Pros
The pay and benefits are pretty strong as long as you don't compare to any of the larger oil companies in Houston (Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, etc) because then the argument is not so compelling. The upside becomes a little less obvious and it is skewed towards older employees who are finishing their careers there (pension vests at 5 years). If you were to start here in your early 50's at a high grade code, it could be a wise financial decision for a lot of people (9% 401K match is quite nice). It's part of the largest oil company in the world so the potential to work on and support the biggest fields, plants, terminals is very attractive to outsiders. 9/80 work schedules and decent PTO make it pretty strong for work/life balance
Cons
Unfortunately, the potential to work on world class problems is rarely delivered upon. You will quickly learn that ASC is nothing more than a vessel to procure & ship high end oilfield chemicals and equipment to the parent company in Saudi Arabia. It also is the company that manages the 1,000's of Saudi students studying in the US by paying their tuition and wire transferring them their stipends. While these may not be sexy sounding, you can at least argue their merit to Aramco in performing those functions. Where things tend to unwind is the technical side of the house both in engineering and research. Neither group seems to have access to data or asset information from the parent company. How can you provide engineering guidance without knowing what is going on operationally or at least what the development plan is? I'm not quite sure. It's even more difficult when your Saudi counterparts view ASC as a nuisance (and even a threat to their expertise and ego) and can simply ignore your emails. There's really nothing that can be done about that nor recourse to be had. So the general feeling is that there are many dozens of intelligent, some very experienced, and well paid technical staff but they are not allowed to see or know data/details of the problems they are trying to solve. Therefore a couple white paper studies with some data you made up is about as mature as projects can get. It seems most of the US-based technical work is done in a vacuum and the primary drive has been to "show value" for what I guess is the upcoming IPO. The management seems to accept the limited impact and cohesion there is with the operating groups in Saudi since they allow these issues to remain systemic. The Saudi work culture is not exactly what you would call Calvinist and is not very transparent. For the managers that rotate here for ~2-3 years, my guess is somewhere around year 1 they realize how much of a soup sandwich it is. They then realize they go back in a year and need some "tangibles" to show their managers of how good they did, so they push to churn out pointless KPIs. And repeat with the next one. If you want to be cynical, assume 9.5 million BPD at $45 oil, the company is generating ~$430 million a day in revenue. So whatever they waste on keeping a bunch of 'technical race horses' in their stables in Houston, I'm sure it's worth it and easy enough to convince Wall St to add another $1+ billion to the IPO price. In that case bravo Aramco, but sorry for the people who idled their careers and dulled their marketable technical skills. In short, if you don't care about having an impact on the operation units and/or you're near the end of your career and just want to relax and make some money with a low risk for lay offs, then mafi mooshkilla - join ASC. If you're under 50 - you should very seriously consider the downside of knowing you can never have the impact you could at an IOC or Independent company. If you are not very ambitious than this place can be a golden ticket. If you are, expect a world of frustration and try to avoid completely.