ExxonMobil trading

Ex-ExxonMobil employee here....they will never be able to compete in the long-term until the company culture dramatically shifts. Exxon in all of it's business lines runs an extremely conservative/risk-averse business model. They are also trying to build the trading org by poaching people from the shops you mentioned, where they are allowed relative autonomy with wider risk constraints. So you have a culture mismatch from day 1 that XOM tried solving by providing above average comp when you walk in the door, but the upside in the XOM machine is always limited. 

Every couple years or so there is an article like this where XOM talks about their progress building out their trading org and the reality is they've been treading water for the last 10 years. Any time there is an aggressive money making opportunity, the red tape that has to be broken through to take advantage usually causes the opportunity to pass by if it's not just rejected by management anyway. Case in point, when crude went negative in April 2020, XOM had sufficient excess storage to get paid to take the delivery of product on that date, store for 24-48 hours, and then resell once the roll forward of the contract occurred....as close to a pure arbitrage opportunity that you'll ever find in the real world. But there was some archaic risk parameter that the trade violated so the XOM traders weren't given the approval to move on the idea and missed out on potentially tens of millions of dollars of profit. That team packed up and quit pretty soon after.