My first job out of uni was for an oilfield services company around 2006-2008. I did another 12 months for them recently in 2013. It's an outrageously homogenized industry at almost every level, at least here in Australia: it seems that in earlier times, it wasn't so hard to make your small own oilfield startup. But nowadays oilfield-specific instrumentation vendors (and sensor manufacturers!) have largely been bought out and either shut-down or brought in-house by the bigger players.<p>A diverse set of contractors means you're all double-checking each other's work. I've also seen jobs where most of the services are provided turn-key from one main contractor (and we'd been brought in reluctantly due to availability problems). When everything from the rig, to the drilling fluids, bits, sat comms, wireline services, DST/production and so on are all provided by the one umbrella company there's a lot more copy-pasta going on and opportunity for errors to propagate [and never get noticed]...<p>It's a shame, Baker Hughes seems like it had a pretty phenomenal history.