The Evolution of a Career: From the Hand to the Palm

Eric Fidler told us a story on Wisdom at the Wellhead about working offshore early in his career. He had a situation where optimizing one well caused a backflow through a rusty check valve on a neighboring well, and the net result was reduced production. To diagnose it, he had to get on a boat, drive around to the different jackets, and read the gauges by hand. It took him all day.

Then he pointed to a piece of equipment sitting on the table in front of us. An edge controller, about the size of something you could carry under your arm. He said with that device running analytics on the edge, he could see the same problem in real time. Instantly. The thing that cost him an entire day offshore in the pneumatic era, this box handles before you finish your coffee.

Kevin made the point during our conversation that the computing power that used to fill an entire room now fits in the palm of your hand. And that's true. But I've been turning that idea over since we recorded, because I think the more important story isn't the shrinking. It's what stayed the same while everything around it changed.

I've Watched This Movie Before

When Eric said he started wiring gas turbines in 1979, I told him I'm in the same vintage. And I meant it in more ways than one. I didn't just start in the same era. I've lived through the same evolution. I spent fifteen years as a petroleum engineer across drilling, completion, reservoir, gas management, and operations. I've used tools that would make a young engineer today laugh. I've waited days for data that now shows up on a phone screen in seconds.

When Bob Baldwin and I started building what became Total Stream, we were working out of a garage with hardware that was already outdated. I sold our first software system lying on my living room floor, showing it to somebody while I was too sick to sit up. I think he bought it out of pity. But the point is, we weren't building software because we loved software. We were building it because we'd spent enough years as engineers to know that the way data moved through an oil and gas company was broken. The tools were primitive, but the problem we were solving hasn't changed one bit in forty years.

That's the thread that runs through Eric's career and mine and through the career of just about every operator who's been in this business long enough to remember what came before. The hardware keeps getting better. The fundamental challenge stays exactly the same. How do you get the right information to the right person fast enough for them to make a good decision?

The Part That Actually Changed

Here's what I think matters most about the evolution Eric walked us through. It's not that the equipment got smaller or faster. It's that it got cheaper and more accessible. The kind of real-time computing and control that used to require a major operator's budget is now within reach for mid-market companies who are watching every dollar.

Eric showed us how the edge controller combines compute capability with traditional programmable control right at the wellhead. It can run analytics, detect problems as they develop, and let an operator respond in the moment. That's powerful. But the part that really caught my attention was when we talked about cloud architecture and shared cost models. The idea that a smaller company doesn't have to build and maintain all of that infrastructure themselves. They pay for the share they use. The DevOps, the operations, the spinning parts are carried in a shared manner.

That changes the game for the operators I work with every day at Total Stream. These aren't companies with unlimited budgets and dedicated IT departments. These are companies running lean, trying to get more out of every well, and they need technology that proves its worth fast or it's gone. When you can put real capability at the wellhead without requiring them to build an enterprise data center, you've removed the excuse. Now it's just a question of whether they're willing to do the work to take advantage of it.

What Doesn't Transfer Automatically

Here's the part that keeps me up at night. The tools got better, but the understanding behind them doesn't come installed. Eric made this point and I've been saying the same thing for years. AI is going to be good at augmenting what you do. But without the knowledge of what you're doing, it's worthless.

Eric talked about engineers coming into automation and digital deployment who aren't exposed to how the asset actually behaves. They understand the software. They understand the data flow. But they've never traced a pressure problem through a physical system with their own hands. They've never gotten on a boat and spent a day reading gauges to figure out why production dropped. And because they haven't, they don't always know when the technology is solving the wrong problem.

That's the gap we need to take seriously. The experienced people in this industry carry knowledge that took decades to build. They know what a well sounds like when something's off. They know what a pressure reading means in the context of everything connected to it. That kind of understanding doesn't show up in a training manual. And if we lose it during this transition to smarter tools, we'll have the most advanced hardware in the field being operated by people who don't fully understand what it's managing.

I watched that happen in the data management world too. Companies bought beautiful dashboards and put them on top of data they didn't understand. The screens looked great. The decisions that came out of them were garbage. Because nobody had bothered to make sure the person reading the dashboard understood what the numbers actually meant in the context of the asset. A nicely painted car with no engine, as I like to say.

Bridging the Gap While the Tools Keep Moving

Don't let your team skip the asset. Before anyone puts an edge controller on a well, they need to understand what that well does mechanically. How the pressure moves. How the systems interact. If the only thing they know is the screen, they'll trust the screen even when it's wrong. And that's a more expensive mistake than having no screen at all.

Pair experience with capability. The veteran who's walked leases for thirty years and the young engineer who's comfortable with real-time analytics need to be working the same problems together. The veteran knows what the well is trying to tell you. The younger engineer knows how to see things the human eye can't catch. Neither one is complete without the other. Put them together and you've got something the industry desperately needs.

Use the technology to preserve what's leaving. Eric talked about digitization as a way to capture knowledge and the chain of events built around it, so the next generation can gain effectiveness faster. That's exactly right. The experienced people are retiring. The knowledge in their heads is going with them unless we find a way to encode it into the systems they're leaving behind. Every day we wait, we lose more of it.

Final Thought

Eric spent an entire day on a boat reading gauges to find a bad check valve. Today, a box on the wellhead catches it before the engineer finishes his first cup of coffee. That's forty-five years of progress in a single comparison. It's real, and it matters.

But the thing that let Eric diagnose that problem in the first place wasn't the gauge. It was the fact that he understood how every piece of that production system talked to every other piece. He knew the physics. He knew the connections. He knew what the asset was doing and why. The boat ride was slow, but the thinking was right.

The tools will keep getting smaller. The data will keep getting faster. But the person reading that data still has to understand what they're looking at well enough to know when it's right and when it's lying to them. That understanding is what actually makes the technology work. It always has been. From the hand to the palm, that hasn't changed.

Eric Fidler has lived the full arc, from pneumatic controllers and offshore gauge readings to edge computing and real-time analytics at Sensia. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, he walks through what changed, what didn't, and what the next generation needs to understand before the experienced hands are gone.