A major part of being a petroleum engineer is to help make good wells. While there are things you can do to make wells better, perhaps the biggest factor is something that is out of our control as engineers: rock quality. Good engineers make good wells into great wells, and bad wells not so bad. But even the best engineers can't turn bad rock into good wells. Good wells come from good rock, and there's really no exception to that.
If you are an engineer and you find yourself working with good rock, thank your geologist. Buy them a pet rock for Christmas. Show your appreciation by listening to them enthusiastically rant about things like kerogen, thermal maturity and vitrinite reflectance (smile and pretend you share in their appreciation for these things).
With that said, if you are an engineer working with bad rock, you still have a job to do. There is always optimization that can be done. Keep up the good work and keep optimizing and improving and making things better. It's what we do as engineers - it's just more fun when the geologists give us good rock to work with.
Thank you to all the geologists who gave me good rock to play with throughout my career.