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Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

21–30 of 69 posts

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#21
post #2

I have a technical interview with this company next week. Anyone want to fill me in on the good the bad and the ugly of being a programmer at a company like Infosys?

> Being a programmer at a company like Infosys

I worked with a person who asked me what PHP was.

If you are still not convinced,

1. There is a very small chance that you will be working on what you were promised when hiring.

2. Your interests or background doesn't matter(More true if you are fresh out of college). You know in and out of Java. Doesn't matter, go send emails for rest of your life.

3. I am not saying that there are good projects. There are but very few and the resource pool is very big that your chance of getting a good project is very small. If you have contacts, then you can get tagged to some projects based on their requirements.(This works only if you have enough experience)

If you really want to improve your career as a programmer, join a product company or a startup. You will get chance to learn a lot and work with awesome people who can motivate you to be a better engineer.

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#22
post #2

I have a technical interview with this company next week. Anyone want to fill me in on the good the bad and the ugly of being a programmer at a company like Infosys?

Disclaimer: I know nothing about Infosys, but I've worked in "body shops" before.

IT service companies are difficult places to work. Normally you have very little control over what you're going to work on. Where I worked, I came in as a C++ programmer and I was sent out for COBOL jobs. I ended up navigating myself away from the COBOL jobs, but it takes a fair amount of political finesse. In the end, I quit after about 7 months and they sued me for breach of contract :-) (Luckily, they backed down after my new employer offered me legal assistance).

The thing is that these companies have sales people whose job it is to land contracts -- any contract. They get paid based on landing the contract. So you may find yourself teaming up with a sales person and being told to say whatever you can to land the contract. This is unpleasant (and if you are lucky you can avoid that work, especially if you don't have much experience).

Next, once the contracts are landed, people are assigned to the contract. Square pegs, round holes... these are details that your manager doesn't want to worry about. The contract needs people. You are a person. OK, we're good to go!

Next (despite what you may have heard), most companies don't outsource interesting work. Big companies, especially, have permanent staff. If they outsource the good stuff, then the permanent staff will leave. Because they want to outsource something (to "save" money), it's the crappy, under-specified project that is guaranteed to fail anyway (i.e. no manager wants to touch it). That's what you get to work on.

Now, this can be good or it can be bad, depending on your point of view. When you are working in a body shop, you can pretty much suck horribly and not that many people will care. If your project fails miserably, you will be shuffled off to the next project -- because you're a person and project need people (Yep, we're good to go!)

Of course, your manager will be shouting at you. The sales person will be shouting at you. The person overlooking the project from the contracting company will be shouting at you. But, you can pretty much rest easy in the knowledge that since your main credential for being on the project is that you're a person, then you probably won't be fired.

Except... if you do something stupid -- like sign off on a code review and accept responsibility for something. In that case, your manager will love you. They will kiss you on the head as they boot you out the door, promising to name one of their children after you. After all, you have fallen on the sword and protected them from the same fate.

Yeah... I don't recommend working in a place like that...

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#23
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend you NOT to join this company as a programmer because you'd have no growth and also, they pay you peanuts and earn millions. They treat you like shit. You'll be just another fish in the sea. The only good thing about joining this company is good work-life balance as there is no much work for you to do.

I find it weird when people curse Indian IT companies which were once their employers. Is it not true that once upon a time you were only fit to join them because no one else would have employed you.

I worked for TCS for about 3 months. This was not my only job prospect but I didn't know any better. I negotiated a pretty good salary and it was remote work with no travel. I thought it was going to be a dream job. Then, I started to realize how inefficient certain parts of the company was. It took about 1 month for them to provision a laptop. They screwed up my payroll setup and I couldn't get them to fix it. I had several other issues that just took forever to resolve. Once I did finally get a laptop and got to work, I realized that none of my team had the skills that they should have had to be on the project that we were on and that I been brought in to train them all (Unbeknownst to me). I left after a few months. My manager was shocked that they I was trying to leave and he tried to pressure me into staying. I did not stay. I might have just hit a streak of bad luck, but I will never go back to a large "IT body shop" again.

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#24
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infosys is making money by selling software engineers, not software to USA/EU :(

Yes, and they sell the worst ones! This leaves a negative impact on our (Indian) image globally.

They have like 200k employees. You can't make a statement like this. Not everyone can come to the US. They give an opportunity for a lot of people to get out of india. Everybody can't work for facebook or google. Many companies don't even want to deal with hassle of immigration and they give you an opportunity to do that.

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#25
post #2

I have a technical interview with this company next week. Anyone want to fill me in on the good the bad and the ugly of being a programmer at a company like Infosys?

You will be working with some of the dumbest people on Earth and most of your clients will hate you.

You might think I'm exaggerating...

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#26
post #2

I have a technical interview with this company next week. Anyone want to fill me in on the good the bad and the ugly of being a programmer at a company like Infosys?

I highly recommend you NOT to join this company as a programmer because you'd have no growth and also, they pay you peanuts and earn millions. They treat you like shit. You'll be just another fish in the sea. The only good thing about joining this company is good work-life balance as there is no much work for you to do.

I agree with most of your comments except the work life balance. I used to work in one of the top 5 Indian IT companies. Working till late night was very common. There were multiple situations where I was worked on 2 projects-the second project after coming home and on weekends.

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#27
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it weird when people curse Indian IT companies which were once their employers. Is it not true that once upon a time you were only fit to join them because no one else would have employed you.

I find it really strange that people are down voting this comment. Not only do these Big IT companies hire in mass, they also spend insane amounts of money and time training students who come out of college without exposure to real work. Yeah they pay peanuts and yes you would be just a face in the crowd. But they likely give you the biggest break of your life. People need to show some gratitude.

Gratitude for what? Training?

1. The training is useful only if you are allocated to the project in the same domain.

2. You are trained in some relevant tech so that you can look for jobs else where.

Both of this is not the case. Mostly everyone is trained in mysql, language(Java, C# etc) or maybe mainframe systems. What extra are you getting over a self taught programmer. (You would get very less in real because the later has some experience working with some project where as you have none). You are then allocated to some support project where you don't get a chance to write a single line of code.

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#28
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it weird when people curse Indian IT companies which were once their employers. Is it not true that once upon a time you were only fit to join them because no one else would have employed you.

I find it really strange that people are down voting this comment. Not only do these Big IT companies hire in mass, they also spend insane amounts of money and time training students who come out of college without exposure to real work. Yeah they pay peanuts and yes you would be just a face in the crowd. But they likely give you the biggest break of your life. People need to show some gratitude.

Not everyone gets training. I spent a good amount for education and training with a 3rd party company after my bachelors. The company (1 of top 5 among Indian IT cos back then) came for recruitment and talked about hifi projects in their presentation. Then they put me in language testing. I have to check an excel sheet and make sure that the text is displayed correctly in some 30 languages.

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#29
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it weird when people curse Indian IT companies which were once their employers. Is it not true that once upon a time you were only fit to join them because no one else would have employed you.

I find it really strange that people are down voting this comment. Not only do these Big IT companies hire in mass, they also spend insane amounts of money and time training students who come out of college without exposure to real work. Yeah they pay peanuts and yes you would be just a face in the crowd. But they likely give you the biggest break of your life. People need to show some gratitude.

"insane amounts of money" is an overkill.

I have worked for a year in IBM. We had a two weeks training course on Lotus Notes, sub-contracted out to a training institute. In a dingy place, in an inner part of the city.

Even in companies like Infosys, most training is done in-house. So we are not talking about insane amounts of money. Additionally, if you need to really spend insane amounts of money to train freshers, then either you are hiring wrong, or you are dumping complex work on them. Either way, it's the problem of the company.

> students who come out of college without exposure to real work.

Of course, students out of college will not have any exposure to real work. There is no real internship system in India.

Also, training fresh students, just out of college is a process followed by literally every company on earth, which is hiring freshers.

> Yeah they pay peanuts and yes you would be just a face in the crowd. But they likely give you the biggest break of your life.

They are able to do this because, there is a huge supply of educated engineers, and an acute shortage of jobs. Companies like Infosys mostly outsource mundane work, to hastily trained engineers (to join Infosys, it doesn't matter what your major is, Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, Aero, anything will do.), essentially using them as mules. Fortunately, unlike the coal workers of previous generations, the domain of work allows for natural skill development. So yes, a break in life, but not the biggest.

> People need to show some gratitude.

They do. There is a lot of gratitude. But also simmering anger at the failure of stalwarts like Infosys for failing to develop business to move up the value chain.

Re: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns

#30
post #14
post #2

I have a technical interview with this company next week. Anyone want to fill me in on the good the bad and the ugly of being a programmer at a company like Infosys?

Just keep in mind that the replies you will get will most probably be applicable to their Indian offices not the US office.

This is true. Americans will most likely get royalty treatment (my observation having worked on both sides). They will treat Indians like they are nothing. You complain, they ignore you or put you in bad projects.
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