How TCS works
Baiting freshers: CTC is very low. Fresher salary will be good, so when freshers get TCS job in campus placement, they take it without second thought. But after a couple of years, when you compare your salaries with your friends, 80% of the time the TCSer will have the lesser salary.
Shady appraisals and promotions: Performance appraisals and promotions are entirely in the hands of managers. There in no transparency in the hikes and policies related to appraisals and promotions. Colleagues in the same team, who work less or equally and are less experienced, end up getting more salary just because you got a low performance rating years back when you were a fresher. You will be always envious of colleagues who were lucky enough to be in a "good project".
Gender discrimination: Women are treated to open discrimination. There is a huge difference in the average salaries of equally experienced men and women working in the same project. If you get onsite opportunity or if you are a woman blessed with a kid, expect to branded as "low performer".
Employees and clients do all the work while TCS makes all the money: Most of the times, TCS doesn't provide any software. Even MS Office which is mandatory for every system are sometimes not licensed ones. You are asked to complete a project but you have to do "jugaad" for the software. You end up getting more support from client than TCS. Most of the time the client knows more about the work than any TCSer. Imagine TCS as Uber/Ola, the employees as drivers and the passengers as clients. In TCS's case, the passenger books a driver and buys a car for the said driver. The driver is new to this and has never driven that car before, so the passenger helps the driver in driving the car. They reach the destination on time and on budget, and the passenger pays Uber the fare. Uber pays peanuts to the driver and keeps the rest. To keep the morale up, Uber gives the best employee award to the driver. During annual appraisal, Uber calls the driver a low performer and now the driver gets less peanuts than someone who joined the company after him. I used the term Uber only for analogy, they provide a greater satisfactory service than TCS can ever do.
Advice to anyone associated with TCS
My advice to freshers is: If you are serious about working, pick another company before it is too late. If you want to do MS or higher studies and want to work only for the mean time, then go ahead. TCS will give all the time for you to prepare, just don't expect any hike while you are here.
My advice to experienced TCS employees: Learn as much as you can and run to any other company before your next annual appraisal. If you belong to the 1% who keep getting 'A' bands since joining, I hope you are happy personally too. Also no woman is going to be in that 1%.
My advice to customers: Open your own offshore offices. TCS doesn't deserve the money you pay. You are going to save a ton of money. There is lots of talent in India. There is lots of talent in you.
My advice to TCS Management: I would say wake up. But I am sure everyone knows the problems and no one cares. I wish India had good labor laws like the Western countries, so that employees wouldn't be exploited the way they are now. No wonder TCS has a trillion rupee revenue, the highest among all Indian IT companies. Well, you got it by taking a chunk out of your employees' paycheck and customers' profits.
