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Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka Resigns (indiatimes.com)
109 points by kamaal on Aug 18, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 68 comments



A lot of criticism is valid however rather generalized. The talent pool at large-scale, low-cost services industry in India is comprised of people who were mass hired, trained on the job and dug through a single skill set for years. That being said, there are pockets within the organization which do really well. It is worth noting, that it can't be a million dollar business without actually solving a business problem. There was a time, when it did manage to fill a massive gap in western markets and even today builds/maintains large scale systems at lot of western enterprises.

In my opinion, it provides challenging opportunities around how to manage large distributed teams. It is not a place to seek technical growth or high powered teams.

As an outsider, I feel, Vishal Sikka, was attempting to change the culture from within but was clearly facing considerable resistance from promoters/founders. I admire the value system upon with the Infosys was originally founded on; they originally went out of their way for employees, however, over time the focus has shifted and I feel they have failed to keep pace with evolving landscape and business models both.


> It is worth noting, that it can't be a million dollar business without actually solving a business problem.

Based on my interactions with Infosis, I beg to differ.

As best as I can tell, their business model is basically to convince clients that Infosys should take on IT projects at a fraction of the cost compared to the competition. Whoever gets them through the door gets hailed as a cost saving hero and is soon promoted. Meanwhile the projects that were given to them inevitably fail, and some new executive is sent in to pick up the pieces. At that stage the cycle may repeat with Infosys once again picking up the task of cleaning up its own mess.

They don't solve business problems, they just sell snake oil to organizations that have not yet learned to avoid them.


While this is true it is has been created and sustained by Western CEOs for the last 25 years. Lets blame the right clowns.


I don't disagree with that in the slightest. Infosys is the optimized answer to shitty IT governance in the west. But that doesn't change the fact that it doesn't solve an actual business problem.


think about your comment and than think again. Do you really believe it doesn't actually solve a problem ? Not at all ?


They said a BUSINESS problem, not an "individual executive wants to get promoted" problem.


Just curious: did anybody here had a good experience with a project done by Infosys? There must have been good teams and good projects.


I used to work with Infosys at some point of time. I believe one of the projects we did was very well received by the client, as their previous 2 attempts of getting it done had failed.

I also heard later that they managed to package it up and sell it as a product to other companies in the domain. I'd say it worked out well for all parties involved, even though my work hours got nasty at times.


Infosys built the original iOS App Store. It's not perfect, but for something which operates at a massive scale, it isn't the worst it could be.


Bullshit. My team built the original app store in Apple.


I might be mistaken on this then. I think it might have been the dev center then, prior to the refresh? I heard this from someone who worked at Apple for years, they were set up in offices across the street from the team they interfaced with at Apple.


No, Apple doesn't do that.


source?


To all the naysayers, Infosys did solve real problems at first; they built a formidable reputation. I don't know when but at some point they expanded like crazy and I believe didn't care for quality so much anymore. There might still be talented people working there, but its know pejoratively as a "bus company" i.e. one which comes to a college to recruit a "bus load" of cheap engineers.


Well, I used one of the body shops in India to move to the US on H1B. Then I switched to a reputed US company within months after landing. This is what every highly skilled Indian grads should do.


>Should do? How does ethics play out here? Promising an employer to work for them just to lure them and get an H1B visa and then ditching them? Doesn't sound ethical.


The company's aim is to import low-wage labour on the promise of access to the states. The employee's aim is to obtain access to the states in exchange for accepting sub-standard wages.

I'm not sure how savvy employees jumping ship is a moral failing of the employee rather than a retention rate issue to be addressed by the company.


Neither is underpaying employees, which companies like Infosys are known to do on a massive scale. If they really want the talented engineers to stay, they should consider paying them market level salaries, having a clear career path etc.

An H1B is not a promise to the employer, BTW. It is a regulatory requirement imposed by the US Government, and not everyone gets it (you gotta have a college degree, masters degree helps, and then get it through a lottery process). If an employee gets a better offer, he/she should absolutely take that offer.


H1B visa jobs are supposed to pay the prevailing wage to the employee, if they did in fact do that how was OP able to find a better job so quickly?


I know h1bs who jumped to Amazon, Intel etc. The salary increase was significant, but they were relocating from low cost of living areas to the big cities.


No direct experience but I heard they are one of nastier of Indian body shops. Projects are full of the most appalling fail and 'just do it'. Line management are utterly clueless enforcers with bad attitudes. But then that does seem to be the go with these companies.


The problem is that those companies exists to fulfil a very different objective than what in-house developers are expected to provide.

You should see them as a Leasing system for Generic Development Resources: flexible and clear billing, fleet management, transparent reallocation of resources, economical and instant capacity to increase or decrease the fleet sizes.

Their line management reflect that, and their developers have to reflect that too. They are not in the business of delivering software or business feature, they are in the business of providing development hours in the most flexible and smooth fashion.

"Just do it" is what their client is buying.


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.


As some one who has worked at startups, product companies and bluechips, if you are starting your career, then an established firm for a year or so is best. Why? Cause you learn process and quality from experienced ppl who have time. At product firms and startups that is rarely the case. You will learn a lot there but mostly the hard way and the wrong way.


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.


Good that you will never go to them again. Whose mistake was it that you ended up there in the first place ?


Gratitude shouldn't come in the way of evaluating the company fairly. After all, companies evaluate our performance coldly and ask if they can get better work for the same salary from someone else. Nothing wrong in doing the same to them.


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.


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.


Did not understand what you are complaining against. There is no university education or any kind of training for life. My entire experience in tech is learning a new piece of technology every few years.

Any company that is likely to hire can only give you base set of skills, beyond this its on you take it forward from there. Also in my experience these companies have routine training for most bleeding edge tech. Not many people sign up for it. During my time there, very few people had the inclination or appetite to take on technically intensive work and bulk of the crowd was in only because they needed a job and it was easy to get one here.

Plus the motivation of many people was getting easy abroad travel opportunities and ability to get by life doing low intensity tech work at a good monthly pay.


"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.


>>Even in companies like Infosys, most training is done in-house. So we are not talking about insane amounts of money.

Infosys provides free housing AND pays salaries for 4-6 month training period, during which you don't do a dust-peck worth of production work. This is for thousands of freshers. So yes its for all practical purposes insane amount 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.

When given good work complain the work is too complex, when not given complain of lack of opportunities to learn.

>>Either way, it's the problem of the company.

Yeah, In India its always somebody else's problem.

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

There is. It doesn't arrive on a plate though campus placements.

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

NO. In US you either perform or will be fired.

This level of entitlement among us Indians is sickening.

If people really think there are jobs and companies beneath them, please feel free to go work wherever you like.

World doesn't owe you a job on your terms.


I like the last one. True, Infosys like companies started as a service company and never expanded their business to develop out of the service sector which is bad. My observation is, all these service companies only focus on their profits and never reinvest to expand the business out of it, maybe developing a product to start with.


Why do companies have to move out of service business? There are so many companies which would give complete product development to service companies because it is not in their domain of expertise.

Personally they should have improved upon the service business. All the present good frameworks etc does not need to be rewritten but has to applied in a better way.


Service companies developing products mostly happens for non critical line of business apps, and usually its just an extension to the apps already serviced by the company.

However, BigIT in India could have latched onto that work and move into core product development.

Two reasons they did not.

One, their cash cow is service and moving people into product development would hurt their bottomline.

Two, they failed to see the obvious growing threat of automation. This I think is their biggest failure.

When you see the threat to your core business, its your responsibility to plan for the future.


for what? extracting the maximum amount of profit from you that they can while paying you the minimum possible?


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.


I think you are painting with a broad brush here rubbishing the entire company.

> no growth

I've known people grow within Infosys just like any other big company

> they pay you peanuts and earn millions

Not sure which offices you are referring to - India or US. In India at least, they are at par with peers engaged in the same Services model.

> They treat you like shit

Subjective. Depending on what you expected and what you got in return.

> You'll be just another fish in the sea.

This I agree. But, that's just like any other big corporate company unless you know how to navigate your way out in the maze.

> no much work for you to do

Again subjective. I have come across people who complain of too much work.

The better alternative will be to join a product company if the OP has an option, rather than a services company, as other comments suggest. Any Services company operates predominantly on a head count / person hours model as against a product company or a product based start up which have completely different dynamics.


> Subjective. Depending on what you expected and what you got in return

So if I go into a company expecting to be treated like shit, it's all good then?


I don't get this argument. Why would anybody go into a company expecting to be treated like shit? Stay away, if you know in advance.

To be clear, what I meant was - if you walk into a services based company with the expectation of working in a niche or a good product building experience, you may be disappointed. Peoples' expectation on the work they get and what it turns out to be (the project you are assigned etc.,) might make them feel like they are treated like shit.

If on any other ground (HR grounds, facilities, equality etc.,), they treat people like shit, then it's no more subjective, but subject to law of the land and corporate laws.


As someone who worked with outsourced IT services companies, I highly recommend you to join product based companies. Most of the work done by Indian body shops are not great,they focus on managing legacy codes and some maintenance works.

If I get a time-machine, I'll go back in time and avoid the mistake of joining services-based IT companies. :-)


As an American your experience might be different from the thousands of Indian grads that are hired every year. But I wouldn't bet on it, and I'd stay as far away as possible if I could. It's a body shop and the office politics are insane.


If you are passionate about writing software, this is a company best avoided. Recruiters in India make it a point of stating that the company they are hiring for is 'not like Infosys'. That should give you a good idea of just how terrible an employer they are.


Either work for a company building their product or consult with someone to build them their product. Don't work for a company that consults for someone to build their product.


>> Either work for a company building their product

That can get boring in the long run.

>> or consult with someone to build them their product

So freelancing? Hard to get interesting projects that way. Also, you'll have to travel, won't have colleagues and need to do sales.

>> Don't work for a company that consults for someone to build their product.

It can be alright if you're in the high-end, boutique consultancy market. New challenging project every x months, like-minded colleagues, fast skill growth.

But yeah, avoid the body-shops like the plague.


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...


Very true.

Key point is "some"

I have seen exceptionally brilliant people and people even dumber than rocks.

Taking my own example, I was interviewed for IBM, fresh out of college.

Qualifications for getting up-to the interview part : >5.9 CGPA, a bachelor's degree in any stream (Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, Aero, Computer Science, etc.)

Selection process :

1. Written test that is mostly aptitude questions, toughness of questions well below that of GMAT. So if you can manage to score a 400+ in GMAT, this test would be a cake walk. A few questions on programming, mostly C.

2. A Technical interview round, comically out of context to the needs of the current job. The interviewer was a guy, no more than 5 years older than me, asking questions about a few math puzzles, a few logic puzzles, etc.

3. An HR interview, mostly checking communication skills I guess. It went like this.

Q : What did you do yesterday? A : Watched Lord of the Rings trilogy at home.

Q : What is the movie about? A : [All my days of binge watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S made my English a bit fluent and, I guess smooth] Explained the whole trilogy, blah, blah, blah.

[ Note, I'm not a native English speaker, and this happened in 2007 ]

End of the interview.

I truly felt that If this is what they are asking everyone, then they are not here for recruitment, but just to fill up some positions with people.


If they put dumb people to work on your project, either your company don't really care about your project or Infosys don't really value your business.


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...


You forgot to mention that after kicking you out, they can also sue you for the max amount they can possibly get out of your body.


For the love of god just get into any product shop, take eLitmus or AMCAT & leave BigIT. There's every less to learn, high restrictions on taking up choice assignments & so many more reasons. You can read up so many answers from Quora.


I am a US citizen just graduating from a college, I haven't been in big IT yet. I'm just starting out with computer science.


Join a Sofware product company. You will have a lot more exposure IT products than in IT services.


There are many, many better choices than that company

But to each one their own, I guess


Yeah join Google, Facebook or Apple instead!!


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.


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.


Research the conditions of sweatshops ;-)


Depends on your alternatives and your current level (of experience). For a brand new grad, if you can get into any product company, you're better off than going to Infosys, simply because of your next options. If your other options are TCS/CTS/Wipro, I don't know if Infosys is much worse than those companies.


I like Vishal and thought he was thoughtful and tried to make some interesting changes. Not surprised that this conflicted with the founders.


Infosys needs a CEO: CTOs need not apply? http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/DCbAckNJOQA0J57CGkMuQK/Infos...




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