Tata Consultancy Services reviews

There is a lot of down time at the Milford, OH office. I'm pretty sure TCS Milford wouldn't gain any new clients if they were allowed to see what actually goes on in the areas of the building they aren't taken to. The management will even ask employees to occupy desks along the client tour route in order to make it seem like there is actually work going on. Advancement within the company isn't based on ones skills or hard work. A lot of the people that are in management positions at TCS Milford are pretty much just suck ups. The employees with best skill sets and education don't stay with company for long because they know their careers will not go anywhere by staying with the company. The project managers are always shipped here from India. It seems as though they don't trust the local hires with project management. These managers prefer to give any important work to their Indian co-workers. So basically don't expect to be assigned any challenging work if you're a local hire. Also, don't expect to receive a higher salary if you have a graduate degree. You'll receive the same salary as the other members of the batch of new hires that you're in. Also, don't expect a raise if you complete a graduate degree after you've joined the company.

Where to begin? Well for starters, the base salary when I was hired in 2010 was 50k which is severely under market value for an entry level position. If you do your research, you should find that competent software engineers are worth more than that. I believe as of Jan 2011, they increased the base starting salary to around 51-52k, which is still low. Related to the salary issue is the evaluation/raise system. Now, I understand a company has X amount of dollars to give raises to. However, in my particular division the manager was located in another state! Who is he to tell me how I'm performing when he hasn't looked at any of my code, projects completed, work done, etc? They give an evaluation system like a grading system and your grade determines your raise. First off, A's are extremely rare and only go to people that have been at the company a while. I knew many people at the center that worked over the weekends and worked their butts off only to get a B! What do you have to do to get an A....work 24/7? Suffice to say, if you perform then you will get a mediocre raise at best (like $500-$1000 / year). I know people that literally didn't code a line and still got the same grade as I received. I say mediocre because even though this is 1-2%, it still even AFTER 6m to 1y you're not making market value. Another con would be the "diversity" of degrees this center seems to be hiring. Now, I'm not sure about what other people got on their offer letters, but mine said "Software Engineer". Yet for some reason when I get there, I find myself in a 5-6 week "training". Now, I love learning new technologies and the such, but their training was basically Software Engineering 101! They go over the basics: what an object is/encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, a few software design patterns. This is unacceptable! If you were hired as a "Software Engineer", then you should be expected to already know all of that and more. Otherwise, what the heck was your college degree for? I can't believe that TCS actually handed out offer letters that said "Software Engineer" to some people. A few had some experience which is absolutely fine. I mean, there were even a few people there that were awesome (they got better jobs with higher paying salaries in less than a year). There were too many that either didn't have the desire or didn't have the ability to contribute to even basic stuff. The final thing I want to warn people about is the bureaucracy. This will shed a little light on why they hire "just anyone" with even moderate technical experience. They receive a tax break of millions of dollars if they hire a certain amount of Americans. This made a lot more sense when I asked myself why the heck are they hiring people that have no interest in software development. In addition, most of what I experienced at the center was a huge emphasis on how we look to clients and visitors. I know that a few times they even had people sit at desks and pretend to type when clients walked through because there simply weren't enough people to fill the area. They have extremely boring and 95% irrelevant meetings called "town halls" that they REQUIRE people to attend (if you're billable to a client you can get out of it easier) and the funny part is that if someone important is visiting they have "preapproved questions" you can "ask" the visitor instead of asking an honest question. The center has no problems at all wasting the developers time because some big shot is visiting or they want an auditorium full of bright shiny faces. They will bend over backwards for the client/potential client, but not for their employees.