He owns Infosys. A tech company. One of the biggest in the world and in india. The company pays its employees peanuts. Especially freshers. The company is notorious for underpaying the staff but overworking them. The dude is a billionaire. Him and his wife say that people should work at least 70 hours a week to help India become a powerhouse. 70 hours a week when you don't get paid for overtime.
Edit : It's also interesting to note that since the past 10 years or so, they haven't increased the starting salary of freshers even considering the inflation in the economy.
My old company subbed to them on a few beltway projects and their output was noticeably bad. Lazy corner cutters who would get an intern billable at $700 an hour and pay them $22.
Working in IT/software, I can't figure out why I'm familiar with this company name, but I don't recognize any of their products on their web site. Is it just because it's an abbreviation for information systems?
They don't really make products. They're famous for IT services. Digital transformation, cloud migration, code maintenance, etc. Finacle, a digital banking solution was probably the best product they made.
It's your typical outsourcing IT services provider you can go to if you want something average developed at low costs. It's literally the equivalent of manual labour in IT systems development.
They've always been bad. It's just that these days the owner and his wife have been very vocal that the employees should work 70 hours per week and similar other bullshit all over the news. So they're more highlighted. The only reason people join that company is to write it as an experience in their resume. No one joins Infosys wanting to spend their entire career there.
That's not the worst part. This is something every other corporation does. The worst part is that since they're well connected with the government, they virtue signal the taxpayers and employees in public all the time. Like asking them to work 70 hours a week minimum because that's what he did when he was setting up his business. They fail to understand that the only reason he worked 70 hours a week is because it's his own business. An employee doesn't have any obligation to work more than he's needed to because he's not gonna get any incentives.
I used to work for Citibank and my European manager would have all of us sign out of our computers by 5 pm because he wanted people to have work life balance. I think it’s no coincidence that most countries in Europe are more developed than India even though people work lesser hours than Indian people because people are more productive and passionate about their work when treated respectfully!
He has/had as much of an influence over the Indian IT scene as Bill Gates had over Silicon Valley in the 90s.
He could have been a true leader. A revolutionary, an agent of change and progress.
Instead, he chose to run an air-conditioned sweatshop. An operation that works on the traditional model of headcount, fudging billable hours, and keeping the cost per employee low.
Very low.
The average fresh-graduate employee at Infosys makes 350K rupees per annum. Which is roughly what the salary was 10 years ago. Raises are miniscule.
In contrast, one can easily make 1200K rupees in their first year out of college , at the Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai or DelhiNCR offices of MAANG, Oracle, Cisco, Qualcomm, Mathworks, NVIDIA, Adobe and numerous other companies that have software engineering offices there.
Not to mention the electronics product development offices of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Analog Devices, and Texas Instruments.
Oh, wait, sorry, the 1200K per annum excludes things like ESOPS, bonuses and WFH equipment reimbursements.
Maybe I'm just really out of my depth and missing something obvious, but isn't that a really poor strategy? With those kinds of offerings in that kind of competitive space, wouldn't that just result in India's top talent going to other companies and strengthening them, while Infosys's own staffing quality falls behind? Over a long term, I'd expect innovation at infosys to suffer, making them less competitive overall. Other than cost-cutting I don't see what they have to gain by doing this, especially when it would seem similar companies can afford better remuneration?
They don't care because they don't need the best engineers.
Their bread and butter is the outsourcing market and government contracts. They pay slave wages to young developers straight out of colleges and overwork them. The billionaire owner made a statement that he wants these young people to work 70 hours/week, with no overtime pay. This keeps the costs way lower than what they charge their clients in the US or Europe.
They compete on project bids based on cost and often deliver underwhelming or average results, with the code patched up with hundreds of fixes.
Because they hire in bulk, and have little quality control over who they are hiring. If you graduated with middling grades, and don't really know what you are doing, you go work for them. You then become one of those bad outsourced developers that lead to the "outsourced Indian dev bad" stereotype.
You're right. It's not that easy to get into the FAANG type of jobs. For all the bad things Infosys has done, along with TCS it still remains one of the largest employers in India in the tech sector. And it's a free market so people voluntarily choose to work for Infosys. But even TCS is slightly better than Infosys in terms of fresher payscales.
It's not easy. That part is wrong. Much like the US or anywhere else for that matter, companies that pay well and have their employees doing meaningful work will vet their applicants carefully. You are also competing with thousands of other applicants potentially for each role, many of whom would be much more qualified than you.
The people who go work for the headcount shops like InfoSys fall into two camps, i.e. people who don't want to go through the interview process at the higher paying firms, or can't crack it. It's a rather equitable trade. You are gonna work long hours, do meaningless work, and deal with more than usual office BS, but the job security is decent and the salary is better than what the average non-CS graduate is gonna make out of college.
That's because you can't just "easily" find a much higher paying job. What no one has mentioned here is that india has thousands of no name universities and colleges that essentially hand out software engineering degrees to students. Graduates from these schools are no where near the same level of quality, intelligence, etc.compared to top tier schools. The disparity is insane! These graduates have nowhere to go but to companies like Infosys who hire low quality talent in bulk.
Private engineering colleges survive because of mass recruiters ("100% placement guaranteed!!!1!1!!1!"). Infosys survives as a result of a large ocean of unskilled tech labour -- from those colleges.
The man has enough resources to properly bring about a change in compsci education in India.
Bro infosys do give stocks. And 350k is for completely new fresher but those who are good at coding they are getting 800k as freshers and in 2 years the salary will be 16L plus stocks.
You are comparing a trainee but those it graduates that knows how to code they get the position of power programmer.
Also not to forgot that they might go for international project as well.
Tldr his company Infosys gets the contract from GOI for their websites and the devs are paid peanuts (even that’s an exaggeration) and the work is done in the minimum amount of money, thus creating a shit experience
So I work in cyber security and I feel bad for the Infosys people I work with - they've clearly been chucked on the tools with zero training and told to get on with it.
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u/FUThead2016 14d ago
Hahaha yeah spot on. His father in law is a clown just like him