Thread regarding Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. layoffs

Awesome original post

Guys, when a company gives bottom rating to employees who received multiple appreciations from the client then it is certain that the company doesn't deserve good people. Instead of blindly forcing managers to brand 10% of there people as non-performers they could have taken some other route which could have been more logical. When people with 15 years of association with the organization are thrown out on pretext of JUST one false rating then how do you think that other team members would remain focused. Be ready for a mass churn over once the industry gains some momentum.

One humble request to every one.... please don't get emotionally attached to your organization where ever you are, you may have lot of emotions for your company but for them you are just an entry in the Employee database .

The company once was a fun place to work. Nowadays one can feel a great silence and can see people with long faces. People see thier collegues as competitors, thier managers as enemy and the company as traitor. Cognizant shouldn't have done this. This decrease the morale of people. Associates who worked day and night are stamped as non-performers and shown the gate. They should have done this silently. How will these people get jobs outside as the PR of cognizant gone out with blazing guns saying out loud we are sacking non performers. Other companies will hestitate to take candidates from CTS thinking them as non performers. Other people working will also get demotivated as they will realize there is no point in working hard as someday they can also face the same situation.

This is a good post, a long post

Over emotion stupid rant. Company cannot be your mother. The very fact that no one is listening to you shows that you are at the bottom of food chain and unimportant at that....so stop crying and move on. Your company may not think twice before laying you off.

You've hit the bulls eye.

1. For every couple of workers there are at least 4 brokers: These brokers come in all shapes, sizes and across locations and available especially at onsite. Their only work is to take the work done from the people on the ground showcase it to the client or internal management in a way as if without them this work would not have been possible or they have personally done this work. They do not care about their teams on the ground, they are only concerned about their personal year-end appraisals and how much bonus they can earn. As more often than not, these brokers are mid-level management or at least manager level people, the workers on the ground feel afraid to take them on and bring the truth in front of the world. These brokers call themselves project leads or delivery managers and can be seen across all types of projects. Not only they try to gain recognition for work which they have not done, they also exploit their project team members from time to time in various ways. These people will always be a shield between their ground level team members and the client or the internal senior management for each and every issue, as if the ground level people cannot speak. The brokers at onsite are even worse, they will try to win the confidence of the client by hook or crook and remain at onsite forever. Even if someone tries to replace them they will get the client into play and no one can touch them thereafter. Everyone knows across the company knows this, but no one takes any action in order not to dissatisfy the client.

2. Training and Care for Employees: Yes, there are trainings scheduled, but for good technical trainings the project has to take the cost, otherwise most of the trainings are worthless and sheer waste of time. There is a program within the company for building the career of an employee from a low level to a higher level, but if anyone talks to any employee who is undergoing this program the feedback would be appalling. Someone sitting higher up introduced this program and lot of money and effort is put behind it, but there has been no initiative to gather the actual benefits of this program, which is none. Only for the fear of not getting promoted to the next level, employees complete the program under pressure. Now talking about employee care, for the past couple of years astonishingly it has degraded like anything. People are being made to join in huge numbers every month, but only plan to nurture them and make them grow is a career architecture which is lack-luster program as discussed above. The moto here is to somehow earn the dollar, don’t care about the people or their career.

3. No formal bottom-up feedback process: There exists a appraisal process where managers can pass on their feedback to their reportees and rate them on their perception but there is no bottom up approach where the reportees rate their managers. Managers hold supreme power and based on their likes and dislikes they rate people and decide their fate. I do understand that there is no perfect appraisal process that exists in this world, but rating someone just based on perception is also not a good way. A near perfect appraisal process could be getting feedback from the client, the employee peers along with the employee manager. But this never happens resulting in disappointment for the employees. There are cases where client has rated an employee highly but due to the employee's relation with his boss the employee has been given a poor rating. Lastly there should be a process where the employee should also be able to pass on anonymous feedback about his manager or report any grudge he is holding to someone or some committee which should be able to take action based on the merit of the case. Someone needs to understand that this is a people driven industry and keeping people happy and addressing people issues should be of prime importance. Right now people are just too terrified to pass feedback against someone higher up as there have been numerous cases where the employee reporting the issue has landed up at the receiving end due to the supreme power of the seniors

1. Margin and Revenue story: Revenue is something which comes from projects and margin is the profit margin on which projects are executed. The business development team has revenue targets and the project delivery team has margin targets. So the story goes like this. The business development team in order to win projects and to meet their targets will bid for projects at low margins, as it is a competitive market. There has been instances where deals have been signed with high revenue but with low margins even under 10% or at minus margins. The business development guy meets his target by winning such projects and assuring revenue in-flow for the company. Now once the project is won the pressure falls on the delivery team to improve the margin and at times unrealistic margin targets are set based on the whims and wills of someone senior. Like for example a target is set for a project to achieve a margin of 30% which has been signed at 10% or less. The delivery team is not a magician to achieve such impossible targets and they resort to different ways to achieve their target like bringing in Automation and replacing high cost senior and experienced resources with junior people. Now Automation is a separate story altogether which is fed to the senior management and also to the client in a nice wrapper showcasing 80% of the work that is done manually could be automated. No one gets deeper into the details weather it is actually possible or not and asks the question as to whether automation which is kind of buzz-word in the industry currently is atall mature enough to replace human beings? Everybody is just happy with the fact that if 80% automation can be achieved then I can release atleast 8 employees out of a 10 members team, resulting in huge savings. No question is asked where will those 8 employees go?

2. Reporting and calls all day: If you happen to reach a certain level in terms of designation, you are expected to attend to calls and make reports only for senior management. Evenif you want to develop yourself technically, opportunities will be few and at the end of the day your appraisal results will be hurt, as no one wants to hear what you have achieved technically. Only story they want to hear is how much your project has made and with what margin? How many open positions have you fulfilled which has brought in revenue for the company? While keeping track of revenue, margin and fulfillment of positions is important, but those would be automatically taken care-off if the quality of delivery improves and you have a happy client. There is also a particular species in Cognizant who call themselves as Solution Architects and I regret saying this that apart from a selected few, the architects in Cognizant no way compare with the architects from other companies like an IBM or an Accenture. I have spoken to my friends in other companies who as architects and when asked about the architects from Cognizant, they just give a quiet smile. Cognizant solution architects are good in designing resource pyramids without a plan on how to achieve them. The bottom-line remains that excellence in quality of resources and also the drive to achieve that excellence from the senior management is missing. A company which only focuses on revenue and margin only without focusing on quality of it’s core products which is people in this case would definitely meet this kind of storm every few years.

3. Location theory: There is a theory in Cognizant that every project that comes in should be operated out of Chennai. If the project is of a few million dollars then the location strategy is decided at a very high level and obviously it is Chennai. It basically depends on where the big people are located, as most of the big people are located in Chennai, most of the projects are operated out of Chennai. No one understands, that whether a project is executed out of Chennai, Bangalore, Pune or Gurugram eventually the revenue and profit is for Cognizant and judicious choice should be made to avoid risk by concentrating everything in Chennai only.

4. Bad Treatment of employees by Managers and above: This has started over the last few years as there is no anonymous bottom-up feedback process. Even if some employee dares to take up the cases with the HR Team, action on managers and above are rare. Employees are threatened more often than not and are made to deliver as per the wish of the delivery managers. Genuine employee issues are ignored. Employees are given mouthful for each and every small or big issue. Employee career growth opportunities are ignored. Only people who are good at oiling and buttering get their wishes granted and get good results in their appraisal. No one cares for good work and perfect delivery, it is all about oiling and buttering your manager and getting a higher bucket at the end of the year.

5. Unhealthy Environment: People in this company know how to be selfish. Ohh!! Sorry I used the wrong word. People in this company know how to be extremely selfish. They can beg, borrow or even steal to meet their target. They do not think what will be the implications of their action on others. On top of this if you have the blessings from any top leader of the company then no one can touch even a manager level person. He can go on doing whatever he wishes to. He can select projects he wants to get into, he can ask his subordinates to pick his son from the school, he can threaten people and what not. At the end of the day he also gets a high rating in his appraisal, just because someone at the top is there with all his blessings showered on this sick soul. Just a quick scan across the company in an unbiased manner would give anyone who wants to bring the company on the right track would reveal this picture. There is no respect for a low level employee, they are being treated like some daily laborer daily.

6. No one wants to hear “No”: If you want to work in this company, you should learn not to say “No”. They want “Yes” for all questions. If you say “No” to anything, people will go to your boss and bring a “Yes” from him. If your boss also says “No” then they will go to his boss to bring a “Yes”. This simple game is called “If you hear a No, escalated and get a Yes”. This I believe is one of the reasons that the company is seeing such bad days now. There is no respect for people saying “No” and everybody is bringing in growth for the company, and you should say “yes” always to that growth. They will dangle a carrot in front of you and get a “yes” from either you, or your boss or his boss.

There are many more reasons and I can go on and on and on. However, I really hope that someone forwards this link to the senior management of Cognizant and they do some introspection. Cognizant is my mother company and like all sons I am not happy that my mother is sick and I desperately want my mother to recover and recover fast. Get well soon Cognizant.