I've being employed with EPAM for few years and for whole this period I don't have a feeling that EPAM is my employer, but rather client which I worked for, because:
- my EPAM manager is not interested in my career growth; career development plan? No, it's not about us :) Even casual 1-1 with manager practice is missing;
- company is not investing in employees education (training, conferences), but client does; people usually sent to conferences on client cost (even though we are vendor to them), EPAM is not participating at all;
Key point: if you are on L-visa get ready to be undercompensated w/o ability to change a thing (except returning back to country you originally came form).
You will hear from your manager every other day phrases like - I'm making everything possible to get you appropriate compensation. But then it's end up being just words.
And this perfectly explains why attrition rate of people who got their Green cards is ~100%.
Also worth to mention that EPAM with Fragomen (lawyers company) will do everything possible to process your Green card application as long as possible. As an example, EPAM can spend month(s) for preping employment verification letter or getting signature from manager that sits next to you. Or Fragomen can make 20+ mistakes in your application forms and then spent enormous amount of time to fix those (lucky you if you found those, some of them non-trivial at all).
Another interesting point that most of employees are on L-visa, just very few got their Green cards.
These are mostly managers who either built good career in EPAM and don’t want to change a thing or simply can't get better job offer.
Those who are on H1B don't stay long - great opportunity to fool EPAM and utilize relocation package in full and leave after couple of months.
