Pros
- HCL offered relative stability during the pandemic - If you have significant expertise in a field, HCL is willing to pay a hefty initial increment to you during joining. (But this is only at the onset, things go downhill afterwards) - Pretty campus. Spent multiple picturesque evenings on campus with good friends - Nice cafeteria - Since there are many employees on campus, there's a chance to meet new people & make good friends
Cons
There are multiple business accounts/projects that are being undertaken at HCL, this review is for 1 such project. The review may or may not be applicable to all other - Dirty work, that the client is bored of undertaking is usually dumped onto HCL - Therefore, most of the projects require minimal engineering skills & more drafting & modeling skills - Most projects are very boring, especially if you're used to developing products from scratch - Clients are skeptical of the work that is done by the delivery team most of the time. - You are always treated as a second rate engineer when talking to the client. - Employee health & Safety standards & protocols DO NOT EXIST - Peers aren't really enthusiastic about work. You'd come across only a handful of passionate engineers - HR Team is just horrible. They do not respond to your queries - IT team is just clueless & act like they are the guardians of the HCL legacy - Company policies are bent to suit HCL's preference. - Employees who've resigned are tortured in the name of "policy" - Time is wasted on meetings discussing things as trivial as bend direction of sheet metal. - Tasks that are taken for granted in product companies are executed here & highlighted as "Top of the Line Work" - There are job based training modules that are forced upon engineers, failure to comply leads to a pay cut. These modules consist of very poorly crafted study material that is just plain outdated, bring & a waste of time - Only a handful of managers are competent, the rest are just seat warmers. - The focus is on the amount of hours the employee uses the laptop(this is closely tracked) & not on how the quality of work is completed. - There are people here who have been designing appliances for 5 years, but do not know how to switch ON that appliance when it is in front of them. This is the sorry state of affairs. - Yearly increments are dismal