Oh boy, grab a snack and a drink ladies and gents, because this is going to be a long one.
- The main problem at all levels of management is that every single manager is incompetent, stubborn and brainwashed by the "Indian method" of doing things, even though they're operating in another country and have been for years. They sometimes do things that seem right on the surface, but you only have to dig a bit further to find some ulterior motive behind their action.
- To elaborate on the previous point, one of the things that happen a lot is favoritism. So some people don't have complains about TCS, but that's because they're conformist and/or pressured (economically for example, since they have families) into doing anything management says without questioning it, so the managers play favorites with them. This doesn't mean they get raises or get extra benefits, but they don't get treated as much like dirt as the rest of the employees, who raise objections when it is needed or provide actual suggestions to improve the project but that go against what management says.
- On the stubbornness of managers: managers are treated as these all-knowing beings that can do no wrong, so that quickly gets to their head and trying to talk sense into them when they are wrong is like trying to teach math to a rock. In my case my manager knew how to program, but Java, and knew nothing of front end development aside from doing some HTML and using !important to override CSS rules instead of editing. So when we the front end developers, the experts in our area tried to talk to him to try to re-write and improve the code to be actually good and follow standards, the answer always was "no, it's not broken, it works, do only what I tell you to".
- To sum op some more points about management I'll talk about the project I was in, an online banking system. TCS took over the project from another company because they couldn't deliver it properly, but instead of looking at the code, checking with developers, and discussing the full scope of what was needed and giving a reasonable deadline, management just said "yes" to everything the client wanted from the previous contractor and said we'd deliver when they wanted; big mistake. The code the other company was complete garbage, but instead of stopping once they team realized this and it was pointed out to management that we should re-write a huge portion of it or start from scratch, management said to just continue as it is, and to not even try to re-write it. If X functionality worked when the client clicked a button during the demo, no matter what was happening on the back end, then we should just continue doing as we're told.
- This lead to already legacy, bad, spaghetti code to become more of a mess. Just on the front end side of things: no JS frameworks were being used, no custom library, no OOP JS methodology, no loaders, no ES6 features, just jQuery; so all the functions were copy pasted into script tags in the corresponding JSP file for a page whenever they were needed, which yes, that means every time a function needed to be fixed or updated, we had to search which files had that function and edit all individually. No CSS processors, no Bootstrap or similar frameworks, barely any CSS3 features (no border-radius or box-shadow, those were images). No sprites, code minifying or bundling, no NOTHING. And I repeat, this is an online banking system for an actual bank. When asked why we couldn't re-write things so that the code wasn't criminally bad, again, the answer from management was "don't fix it if it's not broken. do as you're told".
- Speaking of criminally bad, the level of stupidity from the management here gets to level where they actually break the law: the main reason I quit, aside from all the other complaints I'm listing here, is that at some point in time, for quite a long time, management decided that we should use the production database (with the bank's customers actual data and money in it) in the development environments. I'm not sure how many laws that breaks, but I feel dumb now for not reporting it to authorities. I did let as many people as I could in management above my project and account manager, even on the client's side, but they were in on it and didn't care at all. I also reported it to HR on my way out but they were equally useless and apathetic. It's a miracle and a show of great integrity from the developers that no money was illegally transferred among accounts, because the system didn't have safeguards or logs either, someone could've just swapped money amounts in the database lol
- On my Indian co-workers: I mentioned I liked meeting and working with them, but unfortunately part of their and management's culture carries over to Mexico, and the same hierarchical work culture that is common in Indian IT companies keeps happening here. Where we Mexicans fought for our work-life balance, like when we said no to working extra hours to fix things that were broken because of bad management, our Indian colleagues never said anything and just continued doing anything without expressing any sort of opinion. I think there's also the fear that they liked living in Mexico, and they didn't want to be sent back to India when they were able to send more money back home from here or were happier with their families in this location. The heartless treatment they were given by people in management from their same country, sometime from the same region even, was disgusting and inhumane. And I know this sounds like I'm being anti-Indian culture or something, but believe me, I understand that these are bad things that happen to be part of their culture and it happened to be from India (just like the same hierarchy system happens to be part of Japanese work culture too), but they do NOTHING to fight or change it once they're here, and that causes a lot of friction between the Mexican nationals and the Indian managers.
- Lack of cultural training: now, I know I said I had good experiences with the Indian nationals that worked here, but there were also some issues that happened because of a lack of cultural training, ignorance, or culture shock on one or both sides. Things like using the regular toilets as squat toilets, not flushing them or cleaning the seats after use, not using toilet paper (I kid you not), cutting in line, sexually harassing the women in the office (because some sexist Mexican coworker taught them words like "mamacita", or staring at them in groups while laughing among themselves at their own sexist comments), ALL the management issues, and so on. Before sending them here (or sending a Mexican to India), PLEASE provide some sort of cultural training for your employees... the do's and don'ts, common interactions in the country, etiquette, laws, unwritten rules, taboos, etc. You'd think that people who are mostly engineers would have the smarts to look this stuff up by themselves before being relocated to another country, but nope. Some of them are really simples issues, and they could easily be fixed with just a bit of information, and would help avoid a lot of the situations that cause most misunderstandings among the two nationalities in the office.
- The facilities: when I was there, it was obvious that TCS was about to pass or had passed the capacity they had in the Tata 4 building. The bathrooms were always full and dirty (even though the poor cleaning staff was there trying to clean up all the time), you have to keep checking when there's seats in the cafeteria so you have to go and eat, then queue up for 20-30 mins to use one of the few microwaves that actually worked to heat up your food, or get in a longer queue to try to buy some of the food they serve, or to buy something from the convenience store inside. If you don't own a car, there's no other option to get something to eat nearby, except a bread factory nearby. Speaking of cars, the office only has a few parking spaces out from and in the back that are mostly reserved for managers, or otherwise they (when I was there) used to rent parking space from a church next door, but to get a spot there was a nonsensical lottery system. If you take the bud, then it's an almost 1 km walk from the highway to the office. Overall, you're on your own in that facility.
- Equipment: you get a prehistoric desktop with a 1333x768 LCD display from 2008 once you're in a project. If you dare to complain because you need better equipment or would like a laptop, you'll be treated as a criminal who's trying to undermine their glorious, perfect system, a spoiled kid that doesn't know how good you have it. But it's bad to the point that it interferes with your ACTUAL JOB, the one you signed a contract for. I as a front end/UI developer, NEED at least a 1920*1080 display, because that's what a lot of people in the world, including out users, have on their computers/tablets at home; I need to see things exactly as they see them or otherwise I can't fix them if something if broken. But these pesky facts and logic mean nothing to the management and IT teams, they'll just keep passing you from one person to the other without doing anything. In the 8 months I was there, I was never given a monitor upgrade. To compare with my current job at a US-owned company, as soon as I got there I was asked if I wanted two or three 1440 resolution displays and more RAM on my machine, without even having a project assigned yet.
- No education and training: when you're in bench, pool or whatever you want to call it before having a project assignment, TCS provides no equipment for you, so learning by yourself or practicing coding on your free time is non-existent. This is TERRIBLE because sometimes people don't know how long they have to wait for a project, it could be months, and this means that during all that time, you're just sitting in a room somewhere with other people absolutely nothing. Some people use their smartphones for entertainment, some play card games, some might sneak in a portable video game console like a 3DS, some bring books, but even if you have a coding book without a computer to practice with, it's hard to learn anything, so most people bring fantasy or non-fiction books. The ridiculous security rules at TCS facilities also prohibit anything like a tablet or e-book reader, so people that have digital book collections also were left withe the only option of boring themselves into oblivion. Some people quit the company because they can't handle waiting without doing anything for months, other don't care and waste their time, but by the time they get a project (like a couple o juniors that joined mine after almost a year in pool) become used to being lazy and useless and refuse to work, so they're a burden for the team instead of a work force.
Those are the main things I wanted to point out, but there were a lot of bad things that made me leave the company... the extra hours I DID end up doing, the cult-like adoration of N Chandra, the useless HR staff, the seating arrangements (call-center like office), the colorless/lifeless office, the archaic dress code, and so on. Just a place with no standards that is good for your first job for a year or so if you have no other option, or if you just want to have a job but don't care about a single thing.
