What you do doesn't count. How much you do and more importantly, how much you do it for counts.
It is up to the lowest ranking in the food chain to do all the heavy lifting most often in-spite of the management and 'support functions'.
Spend a long time in the company (in a non-sales role) and get paid considerably less than market rate and hurtfully less than lateral-hires.
Money money, sales, sales (or the company line - growth growth growth). Delivery doesn't count and nothing else counts for much. Everything apart from sales just has to be "noise-free" and if anything should count, it has lead in to more sales.
You are invisible regardless of anything you do if you are not working in an engagement that literally rains money for the company.
All the cons of being in a humongous company: Middle-management turf-wars, business units as silos, self-serving layers of bureaucracy, processes of doom, corporate functions play boss way too often...all nine yards.
Yes-manship is the common practice. Saying no may get you nowhere.
Lots of training opportunities, but most are without value on ground, do not help in practical learning.
Executive/senior management goes to great lengths to market themselves as visionaries and true leaders but in reality, they are essentially a sophisticated self-serving bunch.
After crossing the 1 blillion mark, company's growth has often been at the cost of the growth of its work-force.
Individual growth strictly follows trickle down theory. As you go above, individual performance is often equated and sometimes even counts more than company performance, they get it big.
As you travel below, individual performance gets lost supposedly in a bell-curve and the performance of the BU you are in counts lot more than individual performance. When both the levers do click, the company comes up with innovative reasoning to short you on your share of pie while passionately using corporate mumbo jumbo to explain how that can benefit the company as a whole by investing in future for the longer term.
Very limited possibility to work from other Cognizant office locations or work from outside is no-no in India, except if you are some sr manager who typically deals exclusively with PPT, XLS and Emails.
You are hyped in to coming up with new ideas and tacitly expected to convert them to working solutions/marketable for the company on your personal time at near zero cost to company.
Multi-level multi-layer approvals for most things. Even use of popular and industry standard open source tooling is not easy.
Use of team wide source control tools are very diffcult (infra constraint and careless management). Every penny is diverted to 'customer focus'...which means sales. Path to use of automated testing and use of standard ALM tools across development teams are not easy.
'Delivery Excellence', 'Quality Assurance' make for colorful email campaigns and ritualistic activities in the SDLC depending on the team you are in.
The source/quality controls and standardisation are effectively put in place only when client is directly monitoring on a day to day basis (like dedicated ODC engagements)
Raise, pay revisions and promotions can be often too late and too little.
Job satisfaction and meaningful recognition bottom out with-in two to three years.
Senior management is either incompetent / out of touch with the state of things apart from sales and corporate functions or they are complicit.
You are on your own and you have to do whatever it takes in attempting to make yourself successful (in subjective terms) in the Cognizant deep blue sea and if you are lucky, you might just get it going.
