1) If you are working in the US, better get used to late night calls. I used to like to go to bed early, but the calls with the offshore teams kept going on till 2 AM. It gets reallllllllly annoying after a while..
2) No benefits for working overtime. Period. In my project, no matter how much we worked, we always billed the client 40 hours because of the agreement. Infosys projected that as a "value add" to the client, but it just means overtime without pay / comp-off for the employees.
3) I really pity the programmer analysts in Infosys (I was one not a long while ago). The PM conveniently offloads all his work on programmer analyst and assigns a team of 4 freshers to the programmer analysts team and it is his responsibility to deliver the project. The programmer analysts is the donkey that bears all the load and keeps moving forward when he/she is shown the "carrot" for being promoted to a project manager.
4) Some of the HR folks are really incompetent and don't care a lot for the employees feedback. Whenever I have brought up the issue of compensation, most of the times the response has been "nobody is holding you to stay in Infosys. If you are not happy, you welcome to explore opportunities elsewhere.". aka.. shut up or get out. I really hated their attitude.
5) Some of the senior managers (middle management) are incompetent. They cant even speak properly or do a proper scoping / estimation excercise. They seem to be quite happy with their job / role / stock options, but in reality they are so incompetent, they would not survive in some of the other hire and fire companies.
6) This is really a benefit, but I think there is too much job stability. The company ought to fire underperformers. People know that their jobs are stable and therefore some of them don't push too hard to get the job done. There are some really smart folks, but the incompetence around gets too annoying at times.
7) Quality department is a big sham... CMM Level 5 = CMM Level 2.
8) Delivery Managers are senior management is primarily concerned with profit margins (of course.. everybody wants a big cut from the %age). They really freak out when there is a drop in a couple of % in the profit margin. Then there are these big discussions to cut costs and increase profit margins.
9) The fixed price projects suck really bad, because the managers try to squeeze maximum work out of a minimum number of resources in order to get a good profit margin. If you get into a fixed bid project, get ready to slog like a donkey.
10) Many employees try to get a transfer to places closer to their homes, but only a small %age actually end up getting a transfer. Many people finally quit because of this.
11) Your salary is extremely complex. At no point of time will you be able to tell for sure how much money you will get in a month. I have never seen something as complex as their salary structure. If I had a couple of folks who were as skilled as the folks who wrote the code to calculate the salary / hike, I would have felt quite happy.
12) Communication regarding policies are not very clear and treated very secretively. Nothing is clearly documented in one place.
