This is a detailed account of my time at Infosys USA. Prior to joining Infosys, I was in a bootcamp for software engineering which had started in November. In December I get a call from a recruiter I.C for an opening at Infosys for the position of an associate software engineer. There were 2 rounds of interviews : a phonetic interview and a technical round. Since it was for an entry level position, the interview was fairly simple. I got offered the job at a salary of 57K/year. I was offered 3 choosing dates to join in January, February or March. I had told them that I would prefer it if I could join in March as I would successfully complete my bootcamp by then. I.C said that that would be too late and they would prefer it if I joined them in February which I agreed to. This was supposed to be my break in the IT industry and at a company as popular as Infosys, I would be stupid to say no. I joined Infosys USA as part of their Campus Hire Program on February 15th 2022. On the first day, we all were allocated to the Java Practice. We were given an assessment to solve in 24 hours. The assessment was very difficult and unfortunately, I was unable to solve it. The next day, me along with several others got allocated to the Oracle Practice. The Oracle Practice was the only good thing that came out of this entire experience. It was a three month training where we learnt PL/SQL and Oracle EBS. We had to clear two assessments and a capstone project to complete the training. I was able to clear these fairly easily. In May 2022, I along with a few people get sent to the IFS Cloud Practice. This is where things began going south for all of us. We were introduced to a certain N.R who promised us IFS Cloud is a big technology in today's world and it is the next best ERP system and that after 2 years of employment, we were gonna be making six figures. Again, we got sent into trainings conducted by IFS. The training was not meant for people with no work experience. We essentially just attended trainings which weren't going to be of any benefit to us. N.R persuaded us to do IFS Certifications which again, were not meant for people with no project experience. The goal for N.R was to get us certified so that it could attract potential projects, even if we didn't know anything. He asked us to write down whatever questions we remembered and essentially tried to get us to cheat and pass the exams. In August, I got allocated to a project in IFS Cloud. From August 2022 - March 2023, I had no work on the project. The only thing that I did was make user manuals for the end users. I came across a R.R, who is the worst manager I have come across in my life. He doesn't respond to emails, he is never available to talk and he basically doesn't care unless the senior managers want to talk to him. I had to pester him for weeks just to get my mid year evaluation and my year end evaluation done. By this point I had understood that Infosys is where careers come to die, at least in the USA. During this project, I got approached by a couple of people from other projects looking for experienced candidates to work on IFS implementations but due to the lack of project experience, I never heard back from any of them either. I expressed my interest to the management to leave this practice and go into another practice but that got shot down by them, saying that once you are aligned to a practice you cannot move out. I was released from the project on 03/31/2023 back to bench. Due to the transfer between IPS (Infosys Public Services) and IL (Infosys Limited), there was an error in the system which essentially left me in no man's land for the month of April. I did not get paid on 04/21/2023. After reaching out to HR, Payroll and my in charge for 2 weeks, the issue finally got resolved. Subsequently, I wasn't insured during the month of April. Fortunately, my insurance got reinstated for the month of May. I got fired on 05/31/2023 after a year and 3 months of staying here, hoping things would improve. I learnt how to code in Python on my own and tried hard for the past 2 months to get a role in Python development/Data analysis but of course, once you are in the Oracle Practice/IFS Practice, there's no getting out. They trap you for a year at the very least by stating that if you leave the company within a year you are liable to return the sign on bonus of 4K USD which is given to you completely after 6 months of employment. This is nothing but a body shopping org, outsourcing all the technical work to India and hiring people in the USA to fill head count.
