This is purely my personal opinion after around 7 years stay in TCS.
When I joined there were around 15-20K employees, but still considered the largest IT company in India during that time. It was pretty good to work at that time. There was competition between TCS, Infy, Wipro and all these company started growing exponentially in terms of profits and obviously man power. Now TCS employee strength is more than 110, 000.
The main reason why I left company after 7 years is it does not recognize good works. When a company gets this big every thing becomes mechanical. There are not much personal touch which I was getting few years before. It’s very difficult to track everything and what they improved in tracking will be monetary beneficial to the company. For example now they track what’s your utilization % in a quarter/year and other factors , but they do not track how much complex or simple your project is, how many hours(IF it’s more than 8 hours) you put in a day.
In 2001 it was a doom time for IT market. That time TCS did not lay off anybody and rather it was hiring some freshers, in fact I joined as a fresher during 2001. But now it’s bound to lay off with this much employee size. IT seems like promotions are on hold now. May cut the Variable allowance and all bad news which was not the case in last market slow down(2001). Small things like a birth day card signed by CEO was presented before, but now you can’t think of it. These are samll things but they do matter.
Another thing There are lot of employees who are in GL and Account Manager level. They are more like government employees. By seeing them I did not wish to be on managerial hierarchy rather than on techincal side. Pay scale in TCS is also not upto the market standard. TCS says it’ll be Global Top10 by 2010, but they do not have clear vision on what you will be top 10 (on revenue, on employee strength blah blah). The work environment is not very encouraging. IN One cubicle some times you see 3 desktops instead of 1. I pointed out all these stuff to HR, but i’m sure it’ll be the way people wil work in TCS, India.
Positive points about TCS is at any point of time onsite opportunity is more than any other company. You can change your platform. Little bit job security if compared to other companies even if TCS started laying off the percentage is very low.
I conclude this review with a rating of 3 out of 5 to TCS. It’s not a that bad or very good company. It’s a good company and your career graph depends on your luck, superior and some hard work.