Cognizant Technology Solutions doesn't take care of it's employees. There are no reward systems and the salary is very low. I joined as a lateral recruiter in India with a comparable salary, but I was forced (to the point of threatening) to go onsite to USA since I was visa-ready and there weren't others available with the required skills and a visa. At onsite, my salary was very low and I was not able to take care of my wife and children on this salary. I worked long hours - day and night and never spent time with my family. This created a rift with my wife. My manager gave me promises of promotion and so I worked. A promotion also meant that my salary would increase and this could help me take care of my family in USA and my parents and brother in India. But when the time for promotion came, my manager said that there are others on the queue and he also reduced my rating since only those who have to be promoted gets high ratings. In Cognizant, during appraisal times, the manager doesn't rate us according to the work, but rather according to the people his manager tells him needs to be promoted. I was unmotivated and asked to go back to India immediately, but my manager gave me false promises of promotion in the next cycle. When I refused to believe him, he along with his manager threatened me and insisted that I don't leave. I am the only support for my family, so I had to stay. Then, in a few months, due to poor code quality from offshore, the project got scraped and I returned to India with my family. I was moved to another project. My offshore salary is now as low as the base salary. The new manager refused to nominate me for promotion because as expected, 1. he already has his list of faithful people that need to be promoted 2. I just moved into the account and new people aren't supposed to be promoted. 3. I got the lowest rating because those who are to be promoted gets the highest ratings even if they are poor at working. 4.The people who butter the senior management gets promoted. It has reached a point where the manager will directly tell us that he will give us the lowest rating because he cannot promote us and it has nothing to do with our work quality.
I have given my resignation and will leave soon. But those who are planning to join Cognizant, please remember to not move from country to country and please don't plan to stay long enough to get promoted. Also remember that offshore code quality is poor and onsite coordinators will be stressed to produce some quality code. Offshore works a lot, but it is difficult for us to anticipate customer needs without actually facing them once. In offshore the main developers are young freshers without experience. The Senior Associates and APMs should start coding, instead of blindly using the rest of us as scapegoats.
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