Benefits/pay:
The company and management keeps on emphasizing that they are competitive and pay according to the industry standard but it is important to bear in mind what they use as the benchmark. They tend to peg themselves to publishing industry standards even for other parts of business such as country analysis which is quite far removed.
Additionally, there are no benefits. There are no performance/end year bonuses in the company and the increments are slightly above inflation. There is a good chance that a person joining at the same level as you but at a later date would earn more as there is no internal harmonization of pay.
Progression:
There is no clarity over how and when people are supposed to progress, or what targets one needs to meet to progress within the company. There are no progression plans and they tend to change on a case by case basis, which are mostly decided by the facetime you can force with the upper management.
Performance also has no bearing on progression or opportunities internally, they do performance reviews on a quarterly basis but they are neither linked to your pay, bonus, or progression.
One of the ways that progression does happen is through something known as bootcamps wherein people are selected by the senior management, on what criteria, no one has any clarity about. These are workshops held over a few days and the few selected are provided an actual progression plan, again no where linked to your performance. One of the key responses that one receives when clarifications are requested to advance your career is to either to wait for an indefinite period and good things will happen, or apply internally to different teams (might as well apply externally and go for a better job).
Work
Perception of work varies from person to person but it is highly static, pegged to a schedule, and there is little scope of innovation of any change. If you are into that kind of a thing then might be a pro for you to consider.
There is also internal inertia on exploring and partaking in other initiatives at work, your immediate management/team is likely to discourage you to take up any activities within the business to develop citing workloads, while participation in same is cited as something one is supposed to do to advance. Such conflicting line of reasoning can be found for almost any and everything here since there is a clear lack of strategy.
They also mostly hire experienced + post masters candidates for their research analyst profiles but there is high resistance to do any client engagement in areas where you are subject matter experts, even for simple things such as replying to client queries. Most likely you will address those queries but someone else will benefit from the exposure.
Overall:
Owing to the nature of the business and lack of innovation internally the business seems to be struggling which roughly translates to poor financial performance. This adversely impacts everyone through the lack of bonuses which are based on group performance and the annual increments.
Note: There is significant lack of management in India which means that most of the junior most people sit in Gurgaon and regularly interact with their teams spread over the globe. These can be either meaningful or sparse depending on your team and director, also the quality of those interactions are impacted by the predisposition of some of the London staff (who are can be mildly racist in their interactions and perceive you to be inferior despite say everyone having a similar exposure and educations background)
However, it is a fairly decent company to join if you plan on staying here short term and have something cooking on the side such as professional certifications + graduate school applications.
