Whats good and whats not at our Hyderabad office
Pros
Great CEO - wish I can say something similar about the next level Good office space (except for parking and elevators) Great potential for their product
Cons
- Zero trust on management team in India - Managers have no powers. Especially if you are in India, everyone from top to bottom are treated like an entry level analyst. - Roles / Titles have no meaning – again, if you are in India, everyone is just an entry level analyst when it comes to the kind of work they get or the say they have on any matter - We hire people for one role and ask them to do something else like Solutions Architect manages projects, where as a person who has no domain expertise plays Sol. Architect role. - In contrast, if you are in US, you don’t need to have even basic understanding of delivery methodology, domain or tools of the trade, you still will be given all the power to walk all over the people. - Zero people focus – employees are just “resources”, like office furniture or computers or doorknobs. - No idea of mechanics of local Indian market (but still the senior leadership is adamant on not consulting / taking inputs from Managers in India on hiring / compensation / reviews / revisions etc.) - No clear strategy, every thing changes every day – team structure, roles, and responsibilities to status report formats everything changes every day. - There is no standard pay grades, it all depends on how bargaining power of the candidate, so we end up with huge disparity of compensation for same role / skills / experience level. - Manage workload properly. People are loaded many times at 150%, working extra hours, weekends etc. This is happening mostly because of the way we manage CRs (scope creep). But again, since the folks on US side are gods, we don’t hold them responsible for that instead we apply all the pressure on delivery team in India to slog and burnout. - For every wrong we do, we can’t take cover by saying “we are a start-up…”. Rather, being a start-up, we need to be more careful on many things when it comes to employees as we don’t have a brand to brag about or attractive packages to offer. The least we can do is to treat people in respectful manner and provide opportunities based on skill set / experience level instead of being negatively biased towards a particular location. - My group’s leadership can learn a lot from team like Engineering and Product in many areas like, how to empower managers, manage workload, motivate team and may be a little bit of sense of humor and personal touch while interacting with team during the meetings or otherwise. - I always heard this expression, “Looking through someone..”, and I thought you can do that only when someone walks up to you / passes you. But my manager has taken it to the next level, he does that (ignore) to your emails, your meeting requests and to your presence in any meetings. And again, I strongly believe this privilege is reserved only for offshore employees. One of the basic rules in customer service is acknowledging / responding to communication, I guess someone feels its only for customers not for our own team