Exit Interview At Infosys

Exit interview at Infosys Today was my exit interview at Infosys. I worked in Infosys for four years. I had some good times and bad times, as life usually is. Anyways, How did the exit interview go today? Pretty much the dumb way. He asked me a few questions on where I was going and what I was getting, and why I was going. Except what could Infosys have done to retain me? Well, it was put in a different fashion. What are the things that you like to see as change in Infosys? Well, there are a lot of changes one would want. The first and foremost - stop building eccentric buildings. Buildings are meant to be rectangular. Not conical, oval, pyramids or lotus. (Stop building swimming pools because I do not know swimming). I prefer buildings to be 10-20 storeyed than the three floor buildings that are constructed in odd shapes. Then, we have something called the relative ranking system. Relative ranking system pitts one employee against another. It grades an employee into three or four categories based on relative performance. If I get a rating of 2, and I approach my manager, why I was not given a 1, the answer I get is that we are a very competitive organization, and that 50% employees have performed better than me. And there is this farce called appraisal system that is supposed to measure the employees absolute performance like task rating, and parameters like schedule variance and so on. The point that I am making is that rating should be absolute and not relative. Rating is tied to compensation hikes as well as promotions. So it is kind of important to have it a bit more rational. The third change I like to see is on technology. Though Infosys is supposed to be a technology company, it relies unduly on freshers from college to perform the majority of the work. And once the work is completed, he or she may be moved to some junk work in a totally different technology area. The idea behind that is technology does not matter; Milking the customer does. I cannot choose to work on a technology area for extended periods. Working in the same technology area can lead to stagnation or bad attitude in Infosys. In any way, Infosys is a great company. These are just a few shortcomings that does not suite me. Infosys will continue to do well for the investors. As long as investors are happy, so are the employees. Because most of them invest heavily in Infosys shares. However, the general rule is investor happiness is reversely proportional to employee

happiness. Some of the good things in Infosys is great infrastructure, repeatable and scalable business processes (not technology process, sorry), great colleagues, good IS applications, decent managers, and inclusive work force (read good-looking women) EXIT INTERVIEW IN WIPRO Sairam (name changed for security purposes) was a very sincere and brilliant student who was recruited by Wipro Systems in 1996 from JNTU College of Engineering. Sairam was admired by everybody in the college because he was bright, friendly and yet humble. He completed his studies in June 1997 and reported at Wipro Bangalore on 7th July, 1997. He was given training for two months in Bangalore and transferred back to Hyderabad in September 1997. Sairam was ambitious but he had no day dreams. He wanted to stick to Wipro just like his father sticked to IOB. In the first week of his reporting at Wipro Hyderabad, he observed Deviprasad Rambhatla having a verbal argument with Nathan in a computer lab. This created a bad impression for Deviprasad in Sairam’s mind. Later, Sairam was made part of a group which was being monitored by Deviprasad to assist Nathan for pooling a team for IBM Japan’s Daikoku project. We were given one month time to learn JAVA and one fine day Deviprasad (Deviprasad Rambhatla) conducted a written test on JAVA for the group. Everybody in the group copied the answers from Sairam and Sairam still assumed he would be rated number one choice for the project. Against his expectations Deviprasad announced Sairam as the last choice for the project which hurted Sairam, but still Sairam kept quiet thinking Deviprasad is cheating. Later the team shortlisted for Daikoku project was introduced to Nathan and the other senior members. The junior Daikoku team was kept in a lab to create a demo and learn the Symantec IDE. On the first day in the lab, Deviprasad again interfered and forced Sairam to work on user interface inspite of Sairam’s request to involve him in backend. This again hurted Sairam but Sairam kept quiet and developed a code generator which talks to backend for generating DAO, VO and Constraint JAVA classes. Since Nathan was not accessible Sairam disclosed this innovation to junior Daikoku team. The idea was not appreciated by Viswanadham in the junior team. Losing no faith, Sairam then showed this code generator to Srini, a senior member in Daikoku project. Srini appreciated this idea. One day Nathan was not in office and Anil Pillai called Sairam to pay a visit to Nathan and his wife in a hospital. Sairam went to hospital twice along with Sridhar to give mental support to Nathan.

The next day Sairam heard Nathan was out of Daikoku project because he had no project plan and creating a demo was not IBM’s expectation on the client’s visit to Hyderabad. Sairam was informed that Deviprasad was elected as the PM for this project by the senior management. That day morning Deviprasad approached Sairam and enquired about his code generator. Sairam then did not realize that Nathan was not informed about his code generator and Deviprasad is manipulating the facts to climb the corporate ladder. Sairam then used to fine tune his code generator as per his team members’ demands, also develop new customized ui components for the project, also bring the project out of deprecated situations with his code parsers and generators, deliver modules in the project where there was no documentation and only word of mouth. As a whole Sairam was doing 3 people’s job. This happened till December 1997. Meanwhile, Deviprasad used to consistently make false promises of hiking Sairam’s salary or send Sairam and Viswanadham to Japan. Later one fine day Deviprasad declared that he is going to send Viswanadham alone to Japan with his usual way of demoralizing Sairam in the team meetings. Later Viswanadham announced he has no passport and then Deviprasad approached Sairam to go Japan. Since Sairam too had no passport Sairam expressed his inability to go Japan. Sairam also had a troubling family problem to stop him from going to Japan. Later Sridhar from Daikoku team went to Japan in January 1998. The team was kept under immense pressure to deliver as we were reaching some unknown or unannounced delivery dates. We were working late nights since the beginning of January 1998. Sairam was one day in January 1998 working late till 9 pm at Wipro

office and his dad called him to come home immediately. So, Sairam seeked Deviprasad’s permission to go home and Deviprasad sarcastically denied his request. This has upset Sairam and he used some bad language against Deviprasad after going back to his seat. Sairam went home later and forgot about it in a week. Somehow, IBM Japan forced Deviprasad to come Japan in February 1998. After this incident Sairam was abused on his face by everybody at JIPC Wipro starting from third week of February 1998. Meanwhile Deviprasad sitting in Japan used to change the requirements of Sairam’s deliverable modules everyday back and forth. Since, there was no configuration management tool then Sairam had to always struggle to keep upto speed. This tons of work pressure from Deviprasad and abusive comments from fellow colleagues in JIPC broke Sairam. Sairam submitted his resignation to KGK and Dakshina Murthy M. Hope you realized how badly Sairam was manipulated by Deviprasad. Sairam did not even know that Deviprasad behind this bad phase in Wipro and simply came out of Wipro without uttering a single word against anybody in the exit interview of Wipro.

Wipro wired Sairam and bullied him for past 10 years. They spoiled his public relations by sniping at him with voices in his head every second for past 10 years and making him react to it while he lost control on his senses due to the continuous sniping. Since, then Sairam had hearing voices problem where ever he lived or worked. He could not sustain his relationships with any person or organization. Sairam was 365x24x60x60 tortured between 1998-2003 without letting him to smile for a moment. Sairam was forced to commit suicide in March 2002. I could say Sairam saw hell because of being associated with Wipro and Deviprasad. I the other form of Sairam, sent several mails to Azim Premji and Vivek Paul to seek justice. Unfortunately, the hearing voices problem is still hurting me and making me live in an unreal world. So, pl. do justice to me by making Wipro compensate me, give permanent cure for my hearing voices problem and punish the wrong doers in my/Sairam’s life. Tags: premji, azim, fresher, software, wipro, employee, rambhatla, deviprasad, it, suicide