I spent 4 years in the company and kept seeing it spiral downwards. It just kept going from bad to worse.
1. No technical growth
2. Below par salaries. The salary given to campus selected fresher in 2004 = 3.5Lakhs/annum. Salary given to fresher 2013=3.2Lakhs/annum.
3. Random figure to calculate iteration. They say low iteration, but you never seem to see the same faces again. Someone from HR once told us how they calculate iteration which made no sense as they said the iteration numbers were low because of larger hiring numbers.
4. Recruit people by saying for development and then move them to support/non-dox products.
5. Even in development team, there is no real development work going on. They have a product ready. The product design and development does not happen in India. Here, we mostly tweak existing stuff to customer requirements.
6. If you are lucky, then you might get to be on a decent project. If you are on a new or "upcoming" project then you will be spending 14 hrs in office and wont get weekends.
7. Idea of compensation and support is absurd. Its set up by managers and HR who do not wish to give any money or extra leaves to the employee. The rule is if you work on saturday for 9 hrs then you will get the number of hours worked on sunday as compoff. So managers either call you to work only on saturdays and make you stay til the work is done, usually 12 to 15 hrs or you are on "on-call" support. Which means you will need to work only if you get a call, which will invariable come and so you cannot leave home. But you should only write the hours you worked exactly. So you endup losing your day to office with out any benefit.
8. The management changed hands in 2010. Since then the new managements idea for India center is : India is very big in the service sector with low pay. So we should try to get all the work that we can get for the service part of the company. Since Asia is a very big market, so we can do a lot here. May be good idea on paper, but this was valid maybe in 1990's. Now Indian market is a lot higher paying and so the basic premise is faulty. The upper management does not have an idea of what the company product is about. They make absurd and illogical promises to clients which cannot be kept and then blame developers/support teams for not keeping their word.
9. Amdocs products are very costly for the Asian Market. Rates that they use outside of India (in developed nations) cannot be used with-in Asia. This is a big bottleneck for them because they need lot of investment to handle the very large customer base with-in Asia but they wont make as much money out of it. So to keep things on an even profit margin, they need to cut the number of people working on the project, but all commitments need to be kept.
10. There is an idea of "Com-managers" with in this company. The com-managers are people who will act as bridge between client and technical staff. So they are supposed to act as the go between. They are important to a project as long as a real communication chain needs to exist between client and company. So when cost cutting moves come in, they should be among the first to be booted. They are non-technical and the developer invariably has to communicate to the client on the work being done. So the "Com" needs to make certain that there is enough chaos going on so as to keep his position secure. This was visible in multiple projects that I worked on.
11. If you have worked here a few years (2-4) then you have by then become : a person with lots of Amdocs experience but with zero technical skills because all you use are select/update and ls-lrt commads. Position above GL are management. You can become an SSME in 2 to 2.5 years. GL may take about 6 to 8 based on how good your rapo is with your manager and if he is any good at selling you. Salaries and hikes are based on how "bell curve" on project to project, so to speak. The hike numbers may sound as market average (8% to 15% was the average that they maintained when I was there), but because their sals are on a lower side of market, you will always remain less than market average. And because you have no technical skills to speak off, you cannot get out to another company easily. And because there is no real time to learn anything on your own as well because of expected hours of support, you cannot improve yourself either.
12. Team meetings were funny, where managers would tell us, that people whose project is now stable should start working on making other peoples project out of the goodness of our heart with out any benefits. (HR funda I guess)
13. There is the probability of onsite projects. Thats the carrot which is given to you if you start crying.
14. There is a core team. They are supposed to be the ones who work on the exact product code. Only the India team once again serves as the support team. All calls for product crash and unexpected behavior come to India and they are supposed to reproduce and fix it. But the actual code development will stay only in Israel.
