Fantastic company - yet growing politics making the culture fragile
Pros
1) Awesome free food @ cafeteria 2) Excellent medical insurance coverage 3) Flexible work timing - unlimited work from home as a policy 4) Unlimited leaves 5) Best in the market learning infrastructure - FAA is doing fantastic job - huge investment made by Fractal in up-skilling its employees 6) Strong brand value - everyone knows fractal 7) Smooth exit policy - no fuss, no mental tortures in holding up salaries during exit 8) You miss the awesomeness of Fractal when you leave it :)
Cons
There are 4 fundamental problems in Fractal - 1) Srikanth is extremely accommodative towards people who have been in loyal to Fractal. Because they have chosen to stay in Fractal when Fractal needed them. An apt gesture. But CEO's support has made these people extremely powerful. They are clearly not the best anymore. So when new folks join in and they start challenging these old guards with newer thoughts and vision, these powerful people start feeling insecure . As a result, the new folks will be sidelined and will be made to feel redundant. This culture is predominant in most of the teams leading to severe discrimination of power. A laterally hired manager will be provided a smaller team, lesser work, lesser opportunities - whereas, a homegrown manager at same level with lesser experience gets the cream. This is exactly the reason why one would see a very high attrition rate for laterally hired middle managers ( G-7, G-6, G-5) in their first 2 years in Fractal. The first 2 years for middle managers are like ragging time- you have to say YES to old guards to sustain in the system. And after 2 years, you start getting opportunities. Please note - for junior folks, this is not a problem - because they typically don't get into conflicts. This is something which is not unknown to CXOs - but Fractal is unwilling to change. 2) Fractal definitely has an AI vision. Significant investment has been done in marketing to communicate to the customers that Fractal is AI ready. Some success stories around Qure.ai and trial-run. Some POCs failed as well. But yet, if you are looking for advanced analytics or modelling projects inside fractal you will have to carry microscope. Some data engineering work have started coming Fractal's way recently.Unfortunately ,a lot of advanced analytics projects and products that Srikanth feels Fractal has is again a smart internal marketing effort by those powerful people. Majority of the projects are still operational reporting , visualization and insights and primarily in CPG domain. This is another reason why people are leaving Fractal - when they join they are told a different picture. But reality stands different. 3) One of the root causes behind Fractal exhibiting the above two cons is its incapable senior leadership (Client Partners and Principal consultants). Majority of them are from an era when BI meant analytics . They feel analytics delivery can be done in same way as IT service delivery. A lot of conflict is because of that . They are not able to sell analytics because clients are increasingly refusing to trust them. I myself have been part of several such conversations. 4) Work from home as a policy may not be the best thing. The team bonding is missed. Everyone works in silos. Very difficult to innovate and brainstorm when folks hardly turn up in office. Work from home can be still provided but making it as a policy defeats the purpose of collaboration.
