Pros
The first thing that comes to mind is job security. They will not layoff anyone for lack of work coming in. You have to do something drastic and have it lead to them actually firing you for you to lose your job. If you behave yourself and do your best on your project, then you will at the worst be reassigned to something that you can handle. We actually had a lot of this happen that I'll go into more detail in the "cons" section. For the most part, they're great about giving you time off when you need it. For a few people I knew in other projects other than my own, they even gave you additional comp time if they absolutely needed you to put in time on weekends. I've never had this happen to me, but as I said it depends on the project you're currently on. Another great thing is flexibility of location. If you have an area in mind, they will do whatever they can to relocate you to a client site out there to work on a client project. You have to keep in mind that it may or may not be something that you want to do. If it's a database administrator position and you don't have the education, experience, or interest to make it a good fit then you probably want to wait it out. One of the things that they told me when I was hired was that I didn't have to move if I didn't want to EVER. However, the last I checked, as of Jan 2011 they now include in the offer letter to expect to be relocated. I'm not sure if this is entirely true, but it's something to ask/think about if it becomes a concern for you.
Cons
Where to begin? Well for starters, the base salary when I was hired in 2010 was 50k which is severely under market value for an entry level position. If you do your research, you should find that competent software engineers are worth more than that. I believe as of Jan 2011, they increased the base starting salary to around 51-52k, which is still low. Related to the salary issue is the evaluation/raise system. Now, I understand a company has X amount of dollars to give raises to. However, in my particular division the manager was located in another state! Who is he to tell me how I'm performing when he hasn't looked at any of my code, projects completed, work done, etc? They give an evaluation system like a grading system and your grade determines your raise. First off, A's are extremely rare and only go to people that have been at the company a while. I knew many people at the center that worked over the weekends and worked their butts off only to get a B! What do you have to do to get an A....work 24/7? Suffice to say, if you perform then you will get a mediocre raise at best (like $500-$1000 / year). I know people that literally didn't code a line and still got the same grade as I received. I say mediocre because even though this is 1-2%, it still even AFTER 6m to 1y you're not making market value. Another con would be the "diversity" of degrees this center seems to be hiring. Now, I'm not sure about what other people got on their offer letters, but mine said "Software Engineer". Yet for some reason when I get there, I find myself in a 5-6 week "training". Now, I love learning new technologies and the such, but their training was basically Software Engineering 101! They go over the basics: what an object is/encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, a few software design patterns. This is unacceptable! If you were hired as a "Software Engineer", then you should be expected to already know all of that and more. Otherwise, what the heck was your college degree for? I can't believe that TCS actually handed out offer letters that said "Software Engineer" to some people. A few had some experience which is absolutely fine. I mean, there were even a few people there that were awesome (they got better jobs with higher paying salaries in less than a year). There were too many that either didn't have the desire or didn't have the ability to contribute to even basic stuff. The final thing I want to warn people about is the bureaucracy. This will shed a little light on why they hire "just anyone" with even moderate technical experience. They receive a tax break of millions of dollars if they hire a certain amount of Americans. This made a lot more sense when I asked myself why the heck are they hiring people that have no interest in software development. In addition, most of what I experienced at the center was a huge emphasis on how we look to clients and visitors. I know that a few times they even had people sit at desks and pretend to type when clients walked through because there simply weren't enough people to fill the area. They have extremely boring and 95% irrelevant meetings called "town halls" that they REQUIRE people to attend (if you're billable to a client you can get out of it easier) and the funny part is that if someone important is visiting they have "preapproved questions" you can "ask" the visitor instead of asking an honest question. The center has no problems at all wasting the developers time because some big shot is visiting or they want an auditorium full of bright shiny faces. They will bend over backwards for the client/potential client, but not for their employees.
