TCS Reality: Promotion, Bands, Onsite, and Hike

Its that time of the year and people are worried about the promotion and Hike. I have posted once before on the general reality at TCS but this is a niche on promotion, bands, and hikes. This is from my close interaction with PM, DM, and HRBP.

Bands: Independent of Rating. Remember the former statement at all times. You can be an IPF 4.5 but end up with C band and watch colleague with 3.8 snatch the B band. Just cause you got 4.5 no point rejoicing.

Bands are limited. Each project has a fixed number of bands HR and top management allocate this. Eg: 2 A Bands and 4 B Bands per project Unit with 20 members. So a scenario where everyone in your team gets 3.8 to 4.5 rating but still the B band goes to the 3.8 and A goes to 4.2 while rest are stuck with C is very likely.

One might argue then why give 4.5 but the reasoning provided include but not limited to: there is a lack of experience, criticality of the feature, metrics is skewed ( They can cite you have poor Goal and what helped you score 4.5 is the Attributes), lower performance in the last two months of the Q4, had bugs after Goal Closing, etc. The reasons are infinite.

In TCS most projects it is used to keep people in line and outright favor people. See if a 4.5 rating guy ends up with C band and even if you object. Nothing is going to happen. They rarely improve it (unless you are project critical but still chances are slim if they know you will eat crap and stay here). There will be a meeting but the HR Lead and Manager will have X reasons ready for why you got B band and what is worse most cases they will find some evidence of the same. So no point in the objection.

Nobody in the upper management care about it as well. They just ignore and go unless there is some political vendetta where they can corner or deal with the manager or HR responsible for the band. Unnecessarily you get dragged into a political warfare where one has everything to lose.

So the environment is such that Bands are given and one is expected to accept it with absolute Humility.

Promotion: I see too many posts, asks at office, and comments on promotions. Let me tell the ground reality and discussion I had with an ex HR head who left the org recently.

Promotions have been on hold for the last couple of years and the number of people eligible for promotion is high. Bigger issue is there aint any position vacant to promote these people and put them into.

Eg: A live one, a project has 10 people who have completed 4 years in TCS reporting to a TL who has completed 10 years reporting to a Manager who has completed 14 years. All these folks are eligible for promotion. Especially the 4 year completed group which is supposed to be auto promotion. But here is the issue, promote them to what ? There is no vacancy in the Hierarchy to promote these folks. The other option is to promote all of them with a title change, but this erodes the title value of TCS. Which is a real issue right now and folks switching jobs would be aware of. What happens is C2 in TCS will be considered as C1 at some other organisation because of the massive number of promotion/ title change awarded. It will end up like the forced GenAI certification no value cause too many distribution.

See like the above example, there are so many promotions on hold. The priority will be given for the juniors especially those who have 4 years completed. But all of them wont be promoted.

Going back to the previous example in what world does it make sense to promote all the 10 folks at one go to next level ? Position value gets lost and technically it becomes a title fight. Also imagine the politics and the level of toxicity going to arise when this happens. EoD everyone wants the promotion so if its bad now imagine what happens when the actual fight starts. Its going to be a blood bath.

The issue is/was the no fire policy which led to a complicated Hierarchy formation for the sake of promotion new titles came into picture. But the issue now is after the first round of firing the organisation is losing talent and realised the firing they did was for dummy positions as in even if nobody fills the position the organisation can function. It is an absolute management blunder.

So now organisation has alot of Talent ready for promotion but only option is a title change thats it.

Onsite: Global situation is pathetic. Onsite has become a proper political warfare with absolute bloodbath. You should be ready to kiss ass and be well prepared to face the politics that will come up not just here but at onsite as well.

The managers will be waging war to knock you out to get their favorite lap dog onsite. You are expected to do the nastiest crap for your senior to get there and it will be held against you for your whole tenure with the org.

Idea of going there and saving up is a myth especially EU, US, UK, Nz, and Aus projects. The folks who have gone are trying to come back cause if you want a good onsite experience forget savings. If you want good savings then forget good life at onsite. Things are super expensive and it aint worth it. PPI is super real and people forget to calculate this. Most folks just convert their earnings into INR and forget there is an expense for living there.

If your goal is to get a job there then forget it cause situation there is bad and tCs is no longer making it easy for you to switch jobs. If you are super skilled then you have better luck but be ready to face the harsh reality otherwise cause the number of people far outweighs the number of job openings. Your competition is students, onsite employees from the org and competition, folks of the country, immigrants, and AI.

Our beloved org has also started something called short term onsite where one is sent to a country for an eye wash period like 3 to 6 months. Absolutely useless.

So honestly, upskill and look for jobs that will hire you direct or switch here and make it with time. This is a costly decision.