Pros
1. Stable Job. Even seen people sitting at home getting paid. 2. Good Healthcare coverage 3. Basic 401 K plan employer contribution low because of low salaries.
Cons
1. Incompetent middle management. People who joined Cognziant in early years of the organization got promoted and became managers (some of them worked on something called mock projects!!). Most of them don't have any Managerial skills or any technical skills. Results in highly insecure managers hampering career growth of employees below. 2. Flawed Appraisal and Promotion process. Classic case of dangling the carrot before the donkey. Targets set for middle management are impractical. Which are achieved by making people slog unimaginable hours by promising them promotion at year end. Promotions get delayed every year to extract most by paying little. Finally when can't be delayed any further manager repeats same cliched one liner "We don't have the numbers to promote in your category". Why the numbers are not there is something the manager doesn't know but has been asked to repeat to his associates. Another popular trick to deny associates of a good appraisal rating or promotion is a mambo jambo called "Normalization" where the manager says he had appraised the associate with a high rating but somehow it got Normalized. How does the this Normalization process work is not very clear but HR has sure prepared another one of those confusing slideshows which makes this clear as mud. 3. Extremely low salaries, very hard to survive in US. Cognizant employees stay in the cheapest apartments in town nicely decorated with stuff from the nearest thrift store. In extreme situations Cognizant associates can be seen dumpster hunting for goods like vacuum cleaners, computer tables mattresses etc. Employees are ashamed to introduce themselves in a group of people as Cognizant Employees and rather introduce themselves as someone working for the Client without mentioning Cognizant. For example a Cognizant Employee working for Client X will introduce himself as "I am working for X" and won't mention Cognizant. 4. Company culture seems to be of not sharing profits at all levels. Managers and Client partners (who are seldom seen) are given performance incentives without doing anything (except preparing excel sheets and various useless data reporting metrices from the comforts of thier homes) whereas actual billable employees working at client location are left out from any profit and forced to work at a very small percentage of their billing rate. Another reason for Manager's to deny associates a good appraisal rating or promotion is it affects the account profitability and eats into their own profit based incentive. 5. Too many managers in support functionalities who add to the cost of the organisation like HR(who treat associates as billable machines rather than humans) , Training (Non existent for client facing positions as its profitable for the company in the short run to have employees do billable work) Placement (for publishing weekly/monthly newsletters and maintaining spreadsheet whereas most of the work is done by the associates themselves who are on bench looking for a project). Makes one believe the above departments are maintained for the sake of having them at the cost of billable employees. 6. Even though cognizant boasts of being having an onsite offshore model virtually all work is done by the onsite coordinator (on L1 visa who is enslaved to cognizant and can't switch jobs). Onsite coordinator spends the day working at the client location and tries to train junior employees from India at night. These freshers who once trained leave cognizant at the first available oppurtunity, as entry level salaries in Cognizant are worst. So the Onsite coordinator has to train a new batch and this process continues. 7. Projects estimated for six skilled offshore developers are actually manned by 2-3 greenhorn resources at offshore to maintain high profitability. Offshore managers are also brought into the equation whose only job is to report project data in various useless cognizant metrices and record attendance for Offshore employees. This gap is filled up by the person onsite by working long hours and often impacts the quality of the deliverables. 8. No single internal application for Employees. Various websites like Compass, channelone, ELM, Aspire, whizza, pizza etc which are extremely user unfriendly and do not work half of the time. Looks as if these applications are maintained to justify the existence of people supporting these. 9. No work life balance. About 10 holidays per year most of which the client facing employees have to work. No cash incentives/leave encashments for onsite employees. No overtime pay even if client is billed for overtime. 10. Cognizant has won quite a few awards for growth (which are at the expense of the employees) but has NEVER won any awards for Employee Satisfaction why is anybody's guess. Each year an Employee satisfaction survey is undertaken which most of the employees are reluctant to take knowing fairly well that its not going to change things and speaking their mind would invite the wrath of senior management. Participation levels are extremely low in these surveys and mostly filled up by the middle management. Results of the survey are not shared in totality howeve one cliched line which is communicated to all the employees is "Salary was found to be at par with organizations in the same sector" Which are the organizations to which the numbers are compared are never disclosed.