Unfair Culture, Partiality, and Chaos - Senior Software Engineer Diligent Employee Review

Toxic Culture and Partiality Everywhere: The most frustrating part of working at Diligent Bangalore is the open favoritism. If you’re close to the site lead or part of their inner circle, you get everything — foreign trips, client visits, special projects, promotions and all the credit. The rest of the us? Left to grind silently without recognition. It’s demotivating to see the same few people get all the visibility while others’ contributions are ignored. Unequal Treatment Between Teams: Some teams here live a completely different life — frequent team dinners, outings, overseas travel, and extra perks. Others barely get a team lunch in a year. There’s a clear divide, and leadership doesn’t even try to hide it. The imbalance is so obvious that it creates resentment across the floor. Directionless Changes: Diligent loves to change things just for the sake of change — team structures, projects, reporting lines — all shuffled around without clarity. One week you’re working on one product; next week, you’re moved to another because of some “realignment.” It’s chaos disguised as strategy. Poor Work-Life Balance: Be ready for sudden late-night calls, weekend outages, and “urgent” deployments that no one planned properly. Shifts and responsibilities keep changing without notice, and no one seems to care about employee fatigue. Toxic Leadership and Politics: Many leads operate like gatekeepers rather than mentors. They micromanage, play favorites, and focus more on maintaining power than on building a healthy engineering culture. Speaking up about issues is risky — if you’re not in the right circle, your feedback simply vanishes. Frequent Outages and Poor Tech Infrastructure: The systems are often unreliable. Outages are common, and when they happen, engineers are blamed even if the root cause lies with poor planning or outdated architecture. You’re expected to fix things instantly without support or downtime. No Transparency, No Growth: Career growth depends more on who you know than what you deliver. Promotions are rare unless you have the right connections. Feedback cycles are inconsistent, and goals keep changing mid-quarter, making it impossible to plan your progress.