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Wipro conducts annual Technical tests for its employees

I recently had a chat with a wiproite working in J2EE technology, hes a six year experienced and has been with Wipro for past 5 years.  When we were discussing about appraisal systems in TCS and Wipro, I came to know of a technical test wipro conducts for its employees every year for the appraisal and if some one fails these exams it affects their Salary and Career at Wipro.

Typically companies conduct exams during the initial training period for freshers and trainees, but conducting exams for experienced professionals in a annual basis is unheard of. And Im not sure about exact name they use for these tests but it appears to be very broad covering many technologies even if the individual is not working on them.  For instance this person was working in Struts , Core Java  but he had to take exams on EJB,Web Services,AJAX etc and he was telling how he had to take leave and stay awake whole night to prepare for these tests.

Any information on this topic is welcome through comments/email. If some information is wrong or not complete please let me know.

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Infosys plans to modify iRace

After a shocking backlash from its employees in media and attrition , Nandita Gurjar has acknowledged that one of the problem is with iRace which has in smaller percentage reduced roles and salaries of mid level employees.

In the interview she has admitted a high level committee has submitted some modifications in the iRace and they are currenly under review with management. So infy employees might get a pleasant surprise after the Q4 numbers.

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Infosys iRace makes employees say “I Quit”

Infosys has seen extremely high attrition over the last 3 months and most employees attribute it to the new HR initiative (I think Finance had more say here).There were reports that Infosys lost 4000 employees in the month of February alone accounting for 3% of its total strength. It appears Infosys has frozen all the exit interviews of employees resigning till the end of the March 2010 (H2), this appears as a move to show more acceptable attrition rate to the media and markets ahead of the annual results. Nandita Gurjar has been taking a lot of flak from infy employees in the media comments section.

During recession Infosys like TCS,Wipro and many others increased the working hours from 8 hours to 9 hours and froze the hikes and promotion for two years. Now after iRace many employees have been demoted as they dont fit the expected criteria and their salary has gone down as well. Typically when a company starts reducing salaries even while showing profit growth it makes you wonder when will the normalcy return for these companies. Infosys while projecting a profit growth story to markets, it is doing exactly the opposite towards its employees.

By discouraging long serving employees, the likes of Infosys and TCS are encouraging a vicious cycle in the IT industry in terms of attrition and forced hikes by laterals, in spite of the fact that the cost for the companies will be much lower to retain employees rather hire at a higher price.