Infosys – “Crappy place to work, well past it's sell-by date!”

Infosys is not a startup anymore. It is a huge organization. The growth opportunities in such a big organization will be legitimately limited and very structured.

People need to to understand the basic reason for why Infosys succeeded as a company. You have obviously not seen NRN in his earlier days. If you did, you would have the same opinion about him as well. Therefore, there is obviously some flaw in how you are judging them.

None of the Infosys senior managers from the old days (except for a rare few) were technology geniuses. That is the truth. Then how did they succeed? They knew a few critical success keys - timing of a new business, hiring the right people to carry the business forward etc. Realize that Infosys has always attracted among the best talents in the country who would be loyal to a prospering local company. Loyalty among other things was a key ingredient in their success. Therefore, it cannot be discounted.

In the old days a lot many early employees made millions of dollars through company stocks. That policy dried up as the company grew. If you look at the people who became rich in those days, none of them were extra-ordinary; in fact some them were really dumb-headed. However, like most startup companies, they were knit in a family type culture.

The fact is that I liked the place even though I did not speak their local language and even though I saw some of my peers who did speak their language tried to look special. So, there was obviously some sense of honest work evaluation even though there were a lot of unhealthy work attitude. After all you are dealing with human beings and they come in all shapes, sizes, languages, cultural preferences, communal preferences and so on. As long as those personal preferences do not override the business objectives of the company, they are all good.

I did not benefit much from their lofty stock options in the earlier days and I am also not quite aware of what is going on in the company right now. However, going by what I can see from outside, there is nothing that changed extraordinarily. If you come out of Infosys today and join Microsoft for example, you may as well have worse feeling about your employment. This is how career as a worker working for somebody else always evolve. Just my two cents.