can i have an unbiased review of people working in service based MNC firms like tcs/wipro/cognizant/capgemini/etc ?
- how much did you learnt during your time there?
- i have heard a lot about "bench" : from what i understood, its the free time period in which a person is not allocated to any project. So why is this so bad? can't you simply use your laptop in that time to watch videos and learn new tech?
- How is the growth there?How is it affected, considering these companies are mass recruiters taking thousands of freshers each year?

oh it's amazing! You get to down Boeing Aircraft and space capsules by writing crappy code 😄

I have worked with maybe 3 people from any of those firms over 15 years that had any idea what they were doing. More often I encounter architects who are baffled by bootstrap controls.

If you want skills, go elsewhere. Don't hit the body shops. To them you're just a body sending a bill. Amazon just posted a ton of jobs in India.

Re: bench

Bench means you'll have employment history, but no project experience. Your pay scale will remain where it is, and it will bleed your most productive years. If you're on bench for a long period, it will also scare off other companies you may want to jump to, as they will assume something is seriously deficient in the skills dept., aa no teams considered you good enough to use.

Disclaimer: My profile is that of QA (NOT the shitty manual morons, thank you very much)

So I worked in a services company before joining my current (product) one. To be fair, this was a smaller services company than the ones you’ve listed; we had maybe 50 people.

I spent about 2 weeks on the bench before I was assigned to a project, and those were the longest weeks of my life. Hell maybe it’s just me, but I can’t really learn from watching videos unless I try to implement more than what is just shown, and fail spectacularly at it.
However, I did learn how to handle time crunches, and jugaad for surprise deadlines. So much Jugaad. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)

The problem with the larger services companies, is that they really don’t care about your skills, in line with what @SortOfTested said.

You want growth, pick companies where you gotta either a)wear multiple hats to get things done, or b) have to level up your skills just to keep up with the rest of the team.

ugh , Everything is so bad.you guys are speaking thee truth and truth is painful.

i am a bloody average(or worse) indian student: not very good with academics, not very good in DS/algo/math, not very good in C and decent in java/android/python/analytics.(Note that decent means some proficiency/exp, i am not an expert)

But today here i am having:
- an offer from a service company(tcs) who is going to ruin my remaining skills 9but might give me decent work life bal),

- an android dev offer from a startup ( who is going to assume that am a master in my half good skills, pay me peanuts and, ridicule & stress the fckin hell out of me) and

- a (hypothetical) rejection letter from a good company (Amazon/Google/Hackerrank/etc) who judged me for the skills/ DS-algo knowledg/ sharp brains that i don't possess.
What would I do?

@SortOfTested i a, getting a vibe of bad culture of those firms, but i am still curious to find more. How exactly is the bench time non productive? The way i see it, its free cash for self learning/web content viewing (as long as they are not using any blockers or rules that prevent me from doing so)

Also how does another company know if i have been on a project or lying around on bench? i am not sure how job shifts happen in the later stages of life, but the way am applying now,my resume does not speak about the free time i wasted or my few bad internships details

@StopWastingTime
When you start looking for other jobs references are going to matter. you want to maximize your first few years out of school in terms of experience building. Plenty of people have connections at your largest firms to verify for a little bakshish.

You can cram for algo interviews at entry level and probably get the gig at amazon. Your ability to write and understand what you're reading puts you pretty far ahead of your contemporaries at the body shops. I work with people on H1 that literally can't form complete sentences; those companies are full of people with fake online degrees because all they really need is a body to send a bill and the customer will never be allowed to communicate with them. This leads to needless, painful levels of unnecessary jugaad when there's no need for it.

Karambit's route is rather sensible, and is also good advice. By any metric though, you can do better than any MNC.

@kerambit
Not gonna lie, jugaad is a word Ive long kept in my pocket for when shit goes too far off the rails. Nothing makes a larger impact in a meeting than looking around the room and saying, "guys, we have top of the line equipment, smart people and more resources than we need. Let's dismiss with the jugaad already and do this right."

shit crap..motherload of it. its like cigarettes for CV