back to article Wipro tells freshers a job awaits - if they accept a lower salary than first offered

Last week, top performing entry-level hires waiting to onboard at IT services giant Wipro were given four days to decide if they wanted to take a 46 percent salary cut in exchange for immediate work placement. Wipro requires new hires to undertake a four-to-six-month training program called "Velocity". Top-ranked graduates of …

  1. lglethal Silver badge
    Facepalm

    ... reduced hiring to replace departed staff would have a positive impact on margins.

    But a truly negative impact on those staff left behind who would like also depart relatively soon, and who again would not be completely replaced, leading to further negative impacts on those remaining, who would also begin to depart relatively soon, and who again would not be replaced, leading to ....

    Last one out, please turn off the lights...

  2. trevorde Silver badge

    Meanwhile at IBM

    [Arvind Krishna] DAMN! Why didn't we think of that first? Oh, wait, we were focusing on getting rid of dinobabies.

  3. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

    lakh

    Lakh is a size multiplier, like Mega or Giga, of 10⁵, not a unit. Presumably 6.5 lakh is actually a reference to ₹6.5 x 10⁵ (i.e. 650,000 rupees)?

    1. Insert sadsack pun here
      Headmaster

      Re: lakh

      Yes, exactly. Very disappointed* to see El Reg failing to use the appropriate ISO - lakh without specifying the currency, US$ instead of USD... tsk, tsk

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217

      *okay, it's not the end of the world, but still.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: lakh

        Yeah, it's disappointing but ISO standards aren't always the best thing to follow. Standards exist for consistency not quality.

        Go and make an ISO 3103 brew and you'll know what I mean.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: lakh

          And expecting Wipro to follow standards - any standards - is a big ask.

        2. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: lakh

          I have ISO 3103 certified on my resume, thus far nobody has (Disappointingly) mentioned it.

          Icon - We need a cuppa tea one too, to replace Paris.

      2. Korev Silver badge
        WTF?

        Re: lakh

        I think you'll find El Reg has standard units that supersede those antiquated ISO units...

      3. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge

        Re: lakh

        something to add to your references:

        Japanese unit names

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: lakh

      Nah. If you don't specify, or the context is something else, it nearly always refers to Rupees. If I said my car was 20 grand, you'd understand that means £20,000 right?

      1. Big_Boomer

        Re: lakh

        <LOL> I am on several multinational forums and FB groups and almost daily I see people post stuff for sale with no location specified. I have mostly given up asking them to post where they/the item is. Perhaps one day some light may dawn in their tiny minds, but I'm not holding my breath.

        W.r.t. WiPro, like so many other companies before them, if they mess their staff around it WILL come back to bite them.

      2. that one in the corner Silver badge

        Re: lakh

        > If I said my car was 20 grand, you'd understand that means £20,000 right?

        Depends upon the timestamp - later in the day we'd suspect you meant $20,000[1]

        [1] Eurozone could be at any time, but they are reliably polite and put the currency in.

      3. MOH

        Re: lakh

        Here are 20 assorted grandparents. I claim my car.

      4. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: lakh

        Course it doesn't. It means 20K in US dollars because The Register is now a US site, or did you not know this? You can tell hy the $s and the colors at the center, and other Americanisms. If this was still Limey Central then it would be all £s and colours at the centre.

    3. martinusher Silver badge

      Re: lakh

      Yes and no. I've never bought anything priced in rupees but even I know that when you see 'lakh' it means 1E5 rupees.

  4. that one in the corner Silver badge

    "Turbo" looks good on my car, what about on my project?

    > "Turbo" status, which makes them eligible for a 6.5 lakh (US$7,800) annual salary instead of the 3.5 lakh (US$4,200) offered to those whose marks are ranked as "Elite" - a rung down the ladder.

    "Elite", meaning the best of the best, those who can really do a good job, ranks lower than "Turbo", indicating something that - goes fast?

    So Wipro admits it *vastly* prefers to be able to do things fast than to do them well? Speed is better than Quality!

    Sounds about right for Wipro.

    1. Snowy Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: "Turbo" looks good on my car, what about on my project?

      Go fast and break things, they can be paid again to fix it :O

    2. donk1

      Re: "Turbo" looks good on my car, what about on my project?

      There is a rank higher than Elite, WTF? That is not elite then!

      Turbo .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEoaN9qIxFs so good with a broom? "Yeah go sweep over there, boy!"

  5. Roland6 Silver badge

    "that went through the assessment and interviews between September and October of 2021"

    It is now February 2023.

    An IT market where you apply for a job, but should be prepared to wait months or even years before getting a job offer and then wait further unspecified months oer years before getting a start date, I'm finding hard to get my head around.

    But then something must be a miss with Wipro's recruitment process, are they seriously implying they hold a recruitment 'fair' once every 2 plus years?

  6. Anon.Ymous

    Used to work there till recently

    LOL, I left Wipro, very very recently actually. I have more then 2 decades of experience in IT under my belt and in the past worked for even bigger multinationals on the client side, financial industry mainly.

    I can emphatically state that Wipro is by far the worst company I have ever worked for. I felt really bad leaving my work colleagues behind, have only great respect and admiration for the people I worked with and how they put up and braved through every f**kup and disaster the business threw at them, although have to add that when I left little over half the people I started with with were still there.

    Wipro's annual attrition rate last year was around 24%. And their last year's customer saticfaction survey for our region was a bit over 60%. This was actually communicated internally as an improvement over previsous year and a success story, our region having the best customer satisfation rating glabally. Words fail me how anyone can actually see those indicators as positive.

    In my experience Wipro is to managed IT services what TalkTalk used to be in terms of customer service a few years back, except that in Wipro's case the situation seems permanent, been there long enough to recognise that it's ingrained in their work culture. It was a new client and a new project when I joined and it took me a while to see that it's not just teeting problems and again as much to finally give up on trying to turn things around. A staggering amount of incompetence, blame shifting and arse-covering so deeply rooted in every aspect of how the company functions, starting with hiring, quality and process control, internal support, cross-department communication all the way to higher management complacency and willful blindness. A truly toxic level of disfunctional. Would not recommend Wipro as a workpalce or business partner to my worst enemy, not that I have any, I'm a rather easygoing person, even in this dumpster fire of a company I managed to get along just fine with anyone I worked with on an daily basis and feel truly sorry for the guys who are still there and fighting for this lost cause.

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Used to work there till recently

      You really have to wonder how a company like this stays in business.

      Examples like this clearly show "market forces" are utter bollocks. They should have gone out of business years ago.

      1. BOFH in Training

        Re: Used to work there till recently

        It's cos they are one of the cheaper people to outsource to.

        And for many clients, thats all that matters :(

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Used to work there till recently

          "And for many clients, thats all that matters :("

          We have to realize now that the people doing the outsourcing to the cheapest bidder, are always bean counters. Every time.

          What they see, is *their* budget. No more, no less. *None* of them will take a hit in their budget even if it means the company saves money. That just does not happen.

          When whole thing goes haywire, it's *not* showing in their budget at all and it's all someone else's fault. What's there not to like? Sabotaging a competitor (fellow middle manager) is the middle management mode of operation, every time.

          Also we have this ultra capitalistic system where 1 million in "variable cost", i.e. outsourcing, is *a good thing* to every stock market analyst ever, while 500k in "fixed cost", i.e. salaries, for the same thing, is *a bad thing*. None of them looks whole cost, not interested at all: It's all about *cost ratio*.

          As a whole it's totally absurd, but CEO salary is tied on stock price, i.e. stock analyst reports. *Not* what the actual cost or quality is: All of those are 100% irrelevant in stock market and that means directly the pay of the CEO.

          Naturally the greediest psychopath available is always hired as CEO. That's the norm.

    2. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

      Re: Used to work there till recently

      $4600 for "nearly the best" talent? No wonder they have the reputation they do.

      For comparison, we are hiring people in India who are actually competent, and the saving over local staff is not as great as you might think, as good people can actually command reasonable salaries.

  7. ecofeco Silver badge

    46 percent cut?

    Look for another job. Screw that.

  8. Mayday
    Devil

    Can’t say I’m surprised.

    Would be even less surprised if this decision was made before the first “offer” was even released to the prospective staff.

    Expect nothing less from a WITCH:

    Wipro

    Infosys

    Tech Mahindra

    Cognizant

    HCl

    Kind of like anti-FAANG, to those who actually think FAANG is “good”. Which isn’t me btw.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ex-company did some subcontracting to Wipro (to local client) for many years. The local guys (of Wipro) were relatively competent and semi-independend, basically project managers, no problem with them.

    But then we needed policy decision project managers couldn't give and it lead to 3 months long email cyclone involving more than 30 people, when no-one in Wipro wanted to decide and tried to roll the responsibility to someone else.

    Eventually the client escalated it very high (from high level of them and a major client for Wipro) and got a decision as it was blocking some of the work we were doing for them. Not a single case as client moved away from Wipro only a year later.

    Whole thing paints a picture of a company where a horde of middle managers exist to avoid responsibility and won't decide anything.

    P**ing on the peons fit into that picture perfectly.

  10. ryokeken

    where's the follow up to this story

    for real, what happened?

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