Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced an instant five-day return-to-work mandate for US workers, and warns that staff will be monitored and called out if they don't comply. A Reg reader who works at the Indian outsourcing biz got in contact after receiving an email from HR saying that everyone will be required to come …
I always love to hear about daily struggles of C-suite when they visit the office.
One day he was mildly upset because his son scraped his Lambo and his PA was struggling to make an appointment to repair it.
Weekend drive to France was off the table and instead he had to take private jet to Magaluf.
I told him that I know the pain. I got a flat tyre recently and had to wait a week for the order of replacement. This means I had to use public transport to work.
He looked at me in disbelief and said: "Man you are so brave! I wouldn't do it."
I said: "Did you assume my gender?" - at which he turned pale.
I quickly added: "Just joking."
Then I told him "I guess Magaluf is nice if you into that sort of thing. How many times you've been?"
He said: "I am actually tired of it! But my wife likes to get a bit sun kissed and she hates going to Caribbean."
I paused, then said: "I guess Surrey doesn't have many tanning shops? My partner used them from time to time until she read about skin cancer."
He nervously laughed: "Oh why, oh why I got married. I would love to just disappear for a month or a year."
I said: "I got a mate who could certainly help you with that."
Reminds me of the following story.
A man pulls into the packed company lot, driving six rows deep before snagging a spot. As he trudges toward the entrance, he spots his VP next to a gleaming new Ferrari in a reserved space. Being on good terms, he calls out, "Wow, nice ride!"
The VP grins back. "You know," he says, "if you put in extra hours, work diligently, and get good results, I'll have a new Ferrari next year too."
A common man doesn't really care if he has HIS job. A CEO can be smart but should not be abusing his position to use other's sweat wrongfully. Having said that, imagine the parking lot full of 100 unemployed people for the last few months, and he is driving this car. It can disturb things. That's exactly happening now , world wide. Indians can be smart and all good stuff.,. but cannot go and replace locals in their countries. All Indians in India - no issues.. But if you put them all in not-India work places and and appear to replace, big changes can be expected.
But that's the problem. The C-suite IS in the office everyday because they are all megalomaniacs and sociopaths. They can't "control" things the way they want if they work remote so they want their people in the office with them.
I do find it ironic that the majority of the commenters on El Reg complain about not wanting be treated like worker drones but they want the jobs of worker drones. It's just a weird contrast.
Hollow and goodbye?
However, it does seems there's a race to the bottom in the US at present. The big-name employers are cutting back drastically and that's bound to have a knock-on effect throughout the entire food chain. Everyone is looking to be mean to their staff in the hope that they'll disappear of their own accord - unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer places for them to go.
I'm old enough to remember when the first articles started to appear in the Sunday supplements about software boffins being lured away to the US with promises (and colour photographs) of gourmet canteens and luxuriantly verdant campuses with every type of recreational facility. There's been a continuous cycle of feast followed by famine ever since.
That's hardly unique - there's not much work for kitchen fitters, for example, in an economic recession whereas binmen tend to carry on regardless - but it's weird that the economic cycle for IT staff seems more closely to follow the pattern for luxury goods and services. It's almost as if employers don't know what their IT staff are for and are unable to quantify their value but simply collect them when they have spare cash.
This is like management at Tata is so dysfunctional it can't even navigate their own internal bureaucracy and they just hire people, give them a month to find a job, and fire them if they don't manage it... in the US that's perfectly fine anyway since they're about 100 years behind on workers rights.
'cept those aren't Americans they're doing that to. It's H1B & OPT visa holders. Tata throws them in like having 10 fishing poles going and hoping to get a bite on one of them.
I'm seeing little cracks of daylight finally showing thru at several massive financial and banking companies. One global firm has cut approximately 200 H1B holders locally and word is all of them were unable to find other jobs, so they returned home.
'cept those aren't Americans they're doing that to. It's H1B & OPT visa holders
It's still US labour law though. Particularly shitty law and shitty treatment by Tata because they have just two months to find another job or they have to leave the US... unless they get snatched off the streets before then and sent to a prison in another continent.
Because it helps perpetuate the idea that many in the anti-WFH camp have of WFH'ers being a bunch of lazy work-dodging freeloaders who treat their days out of the office as little more than extra holidays, leaving the poor hardworking folk in the office to pick up all the slack and keep the business afloat, and therefore any demands for WFH'ers to return to said office are entirely justifiable...
Perhaps a *touch* cynical, but IME the number of people who prefer working from the office but at least recognise that WFH can still be beneficial for the business and are therefore quite happy to let it continue, are far, FAR, outweighed by the number of people who think WFH is an utter disaster and should be removed from existence no matter what.
So as someone who very much thrived during those long periods of pandemic-enforced full time WFH, and who still finds it far easier to get stuff done on the days where I can still contractually or on request WFH, I have no time at all for anyone who's *so* anti-WFH that they refuse to accept it has even the slightest of benefits for anyone. The sooner such dinosaurs cease to have any say in how businesses operate, and we can start to properly embrace the genuine benefits WFH/hybrid/something other than full time RTO offers, the better things will be for all of us still trying to earn a living whilst balancing all the other demands modern life throws at us...
Eh, a bit of strawman here.
Your point is that as a representative sample of 1 you stridently object to the opinions of those who claim that WFH can't ever work. Fine, but those people are fictitious. There are corresponding samples out there that claim that the office is more effective than home for them and who strenuously object to the opinions of those who claim that WFH can work at all. Equally bogus.
The vast majority of people waste some time every day, do some work, and draw a check. It's far easier to waste that time at home in your pajamas, wandering to the kitchen every hour, but I've resisted being 100% efficient for 40 years and I was dodging my boss for decades before WFH became an option. Folks are going to work to their level of integrity, interest, energy, and oversight IN THAT ORDER. If you want to work you'll do it anywhere, same as slacking.
The largest lesson that covid-induced WFH taught was how much waste there was in the old office model. You know most people are doing laundry, making dinner and walking the dog during their usual WFH days, but productivity don't really change. So what were these people doing in the office before 2020? Oversight was illusory then just as its need is now.
But under President Trump, those practices are changing. During his first term in office, very little changed with the program, but in the last few months, -- Not according to "How Trump’s First Term Shook Up H-1B Visas for Indians" [visaverge.com]:
Under Trump, the H-1B visa program witnessed a surge in denial rates. In stark contrast to the 3.2% denial rate during President Biden’s term, the average denial rate soared to around 18% from 2016 to 2020 under Trump. Additionally, the issuance of RFEs [Requests for Evidence] tripled, reaching up to 34% during this period. RFEs require applicants to provide additional documentation to support their visa requests, often resulting in delays and increased uncertainty for applicants and their employers.
I ask you drop political pre-conceptions and consider this post in the context of "https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/07/20/h_1b_job_lottery/" -
"In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science," Lynn wrote. "That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82 percent of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma."
Personally that sounds like a great switch. I'm not a huge m$ fan but I'd rather .net over Java. Plus increasing your employability with an additional language which has resolved a lot of the java craziness.
Anonymous because I'm coding in Java and would love to switch to anything else....
"In several shocking cases, Java developers have been forced into .NET roles,"
What next? COBOL? Haskell?
Now, if a highly proficient, $$$ Java developer is pushed into an entry-level, $$ .NET position, then I agree that this is wrong. If the pay stays the same, I'm not sure.
In the course of my work, I have had to learn PHP and VisualBasic.NET. The cases were annoying, but if they were shocking I wasn't among those shocked.
Having had the pleasure of many languages over the years, including .net, I'd rather stick with Java than almost any other flavour-of-the-month.
Currently doing C code. I forget sometimes how wonderfully simple it is. And just how long it takes to get anything at all of any significance working.
Nothing new unfortunately. I worked for another +91 outsourcing company, one some might have encountered if trying to get help regarding Azure products (don't really care about deanonymisation on the reg all that much so idgaf if you figure out which one, bad practise but burner acc goes brr).
Jesus F Christ on a bike that's falling apart, the management and approach to employees is atrocious in these pseudocorporations (fuck corpos but these companies aren't even close to corp standards). Luckily, being based in EU, the local labour laws are somewhat decent for IT folks and my own team was one of the better manned ones, but even given some protections:
- after two years we had no promotion guidelines, no rules regarding raises, no workplace regulations whatsoever (going against local labour laws of course)
- yearly appraisal ranged from below 10 eurocents to 30 eurocents per hour,
- we got paid two times less than market rates (and contract workers got twice as much despite knowing less than us),
- WORST OF ALL abuse faced by non-EU folks by management was rampant, there were multiple s*xual misdemeanors on part of mgmt,
In general, everything was right fucked up the ass with a cactus. Once one of our own guys got promoted to team leader (the only position that would be considered a promotion and paid pittance in comparison to market rates for doing the same shit), he had to wait nearly a year to have his paycheck recalculated.
I mean, for fucks sake, we had one vile creature yell on the open space at an employee threatening that they'd be fucking deported if they didn't get better results (obv quantity > quality) or complained. At least on one occasion this was the project/department/office head honcho. This happened more than once. The abusive practices were routine. Just dick-waving and propping up egos of the small-souled fucks who were convinced everyone has to obey all whims or be discarded. Just creme de la creme of post-colonial (as in, exploited folks exploiting others to fit in with the worldwide pattern) mentality fixated on generating value no matter the cost, mixed with stratified societal patterns and gung-ho US-style bullshit. Indian capitalism is somehow even worse than central/eastern European flavour and that's not even a contest tbh. And we have pretty bad fucking practices, or had until a decade ago or so, even in 'proper' companies.
Our project was at least somewhat self-contained. The folks in India in central offices were hired just to be benched, given peanuts and 3 months to find a project to be allocated to themselves before given a boot, just a fucking meat grinder if you weren't a senior already.
Oh, speaking of peanuts, the folks in India got 'care packages' of nuts for one of their holidays. Multiple packets were full of literal maggots. Pretty ripe ones at that. Swear on Sir Terry, you can't make up the shit you'll see when you work for a company like that.
Can't even blame the people from overseas that worked on the project with us us that their work was botched all the time, really. How could it be anything more than passable at best when they were working in stressful conditions far worse than ones we had is beyond me. For all the anger and stress our cooperation has caused me over the years, I genuinely pity the Indian folks I worked with. These outsourcing companies are just soul-crushing abattoirs. I got burned out to an extent that if I was younger and less aware of things, I would've probably had to spend some time in an institution due to mental health being just in the deepest fucking pit. If I wasn't living with my partner, I would've definitely drank and smoked way more just to cope with the misery. And I definitely toed the line of being a highly functioning alcoholic for a bit.
Getting a job offer in a field I wanted to pursue was the only thing that helped. Well, that and doing acid during a month-long medical leave to help with processing all the bullshit. Would've gone back to bussing tables if I remained there for a month longer. Or sweeping streets. Or anything that wouldn't mean being a cop, anything at all just to have enough money to survive month to month.
I can't imagine how bad it must be for employees with less options for moving on, or ones brought into the country by the company. This kind of dependency is rotten and anyone that abuses it (i.e. every fucko in the command chain of these 'corpos') deserves a cruel and unusual punishment. I would propose something but I'm on enough watch lists as it is.
Also, fuck TATA, LTIM and all the assorted shits. This year their CEOs had a contest in who will outbid another when it came to proposing optimal working hours in India. I think cookie went to that shit from LTIM who wanted folks to work around 90 hours a week or so.
Burn it all to the fucking ground.
Did you have zero other employment options?
I can also totally understand sticking around at places like this if you are supporting family.
If not, just GTFO even if it leaves you with no money, if of course you have at least one person who can help you whilst you find employment elsewhere.
I’ve had a few jobs at toxic companies over the years which I’ve quit after a few months.
It never ceased to surprise me that some of the poor saps that worked at these places had been there years. Too scared to make the move or perhaps ground down so much they felt worthless.
Tl;dr - the market is completely fucked, even for people with junior experience or skillset who want to get an underpaid entry level gig.
So, some background as far as us getting hired there (block of text but relevant):
A lot of the folks had no previous IT experience, landing that gig after a rudimentary 'boot camp' that wouldn't be enough to ensure passing of the networking/VM part of AZ900. They had no other shot at any technical role since the 'we'll teach you how to do stuff' offers fizzled out good five years ago, at least in the region I'm in. Or rather, there are openings but with how competitive the market has become, public offers are mostly bunk, since referrals take precedence. And that's a region that has a ton of outsourcing companies as well as internal IT, in theory a place where it should be easier to get a gig than eg. Western Europe.
I had a year of (pretty good, not just L1) SD experience and was in general competent, if definitely more of a clicker/script kiddie/'oooh what does THIS do' - but even with the scope I was taking care of, which ranged from usual SD stuff up to troubleshooting design/engineering soft and being more of L2/SME/wetwork with elements of L3 I had no luck with getting any responses to absolutely any SD/L1 support outsource offers for a year and a half. Ones that basically boiled down to triaging and using L0 KBs. Even tried to dumb down my resume further to make it look like I was less likely to bail/want to move up after some time, still no dice. For the gruntiest of grunt work.
Some guys had technical college/uni degree in the field as well as either some basic dev or SD experience - same boat as me, no other callbacks even though they sent out a ton of resumes for a longer period.
We got hired via the bootcamp and hit the production in less than two months after starting there. Barely any transition. Learning on the job during a peak period.
In all of our cases we ended in a position where not remaining with the company would mean either taking a massive pay cut to do 'menial'* tasks/physical work. With mental+physical health of a lot of us being in the dumps, that was largely not an option. The money earned in the company didn't allow to build a cushion for couple of months either. And none of us had partners that could carry us for a couple months - most cases, where I am the rent and utilities take 60-75 percent of the paycheck even if you're just slightly below median pay and living alone. Living with someone it does get easier, but not nearly enough for even three months of slumming it.
Being locked to a specific client environ, troubleshooting proprietary backend with 1st party tools meant that we were specialized only in that environment and its logic. Our only way out related to what we were doing would be to work for client directly (max 2 openings per year, most often one) or find another gig requiring eg. cloud networking/VM proficiency but that alone is not a viable skillset to find a gig - you need at least CCNA level knowledge to land a junior net position. And no one I knew of was hiring for strictly cloudnet/cloud sys admin. Most gigs are containers and that's not a forte of mine or anyone I knew.
So, we were stuck. Skillset limited to one thing, lot of folks without any knowledge beyond it, everyone burnt out and overworked AF so barely any strength to upskill outside of work. Most with less than two years in IT and no marketable skills in the area. Bad scene overall.
After experiencing how fucking awful the company is, I was the first one to bolt for the door out of the entire team. Took me over a year of actively searching and trying to upskill to get anywhere, applying even for gigs that would mean getting a 25% cut (from below median pay, mind you), nothing in the meantime came through even as far as shit job offer. I sent out over 150 well-crafted resumes (most often tailored towards the offer and both hiring staff and algorithms), applying for everything, from SD through junior admin, account mgmt, various junior sec and product support offers. Every time minding not to overshoot and play to my strengths in every regard. In that time I got five responses, with two being a result of referrals by my friends. Two others got to tech interview stage, then ghosted me. One ghosted me after getting great feedback from the hiring manager. Over 80% of the offers didn't even have decency to tell me to fuck off.
I took the first offer I got and as luck would have it, it's a brilliant environ with decent pay and learning opportunities, not to mention my dream branch of IT.
I spoke to some of my teammates, most didn't even make it to 30 resumes sent after searching for 4+ months, just getting burnt by the recruitment process. This month a second person left the team, only thanks to being referred and upskilling despite being absolutely destroyed by the job. They were actively searching for eight months. Alongside me one of the three that were the most broken by the company.
I got lucky as did my friend but with outsource you are often set up for failure if you leave. They will lock you in, grind you and leave powerless with no parachute to rely on for surviving when push comes to shove. This isn't a bug of the system. This is - maybe not by design - but nonetheless a feature that is optimal for the operations of those companies. They have no desire nor need to change as long as they perpetuate themselves. Only unions could perhaps change something but good luck with that. We tried organising but before we set everything up, it all ended with a damn bucket of crabs and folks being too scared of losing the job to engage with the idea of standing up for ourselves. Again, in a country that actually has somewhat decent workforce protections.
So yeah, while I agree with needing to leave these environs asap it's unfortunately not that easy, not with the material reality of certain regions and the market being what it has been for past couple of years, especially as far as junior positions go
*not meaning it in a negative way, all work is valid except being a cop, a landlord, a C-suit or a career politician.
then enforcing a "Bench Policy," whereby they are encouraged to apply for particular jobs with no guarantee of getting a contract.
Some workers even claim to have been offered roles, have left their jobs, and then been left in the lurch.
one guy i managed got lured away from us by the promise of a nice salary and role at a local consultancy. then it turned out once he joined he had to interview for the role at the client-side that they assumed he'd get. He never got it so ended up miserable on a bench waiting for a crap placement
and that was in the uk only a few years ago
I don't think this is just TCS. Another of the Indian outsources have form with hiring with a UK client in mind, but then upon onboarding me found there wasn't a role.
I was then prospecting for work with half-a-dozens other clients and sat on the bench, facing redundancy after 90-days if unsuccessful. At one stage I was offered a position in Malaysia with the advice "you just have to go where we need you" which - having a young family - I very politely turned it down. A UK role was eventually found, which was interesting in its own ways.
Some people make a good enough life out of working for these outfits, but it certainly wasn't for me.
If you have skills, escape early and become self employed or find a reliable gig, before mass cuts. You may also want to build that side hustle as a plan B and learn other skills.
All that stuff about STEM being the best career option may not have been entirely correct.
I sympathise with these guys. I just see Indian companies mimicking the glitz and glamour of 90s american corporations with words like onboarding and the like,with no doubt lots of glossy brochures.
But the underlying company mentality is akin to hiring some farm labourers.
Just be a yoga instructor and come to the uk.Starmer thinks we need millions of yoga instructors. Maybe uk will trick you into advanced computer jobs.
Similar for me (in the UK but it's a US corp).
Implemented work-from-home at the start of lock-down, shut down most regional offices, eventually decided to sell them off if owned, or stop leasing/renting if not owned.
My old office, which was in my local Town, was in the middle of a residential area for some reason (pre dated the company owning the place), was sold and has been redeveloped into housing.
The only offices we retained were some secure locations (specific single clients, not allowed in the building if not on that account), a very small number of regional offices, and some space down in London.
Company C suites are now stating we need to be back in the office for at least 2-3 days a week in order to <insert bullshit reason that makes no actual sense here>. But we don't have the desks, and many people, including myself, are no where near close to one of the remaining usable offices, for it to be a viable commute.
The closest, based on time (via train), for me would be London, and that's 4 hours a day (2 hours each way, including tube/bus) assuming no hold ups, and as my contract is work-from-home, the company has to pay the travel expenses, which the account I'm on is refusing to do!
Would never work for these shysters!
Britain is flooded with Indian Outsourcing firms & I'm blocking their numbers at pace. They seem to be getting all the government contracts and even private sector seems to have jumped on the bandwagon.
Western IT - or at least UK/US IT skillset as everything is shovelled away
Same in the USA.
I spent last month literally blocking dozens of calls. Calling about jobs, over 1000 miles away with shit pay. The ones I could understand that is, and I'm really good with thick accents and have nothing against anyone with an accent. But Indian body shops can fuck right off.
So call me suspicious…
But I reckon these edicts actually have almost nothing to do with the remote/WFH efficiency debate, but are simply a tool to reduce redundancy payouts for upcoming staff squeezes….
Whenever you see these stories, it’s always larger companies that are already/about to run large staff restructures due to a decline in profits.
A “return to the office” edict (dressed up as efficiency) will lead to a huge number of resignations, meaning they need to pay out fewer redundancies when they launch their restructure down the line.
There's a few billion others in India more than ready to take your job!
Post pandemic there is zero reason to have a 5 day in the office mandate, unless you're working a F2F client role as no one really cares where you are.
Except, of course, the facilities manager + finance manager!
I’m confident other companies will follow suit. The U.S. is deeply frustrated—many top firms have almost zero local recruitment. Visit any FAANG campus and it no longer feels like the U.S.—a sentiment I’ve heard repeatedly.
If companies don’t start hiring locals, they risk serious backlash and operational risk—not just in the U.S., but globally. In France or the UK, hire locals first. Yes, HR costs will rise, and so might product prices—but nations prioritize local employment, as they should.
Think of it like this, hypothetically: in Delhi, if 5,000 workers from Bihar or UP are brought in to construct a massive building, and only 3% of jobs go to locals for management—how would that feel to Delhiites? Not great. Same logic applies everywhere.
As anyone currently living in the uk may think after a whirlwind period after covid. why am I paying uk prices to live in India?
For a good reason. The very wealthy have this all worked out. UK is an aging population and you need a population to rent/buy/take out loans. All things old people dont really do but things that keep the wealthy wealthy.
Worst thing is the pretence its unforseen but it really very planned. No point blaming the chap who took up a job offer.
As for Brexit. Imaging the fear the uk wealthy had of their now captive population running away with any money they have for a new life in europe.
Imagine how clever it was to make basic uneducated people thing brexit was thier own wish.
