The truth about Microsoft Global Services India

Last year, I decided to go back to India for good even though I had a green card and home in the US. So, leaving my $150K salary, SUV, house and sending all the stuff back home, I decided to go back to “my” home country India. It was all good until I was approached to interview by MGSI – Microsoft Global Services, India, which is a 100% subsidiary of MCS, USA. For the client “MGSI” is invisible. It is just MCS.

I had a lot of telephonic interviews, and finally got called to Hyderabad India for my final face to face interview. I was happy because I always wanted to join Microsoft as my work experience is mostly in MS Technologies. I completed a practical test with a fully working demo, which passed with flying colors. Then I cleared my final interview with one of the directors in MGSI. So far so good. The only thing was the people there looked dull and morose, and this stuck in my mind when I went back home.

You know Indian families – they were overjoyed that I got in Microsoft, and I decided to join. I was very trusting of Microsoft as they are a very large company and I always admired them. I joined even before getting a formal letter or knowing the exact terms. It took them 3 weeks to give me the letter which had weird details like a slightly different salary structure than what I expected (in the US, if it is 100K, it is 100K, not 75K actually). This was the first sign that things were run differently in India. Then it had really draconian terms like 90 day notice period or otherwise I would have to pay them 2 months salary and relocation costs.

MS has the weird policy that if they took in a person for a particular position, even if the hired person had no idea or experience with that technology, without giving any training on the same, they would simply put him in a project on that technology.

I did get time to study and I did study and worked without too much difficulty in a large project. I have to say one thing about MGSI that these people have no culture or respect for others. The office was the worst kind of hostile, abusive environment I have ever seen in my experience. Even if you did do good work, it was not acknowledged, and people would treat you brutally.

I talked to people who worked there for several years, and no one was happy working there. This is because everyone knows that SharePoint is built on very old and very ancient COM technology and is very difficult to work with. Nobody wanted to work on it, but they were forced to, because usually the work done by MGSI was that which nobody wanted to touch in the US.

I also learnt that Microsoft does not care about anything except making money, even if it means selling what everyone knew as bad obsolete technology, if it meant they could make money out of licenses.

So, the morale was very, very low. In addition to all of these constraints, people had to travel a lot during the year, get paid in rupees, while they hardly got to stay at home with family. You would be in places like Egypt, South Africa or Vietnam all the time. The worst thing was this was the first large company where even people who worked there for a long time were unhappy with it. In the words of one person: “I hate it here, I wish I could leave, but I can’t”. He never told me why exactly he couldn’t leave even though he had been working there for a long time.

Very many people started leaving MS, because of this they added this draconian 90 day notice period to the employment agreement.

I worked there for a few months, and in the meantime, explained the problems to my manager who told me that, they already knew that this guy was abusive, disrupting work and were working on it. I made the mistake of believing him, only to find out that they kept him in the same position, and actually gave him a promotion. So, thing obviously got very bad.

I had great difficult keeping my hands off this guy towards the end, because I wanted to slap him hard the next time he said something rude and brutal.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I resigned one fine day, and went away. I explained the truth in my resignation letter and talked to a few managers. I definitely did not want to work in a company like this.

The truth about Microsoft in India is that, they hire very talented people through extensive interviews. Maybe one in 300, and give them really junk work which nobody in the US wants to touch. If by mistake, some good work does come to India, then when focus shifts to that, they move it back to Redmond. Some of the people they hire come from outside the country like me. And we feel very let down by this experience.

This is true exploitation of talented Indian software engineers and making sure that, they never get a chance to realize their true potential. It is like taking the best grads from a college and making them work in an abusive sweatshop environment. This is the worst part about Microsoft in India. I sacrificed a lot to come back to India, and I was let down. I will never make the mistake again.

Let everyone know the truth about what really MGSI is:

1. They cheat and lie to their customers.
2. Their own employees don’t feel happy doing this day in and day out.
3. They are the most arrogant, cruel and abusive, uncultured people I have ever met.
4. They tarnish the image of the parent company.
5. There is no software process or SDLC in place.
6. If good code means ignoring requirements and just making sure that the code passes the rules engine, this is what they do.
7. Their idea of software development is to hire 10 engineers, tell them to do something and sleep over it.
8. They are busier trading blames with each other than anything else.
9. Forget international quality, even local Indian companies do a better job.
10. They have a closed mind.