'Exploitative' IT Firm Has Been Delaying 2,000 Recruits' Onboarding For Years (arstechnica.com) 35
An anonymous reader shares a report: Indian IT firm Infosys has been accused of being "exploitative" after allegedly sending job offers to thousands of engineering graduates but still not onboarding any of them after as long as two years. The recent graduates have reportedly been told they must do repeated unpaid training in order to remain eligible to work at Infosys. Last week, the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), an Indian advocacy group for IT workers, sent a letter, shared by The Register, to Mansukh Mandaviya, India's minister of Labor and Employment. It requested that the Indian government intervene "to prevent exploitation of young IT graduates by Infosys."
The letter, signed by NITES president Harpreet Singh Saluja, claimed that NITES received "multiple" complaints from recent engineering graduates "who have been subjected to unprofessional and exploitative practices" from Infosys after being hired for system engineer and digital specialist engineer roles. According to NITES, Infosys sent these people offer letters as early as April 22, 2022, after engaging in a college recruitment effort from 2022â"2023, but never onboarded the graduates. NITES has previously said that "over 2,000 recruits" are affected.
The letter, signed by NITES president Harpreet Singh Saluja, claimed that NITES received "multiple" complaints from recent engineering graduates "who have been subjected to unprofessional and exploitative practices" from Infosys after being hired for system engineer and digital specialist engineer roles. According to NITES, Infosys sent these people offer letters as early as April 22, 2022, after engaging in a college recruitment effort from 2022â"2023, but never onboarded the graduates. NITES has previously said that "over 2,000 recruits" are affected.
You know that vampires kiss meme "You don't say?" (Score:2)
If Slashdot had the ability to paste images, that meme [bing.net]would be going up now.
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Infosys is exploiting IT types? I'm shocked, SHOCKED! Well, not that shocked.
unpaid training = working for free (Score:2)
But by having people work for free we can be the lowest bidder and make lot's of profit!
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In the U.S. this would be illegal -- free is less than minimum wage.
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I'd like to introduce you to the concept of "internship" or "residency." It's extremely legal in the US.
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Medical residencies are paid positions. Underpaid, since the resident is putatively training but still paid. As for internships... yes, a company can offer an unpaid internship but there are so many pitfalls that it's not legally safe to do so.
https://www.findlaw.com/smallb... [findlaw.com]
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That's pretty heinous (Score:5, Interesting)
The shitshow call later the week "Oh, it's back on, we need you on the site in 2h". I was stupid enough to say yes...again, young, dumb, and poor with few options. The place was a dot com startup horror show. Overfunded, disorganized, no path to profitability, it closed down 2 months later. The warning signs were there, but as a new graduate, I didn't know what was normal and not. I hadn't worked for a good place yet.
The big problem is that it was really hard for me to find a job afterwards and some of the recruiters I spoke to assumed I got fired and just picked the next graduate without some backstory.
These graduates are not only not getting paid and being told to jump through training hoops, they're being taken off the market and that should be illegal. That's 2000 engineers that other places can't hire and tampering with the free market, raising costs for everyone else while the graduate's minds atrophy. I hope Inofsys gets shut down. They have a long history of abuse and incompetence and outright frauding of their customers. I've caught that company sending false invoices to my employer. They billed us for work I literally did and I was in constant contact with their team and knew they didn't work on that project. I found out because my manager asked me about it. It was blatant and obvious fraud.
I reported it to our director and she told me to ignore it...because they were failing us horribly and anything that made them look bad made my director look bad for choosing them (she was getting kickbacks).
Infosys is a criminal organization. They bribe executives with vacations and perks and then submit inflated, or in my case, outright false, invoices. It's like an episode of the Sopranos, only with less violence and tracksuits.
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hope [Infosys] gets shut down.
It deserves to be eaten by a Grue.
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You're thinking of Infocom, and they did. Well, actually I think it was Activision, but same difference.
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That's true. I couldn't remember the actual company name at the moment, but I thought it was close enough to still be funny.
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I thought so, but I don't know how many people around here are still old enough to get it.
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I got the joke, and text adventure games are the best. Long live Zork! Go north.
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Wrong level, it's India itself that is the problem, allowing its telecom lines to be a tool for an immense amount of scamming. Instead, USA should entirely cut their traffic and get the government to the negotiating table if they want to be treated as an actual civilized nation.
Broad brush for the largest nation on the planet (Score:3)
I generally assume that the entire nation of India is in some way or another a scam.
They're the largest nation on the planet. They have issues, but you generalize India at your own peril. Infosys and most offshore outsourcers are likely all scams, or at best mislead about their capabilities, but there's at least a billion Indian citizens that have nothing to do with anyone who wronged you.,
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Nice try at a smokescreen for India's malfunctions, but you fail.
India is only 18 percent of the global population, but they are 95 percent of the phone scams to USA. India likes the ease of being able to set up scam businesses because police and government are corrupt, and the citizens of India like the ease of setting up a scam business so there is no push to change anything.
We could talk about other ways India is abysmal, ranked 7th worse country for sex trafficking and crimes against minor by Maplecrof
Re: Broad brush for the largest nation on the plan (Score:2)
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It's mostly a shithole with a mostly crappy culture. Decent food though.
Move On (Score:2)
Read between the lines - you're not getting hired.
They're acting like they're out of cash.
Guess what comes next.
Get a job (Score:3)
No idea why anybody falls for that (Score:2)
You make me a job offer that I like, we have a contract at a date a few weeks later or you will do without me and I will never be interested to work for you again. See, simple.
Re:No idea why anybody falls for that (Score:5, Insightful)
Anonymous reply because I am an Infosys employee (I'm not Indian, and not working from India).
You are right.
However, the reported behavior seems contained in India-only.
What I suspect happened is one of two things:
1. Infosys putting up job offers for projects that might materialize or not (e.g. in discussion or pre-approval phase). When projects did not materialize, they told the candidate(s) that their hiring is on-hold, but they could train for a different upcoming project (ancillary training). Rinse and repeat.
2. Candidates greatly inflated their skillset in their CVs - which is a VERY common issue in India. You put up a job opening for, say, a Senior Java Programmer and receive literally THOUSANDS CVs, out of which probably 10-15 are worth their salt. That is, if you're lucky. The rest are lying through their teeth and doing everything legally and illegally possible to grab a foothold in the company, knowing they will be likely kept there because their employer would be afraid to replace them, being a high chance their replacement would be worse.
Not defending Infosys in this, at all, just exposing possible reasons. Cause and effect, and all.
Murky waters (Score:4, Insightful)
After reading the article, things look very differently compared to TFS. There are some murky terms there which might have been misinterpreted.
1. An "offer letter" is not a job offer. It's something more in the vein of "We will offer you a job if and when you qualify for this and the other skillsets". A pre-contract, if you will. This is not as uncommon as you'd think. An American company was doing exactly the same thing in an Eastern European country, where they opened up for students to come and be exposed to various technologies. promising students received a pre-contract in the same vein.
2. These offer letters can be presented any time, e.g. to an at-the-time University freshman. "If you learn and do well, when you finish University, we will hire you". maybe that freshman or student didn't do well in the end.
3. The PDF further says "the graduates were asked to participate in an unpaid virtual pre-training program from July 1st to July 24th, 2024" - a very recent event. They were told they would be onboarded between August 19th and September 3rd. Well, last I checked it's still August 28th. On top of that, it's not unheard of that final job offers are delayed by days or even weeks.
4. The candidates were allegedly told that they need to retake the exam offline - here I suspect mass cheating by candidates being exposed, effectively nullifying the previous training and exam.
5. NITES did say over 2K candidates were affected, but I think there's more to this number than that. Could be that many of them were simply no longer eligible.
My gut feeling is the truth is somewhere in the middle.
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While it's not unusual for an offer letter to be conditioned on a few things that are in process like successful visa application or passing a background check, it's more than an offer to eventually offer. I have no idea how the law in India might vary.
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Indeed. I am curious how this would pan out.
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Maybe it's an India thing, but in US an offer letter is an actual offer and will very often hold up in court (though the new fad in binding arbitration is murky as such agreements essentially mean that the poorer party will always lose). The offer is usually dependent upon some prosaic factors though, like verifying eligibility to work and so forth, or passing a background check.
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Could also be that the words offer letter” are misinterpreted (incorrect translation or even name change by NITES to seem like it's a more serious matter).
Better labor laws are needed and not workers on ca (Score:2)
Better labor laws are needed and not workers on call at $0/hr to sit on the bench.
My English deficiency (Score:3)
I seem to be out of the loop. Is "onboarding" the same as hiring? Or is it more closely related to waterboarding or maybe surfboarding? Maybe it's really hoverboarding.
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Onboarding is the step after being hired. It's when you get your account information, provide your information so you can get paid, go into the office and get your equipment, then go through your two minute orientation before being released into the wild.
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If you're getting a paycheck, you've been hired. If not, then not.
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Hoverboarding sounds like the precise term to be used here.
NITES president Harpreet Singh Saluja must be new (Score:1)