Infosys

The minute we drove into the campus, we were all awed by how gorgeous this campus is, and there are four more buildings that are under construction now. As always, we had our presentation first and follow by the tour.

This presentation did not impress me at all. Instead, it gave me some negative gut feelings that I will rarely have. Before I say anything else, I want to insert a disclaimer here that everything I said in the following is pure personal opinion.

We watched a short clip about Infosys and towards the end of the clip, one of their Asian employees stated: “Infosys has helped me with my confidence” with her head look down and did not even look at the camera. I was thinking to myself, if she really have confident in her, won’t she be at least looking at the camera to show her confidence or maybe with a smile? She did not look happy or confident at all. Then, the presenter kept saying that Infosys is an employee based company and because the company has such a great value system that holds all of their 80,000 employees together. So one of my fellow classmates asked the presenter what is their value system, and the presenter could only give two out of their four values. And what’s more ironic is that this presenter is a trainer at Infosys for new hires. So my guess is if he didn’t know the GREAT value system that holds the employees together, then what about the employees he trained? The chances are they will not know the values of the company too. Then, the next question will be, what exactly do hold these employees together for Infosys?

Oh well, the presentation really turned me off. Later, we toured the fabulous campus they have in Mysore.

And nothing occurs to me that if I were one of the graduate students in India I will want to work for this company. On the counter side, I could see why all the graduate students want to work for Infosys. Infosys have all the training sessions structured and planned from morning to afternoon; they even have their evening life planned too; and weekends too. It is no doubt that the amount of capital Infosys spent on their employees are great, but whether this type of investment is for employee’s personal development or just to “program” their employees to company’s specifications is a matter that continuously concerns me.

Below is a picture taken from one of Infosys’s training room, which is the largest training room in the entire world, it has the capacity of training 9,000 people at once. The world has become flattener for Infosys as their employees could sit in one of these GREAT training rooms to get trained without going anywhere in the world. Sounds wonderful?