HSBC

Good pay with work-life balance.

Of late, they have been doing mass hiring. They plan to onboard at least 4k people, as per their HRs. This is due to their desire to remove their dependency on contractors. I was offered really good pay, but the truth is they don't have work.

Most of the work is third-grade, that they want to hide behind domain knowledge. You will be just doing production support in most projects.

Also, before joining, I heard of their hire and fire policy. Well, it has been one month here, and I can say it is very much true.

Each year, they are short of budget. Each year, their policies change. Sometimes they want contractors, sometimes they want permanent hires.

If a project does not have a budget, they will just fire you. They won't even consider moving you to another department, even when there are openings out there.

HR is almost non-existent here.

Technology is very outdated. At the time of recruiting, they talk about clouds, MongoDBs, blockchain, etc., but all these are just their marketing strategies.

I have also heard they have this habit of removing the whole team for cost-cutting. Like in my project, there is no testing team. They plan to do the same with the L1 support team. They want these tasks to be handled by dev teams so that they can get away with support teams as well and reduce costs.

Moreover, employees are almost treated as cattle, literally resources. There are no benefits apart from your salary.

In short, join only if you really don't have a choice.

Learn how to run a software company in India, or else better outsource the whole work. These frequent firings have already spoiled the brand name of HSBC, and if it happens again, I am sure no sensible person will join it ever.