Visa

Good work-life balance.

Cab and gym facilities.

Employee leave benefits depend on your manager.

Breakfast/lunch at subsidized rates, with great food and snacks.

Quickly get recognized if you are serious about work and make the right design and coding decisions.

Agile practices are broken; they are running a waterfall in the name of Agile.

Directors throw in jargon in all meetings whenever senior management visits from the US to impress them, but nothing happens at the ground level.

Moving to GIT, moving to Jenkins, using IntelliJ, and having code quality tools on a local machine is considered engineering excellence. Need I say more?

Senior management is aware that the company is being run worse than a service-based company, and they refuse to take any action on it.

Directors commit to unrealistic deadlines for big deliverables to upper management to build a positive image. Teams are pressurized to deliver without considering code quality. Directors do not even defend the team and refrain from taking any responsibility; their first instinct is to find reasons to escape the call or meeting with a wider forum.

If you are politically right, you can survive without writing a single line of code.

Most staff software engineers do not have enough hands-on knowledge and try to duck any design discussion. They will come into the picture only when things go wrong to point errors at someone else.

Management expects you to allocate 10% to project A, 10% performance of B, and 10% responding to critical integration issues. You will get some time to code if you manage to squeeze in some time in this politically active environment after attending rigorous meetings and responding to emails.

I was part of an interview panel, and the level of candidates was poor. Good developers are not even accepting offer letters. Management knows this, and the strategy is to hire people from PayPal or people with personal connections, despite the panel rejecting candidates.

Senior management’s strategy to any problem that derails the deadline due to unexpected technical challenges and additional scenarios is as follows:

I have faith in you, sit, discuss, and then proceed, but make sure you complete this within the deadline.

Please clean up the management and hire senior directors/directors from good product-based companies. They should be in a position to understand the basics of technologies/product development; this would solve major problems in the company.

Differentiate people based on their deliverables, rather than considering brand value and background.

I could go on, but I've decided to move to a product-based firm. I'm giving a heads-up to people who fall for the sweet talk of management, like I did.