Good for the investor, bad for professional growth
Pros
I am writing this so senior people joining this org can take an objective decision - Focused on the bottomline, every project has to adhere to strict margin requirements - Relationship driven, referral based growth. Atleast till about 2015 the company has purely grown on reference. Keeps the sales cost to the minimum. - No bench, may be a few freshers. All COE, product innovation group brought down swifly within a year when ROI did not start coming within short time. So purely Just in time services. - There are a lot of early employees still with the company. Bonding among them is strong and have built homes around the company and settled down, They probably would retire rather than leave SLK. - Good thing is being business savvy they have realized innovation and disruption are in evitable to surviving. They have got in an innovation head and a customer engagement head. These guys are trying to play the game by the rules and to be fair have to be seen to what extent they succeed. But having been there for many years this too shall passe, the culture is purely transactional and whenever they sense an opportunity to load 20 freshers the focus will immediately shift. very few companies have successfully transitioned to innovative companies that requires a product or solution mindset. - Being a medium sized services firm they pay the salaries on time. Variable if eligible will be paid half yearly. There are yearly gifts for festivals and birthday gifts. HR policies are pretty decent and better than average i would say. - If i am an investor i would love to put money in this company. Great business. If i am an ambitious professional looking to grow personally and professionally STAY AWAY.
Cons
Now the bad things -There is no Charisma in the CEO. You probably will miss him passing by. He is a shrewd business man, as long as his margins are coming he is least bothered about day to day operations. - The day to day operations are managed by the COO. Amazingly the COO has never closed a deal himself, heads the sales team. The sales team really are account managers largely. The COO is in fact a glorified project manager who has rapidly grown to the COO position under circumstances and been clever enough to hold on to the position. COO comes across as a down to earth person but really he is someone who lacks leadership ability, preachy sometimes, highly opinionated and uses deviating ways to manage the team. When confronted the COO would never face you with tough discussion but use craftly ways to put in place people who are outstanding. - The culture is yes minister, the COO obeys CEO, The group managers to the COO, the managers below to their managers and so on. However a silver lining is in the manufacturing side there is a team with the mind of their own but BFSI is an energy drain. There is very little tolerance to disagreements because this apple card is been built and maintained by the cotorie. Any thing that questions the authority or a threat to the apple cart perspective change very fast and people start working on your downfall. - Then there are CBU heads, some very ambitious and some very adamant ones. All of them are highly opinioned and judgemental. The CBU's also have their own politics but these CBU's largely obey the COO. Customers also have a large say in how the performance of managers are counted. The CBU heads have made quite some money, most are old timers and stuck to the job for long. Innovation for them is nothing beyond a colorful presentation, cant blame old habits change hard.
