CTS(Cognizant)

This review is written by Pradeep Kumar Mishra.

Brand Value: Yuppie I guess Cognizant as potential advantage in this. It maintains a good brand in India. But its low salary puts it on the other side of this brandL

Career growth and onsite opportunities? Career growth is not very fast. Normally anybody has to wait for 3 years for first promotion as Associate from Programmer Analyst. Onsite opportunities depend on the individual project. But overall I guess in Cognizant onsite opportunities are more than any of the other companies like TCS/Wipro/Infy etc

How is work environment and how efficient is the communication b/w teams or department? Work Environment is not so good. My personal experience is pathetic in this company. In Chennai maximum of the members would be Tamil (this is obvious), but onsite meeting in my team is also in Tamil. So for me the work environment is pathetic.
Communication b/w departments are fine and I appreciate this.

Work pressure/Work – life balance. Depends on project, but overall its fine.

Satisfaction with salary and quality of work. Very very very poor. A simple example is the pay package for 2006 pass outs and 2007 passouts.I am 2006 batch. Our Package was 2.11(includes 20K incentive). Our Juniors were offered 2.50(includes 20K incentive).And our revise package w.e.f May 2007 is 2.60(20K incentive).So we have only 10K annually salary diff from our juniors .At the same time the salary of Infy and TCS for 2006 batch is 2.75L Plus. Very bad quality of work overall.

What type of work they do: Product development, Services etc. Or if mix of these then what at percent? Mostly services.

Job security. 110% unless you are very poor performing (I don’t think anybody will be)

Some positives and negatives of the company. Not good if you want to develop your technical skills. Neither good in pay part. I don’t thing any positive part of this company.

Do you recommend your company to others? Yes or No and Why? A big No for friends. There are so many reasons which are already discussed.

CTS

Cognizant is a US-based global IT services and business process outsourcing solutions provider headquartered in Teaneck, N.J. Cognizant was founded in 1994 as an IT development and maintenance services arm of The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation. The company was spun-off as an independent organization two years later. Since 1996, Cognizant has worked closely with large organizations to help them manage their IT operations. It provides IT solutions to software development and maintenance problems including quality assurance services and re-hosting and re-engineering. The global headcount is around 43,000.

Salary & Compensation: Competitive with the industry, may be little better for managerial positions. For MBAs from top instituts like IIMs package is around 8.5 lakhs per annum. For fresh engineers the package is 2.6 lakhs per annum during training period, after confirmation it becomes 2.8 Lpa at least.On the basis of performance it can be upto 2.95 or 3.2 also.But the training period will be of 1 year.

Brand: Good in India, image is better than other service companies like Infy, TCS etc specially employees perception.

Onsite opportunity: Definitely less than other Services companies like Infy,TCS. Onsite remains a dream for many people. It more like a game of luck … one needs a passport, visa, requirement for onsite job … on top of all these one needs to be the correct fit … other than these, there might be a waiting list in your team … where u r in the list will decide too … so a lot of luck & patience is also needed. I did not have a passport first (Strongly recommend everyone joining cognizant to get one, or atleast apply for it), then was very below in the waiting list, then no opportunity came & finally went onsite after nearly 3 yrs.

Work culture: The corporate culture looks overall nice. In all it has American style of working.
Facilities: This is great. U will find everything out there.

Overall: CTS is an average pay-master and their main motto is to maintain good-will at both ends. The only thing they might want to consider with more care is growth. Uncontrolled growth is always dangerous and will definitely lead to employee dissatisfaction..

Hiring Process: I was treated with due courtesy and not with the “usual air” that HR people have around them. People were friendly and professional. Usually it has 3 rounds of interviews which include technical and HR. General competency of guys is average.

For CTS Written Test/ Interview
1)Verbal & non-Verbal (RS .Agarwal)
Give more importance to non-verbal sections, finding odd one from the pictures, like that Pattern:

A) ENGLISH & VERBAL SECTION
Find out incorrect sentence (Five Questions)
Find out correct sentence (Five Questions) (20mins-25 Questions)
Arranging the jumbled sentence (Five Questions)
Two Comprehension Passage (Ten Questions from two long passage)

B) QUANTITATIVE SECTION (30mins-25 Questions)
5 on Venn Diagrams

5 questions on Coded Relation. (Suppose, A+B means A is the son of B;A-B means A is the wife of B; A*B means A is the brother of B; Then what does P+R-Q mean or what does D*F-E means these type of questions. Refer Aggarwal Book,page No. 237)
5 on Data Sufficiency problems ( Refer to R.S. Aggarwal page No.495
5 on Decimal to Binary Number conversion (Say, $=1,*=0 then find the value of 342 or Find the LCM of 12,15,18 or find the sum of $$** + *$$$ ….etc very simple)
5 on Cubes (How many cubes r one face coloured, two face coloured, Three face coloured, and no face coloured etc)

C) ANALYTICAL SECTION
7-8 Questions from Odd figure out(4 figures are given. Choose the odd figure)
2 Questions from pick out the next figure(3 figures r given. find the fourth)
4 Questions from logical deduction. (20 mins -20 questions)
3 question from puzzle For the Section C go through Aggarwal book (Verbal & Nonverbal)