Their on-boarding was extremely rocky and their recruiters didn't seem to know what they were doing or how to look up information for start dates, locations, details a new recruit would need.
Their benefits structure penalizes you if you cover your spouse and their workplace also offers benefits
They do not pay overtime rates, instead you get a measly $5-7 per hour instead of 1.5 times hourly rate which is actually ILLEGAL in the United States, but since
HCL is based in India, they do not care.
When addressing the overtime issue, I was told there was a clause in my offer letter that addressed it, and in the correspondence the HR referred to me in the third person like I wasn't even part of the conversation. Now I am having to pretty much fight HR in order to obtain a copy of my offer letter since I was not able to print or save the document before they removed it from their system. This is the first workplace I've seen where offer letters are that obscured from the people who have signed them. I have serious doubts that HCL will ever be able to furnish a copy of my offer letter because they probably purged it.
I don't doubt the reason above is because HCL has been successfully sued multiple times in the past due to their handling of overtime pay. In fact HCL is still in multiple lawsuits involving many things from the technologies they use to labor issues like this.
The management is very hands off until something inconveniences them, and then suddenly you matter, but otherwise you're just expected to shut up and do your job no matter what the circumstances.
No advancement potential even hinted
No performance reviews which means no merit raises or any talk of raises of any kind, then again communication with management is so abysmal it doesn't surprise me
Had to go to the office during COVID crisis while everyone else was allowed to work at home, including the rest of my team who pretty much did nothing for work and still got paid the same rate or higher, but management doesn't care
Virtually all employee social interactions are based purely in India so there is no "one team" mentality. HCL loves its India teams and treats American teams like a red-headed stepchild.
Case in point, HCL regularly takes down its timesheet software and learning environments for maintenance during off hours for the Indian teams, but that means that us American teams have to find different ways to access the systems since we are coming on-shift to experience the maintenance cycles. They did finally address this somewhat, but the connections to their systems are still extremely slow due to the fact that all their servers are based in India despite having a large presence in America.
