Ok, now time is to show you reality. I worked in 5 other organizations and then ZS associates. Want to give you honest review so I can help people to understand real situation in ZS Associates. I started in Jan'15 and my life smooth for 1 month, then I moved to project for one of the Pharma client. I was working as BI expert and got opportunity to work on Informatica and data warehouse. Daily I use to work for 10 Hours average and after 6 month I staffed on other project parallely and my working hours extended to 12 hours. In ZS you have to bill your exact hour task wise on weekly basis and you have to keep track of this because manager can ask you any time, you have to maintain good average of 10-11 hours daily to get your 100% bonus. If you are lateral hire, more than 4 year experience you will get position of Associate Consultant where as core ZS, I mean those who joined ZS directly from college become associate consultant in 2.5 years.. you will have lots of ego clash. ZS is not technology dominant , people mostly work on excel and far behind high end technology stuff, so from technology perspective you will learn little in coming days. You mostly involved in business related task which make you almost handicap after 2 years as you will forget your all knowledge you gained in your previous experience. People with 3 years experience get early managerial kind of role, which is good but it give them authority to delicate work which is dangerous , they start thinking they are managers and they start treating juniors or freshers like labour. Managers and senior management expect them which is wrong. 90% of workforce in ZS is below 26 year age which shows that people dont stay long in ZS, Managers proudly says its very difficult to stay in ZS as we need hardworking and intelligent people , its not cake walk, but its not true..they only see profit in their business and for that they can go to extend , people work there without any life , start smoking and drinking to sustain. Lots of health issues and finally quit. I had good time , made good colleague but I also end up in this situation and finally quit. Project start with 20 people and you will realize that after a year project is driven by 10 people, they say team become efficient but truth is that they want to make profit , they motivate you with big words like challenging task, we are preparing you for big roles ..bla bla..but in the end you will see that they are just sucking you. You will get laptop , iphone and these things is actually traps , people are happy to see that yeah I got work from home but truth is that you will work on your sister marriage , brother marriage and even on your birthday.
This is not the situation of everyone, those people who are very politically sound they sustain there , they know how to put blame on juniors and maintain their work life balance by delicate almost every task. With all these comments you might say I am frustrated and ignore. Thats fine, I left ZS by my choice and joined another organization and now I have quality work and time for my family which I see most important. I could have find time in ZS also, but I dont want my Juniors will curse me when I leave. I still in contact with My juniors and stay love to talk to me because I followed right approach. However being nice never worked out for me, my manager always loaded me with lots lots of work and track my timesheet like hell. Micromanagement. ZS was one of my dream job and working 2 years for them made me realize , a non valuable gift in good packaging. Give a thought before joining and dont get in trap by seeing free food , phone and laptops. You will leave eating after few days :) . Projects are small 3 millions dollar or type. Client is not ready to pay for high end technologies , in the end you will end up in their in house product JIM which has no value in outer market. They started in big data and hadoop but I afraid no projects in hand , Pharma clients are not that rich they just want their work should be done with minimum budget and ZS do it for them. No good governance process in place, you can update data in production , funny. When you ask managers it should not be done as it is not good way of doing things in IT, they say we are smart and we give you all rights to speed up the process but truth that if you drive fast , there is fair chance of accident and it happens allot. Some people loose jobs also. So unfortunate.
People who are working in ZS since 6 years or long will say good things but truth is that they became so incompatible that they wont get any job outside and other company want good skill set not just Pharma knowledge. Try to understand that.
All the best, take wise decision.
