Welcome to the sixth weekly edition of the Bodyshop Report. We are halfway to our goal with 250 bodyshops ranked of what will become our “Misfortune 500” bodyshop rankings.
This week’s report will be a little bit different. So far we have been intentionally avoiding the worst of the H1B abusers, allowing us to bring awareness to lesser known bodyshops. Starting this week we will bring in one or two of the “WITCH” (Wipro/Infosys/Tata/Cognizant/HCL) companies every week. Also, instead of highlighting companies from the top 10, I will be selecting companies further down the list to spotlight some of the most egregious bodyshopping practices.
209. JSMN International
This New Jersey company is one I have written about previously. In addition to damning reviews on Glassdoor complaining of bedbug infested guesthouses, payroll running, and USCIS blacklisting, you can also read about JSMN International on Goolti.com, where reviewers complain about guesthouse “fully infected with bugs” and “bathroom leakage”. Strangely, back at home the CEO is worshipped as a great person in “The incredible story of Ravinder Thota, the phenol salesman who built a $33M IT company“. In a true rags to riches story, our hero went from a humble village to the fraud capitol of Hyderabad, and now has reached the pinnacle of his career as a New Jersey bodyshop owner.
72. Systel Inc.
The north Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta is home to 83 H1B dependent companies, including Systel Inc. which enters the list this week at #72 overall and #3 in Georgia. There are some bizarre and shocking reviews on Goolti.com written by Canadians who found themselves trapped in Systel guesthouses. Predictably, their Canadian “guests” were not amused:
What People Are Saying
“Canadians!!! Stay away from Systel. If you decide to take a risk, prepare for the worst experience of your life. The company will provide you with poor living conditions that is barely acceptable for animals. You will be provided with food from ” Wal-Mart”. There will be no pay and you will suffer before you get paid. I have witnessed people getting fired for no reason and others decided to just leave the next day or after surviving for few weeks. The admin employees are nice but the upper managment lacks proffessionalism. The most impportant part is not to sign any contracts before you get you first check. in other words , do not sign without getting paid first. Promises do not work in such a company”
— Survivor
“This company is expert in exploiting Canadians. I don’t know how expert they are in exploiting Indians who they bring on H1B.
They bring Canadians on TN1 and behave with them in the same manner as they would with someone from a third world country. They put them in apartments with 8-10 other people like animals. That setup may be normal for someone coming from Asia but someone born/raised in North America can’t possibly adapt to that. They promise you that they will pay for all your groceries but they they decide what you eat and what to pick when you grocery shop. They disrespect people and treat them like garbage.”
— HAK
- Wipro, Inc.
The first letter in “WITCH” belongs to New Jersey headquartered Wipro Limited, with offshore headquarters in Bangalore. “Western India Palm Refined Oil” has evolved from selling snake oil in the 1940s to selling warm bodies today. NASSCOM ranks Wipro fourth in the Indian IT industry.
In our scoring, we found 258 one star reviews for Wipro on Glassdoor and 954 recruiters in LinkedIn. On Goolti, one reviewer refers to slavelike treatment. 1,062 reviews on Glassdoor mention poor work-life balance, and 1,268 others cite low salary or “less salary”. Wipro’s $77,500 median salary is the second lowest of the top five.
I have personal experience with Wipro. In the mid 2000s, we had just fired our outsourcing partner in Hyderabad for horribly botching a large project, and were staffing up locally. One of our staffing partners was Wipro. We came to dread interviews with Wipro applicants. Most of the interviewees barely spoke English or spoke it with an unintelligible accent.
So naturally when we found a Wipro candidate who could speak English, we hired him quickly. To our dismay it turned out “J” could not code his way out of a wet paper bag. He would fix every bug with one or two lines of code, so as a result managers only assigned the most trivial bugs to him. I did a code review of one of “J”‘s fixes and counted two new defects in one line of Javascript, an almost impossible feat. After giving “J” advice how to fix a bug, he asked me to remain sitting at his desk and write the code myself. I refused. When our boss bragged about the great rate he was being offered by Wipro to hire junior level devs (3 to 5 junior devs for the price of 1 experienced developer), we were horrified.
For more insights you can view the data here. I hope you enjoyed this week’s report. Can you guess who will be next week’s #1? Will it be the second letter in “WITCH”? Tune in to find out!
White-Collar Workers of America 