A Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) employee took to Reddit to share that his manager, with over 14 years of experience, was deemed a “non-billable resource”. As a result, he was forced to resign and leave the IT firm immediately, that too, without any severance pay.
TCS fired an employee without severance pay
“I work in TCS. My manager with 14 years of experience got fired without severance pay & asked to leave immediately,” read the title of the Reddit post shared by the TCS employee.
The post, which is marked in “workplace toxicity”, explained that the manager and his team were assigned a new project for an American client. The client, he said, had built 15 applications on IBM systems that needed “modernisation” because they were now “deprecated and unsupported”.
But once the project began, the team realised true modernisation wasn’t possible “without rewriting everything from scratch”.
“The systems were tightly coupled, outdated, and impossible to deploy on modern infrastructure,” he said, adding that the management was aware of the shortcomings.
Team expanded to attempt impossible: TCS employee
The Reddit user, who goes by “This_Hedgehog_4115”, claimed that despite this, the management insisted that the team “attempt the impossible”. “Overnight, the team was expanded to 10 people and told to modernise 15 applications within a month — a completely unrealistic goal. Offshore managers kept pushing us, since the project was outcome-based,” he added.
He further explained that TCS would only get paid if they successfully delivered on the client’s demands, in this case, modernising all 15 apps.
After four months of effort, the team found that “not a single application could be modernised without a full rebuild”.
‘Non-billable resource,’ says TCS before firing employee
The TCS employee then shared the most “shocking part”. His manager was terminated with immediate effect on grounds of “poor performance” and “inability to deliver”.
“Since the project didn’t generate billing, he was deemed a ‘non-billable resource’. No severance pay, forced resignation, immediate exit — despite TCS having a 3-month notice policy for employees who resign,” the post claimed.
According to the employee, his manager is married with two daughters, and yet TCS treated a “loyal” employee as if he didn’t matter.
“It is unfair, unethical, and heartbreaking that TCS punishes employees for management’s poor planning and impossible client promises,” he ended his post with these words.
FinancialExpress.com has reached out to TCS for a comment. This copy will be updated as and when a response is received.
‘IT not a secure job’: Reddit users
When one Reddit user said that an employee can choose not to resign when forced, the TCS employee replied, “HR says either you resign or we have to terminate you. If terminated by the company, it becomes hard to find the next job.”
“And still, new passouts and parents want kids to work in IT companies. IT is not a secure job. Move to other fields and work there,” commented another.
A third posted, “This is the problem with the Indian management. They will say yes to anything and expect the developer to do some magic and get the work done. This not only creates a bad rep but also affects the whole team, where we extend long hours, which is having a 0 effect in the end.”
One person, who thinks that job security is a joke in India, said, “The same thing happened in my last company. I had already resigned from that company and was serving a notice period, so they put me in a project where they were migrating from .NET to Java, but the migration was just a joke, as most of the business logic was in the database stored procedures. I left the company after serving my np but later I came to know that the American client decided to stop the project. The Indian company then fired the tech architect who was working on the migration.”