...every day, setting the example.

I would hope they would be it could be a case of "Do as a say and not as I do"

Could be a blessing in disguise if the C-suite is away :)

I always love to hear about daily struggles of C-suite when they visit the office.

One day he was mildly upset because his son scraped his Lambo and his PA was struggling to make an appointment to repair it.

Weekend drive to France was off the table and instead he had to take private jet to Magaluf.

I told him that I know the pain. I got a flat tyre recently and had to wait a week for the order of replacement. This means I had to use public transport to work.

He looked at me in disbelief and said: "Man you are so brave! I wouldn't do it."

I said: "Did you assume my gender?" - at which he turned pale.

I quickly added: "Just joking."

Then I told him "I guess Magaluf is nice if you into that sort of thing. How many times you've been?"

He said: "I am actually tired of it! But my wife likes to get a bit sun kissed and she hates going to Caribbean."

I paused, then said: "I guess Surrey doesn't have many tanning shops? My partner used them from time to time until she read about skin cancer."

He nervously laughed: "Oh why, oh why I got married. I would love to just disappear for a month or a year."

I said: "I got a mate who could certainly help you with that."

Three downvotes? Some people really do have large sticks up their arse.

Reminds me of the following story.

A man pulls into the packed company lot, driving six rows deep before snagging a spot. As he trudges toward the entrance, he spots his VP next to a gleaming new Ferrari in a reserved space. Being on good terms, he calls out, "Wow, nice ride!"

The VP grins back. "You know," he says, "if you put in extra hours, work diligently, and get good results, I'll have a new Ferrari next year too."

A common man doesn't really care if he has HIS job. A CEO can be smart but should not be abusing his position to use other's sweat wrongfully. Having said that, imagine the parking lot full of 100 unemployed people for the last few months, and he is driving this car. It can disturb things. That's exactly happening now , world wide. Indians can be smart and all good stuff.,. but cannot go and replace locals in their countries. All Indians in India - no issues.. But if you put them all in not-India work places and and appear to replace, big changes can be expected.

What FORE!!!

Of course the C-section will be setting the example. They are the ones whose workplace experience will be enriching. Literally.

C-section?

So if this is an underhand way of removing headcount, can we call it Caesarean?

But that's the problem. The C-suite IS in the office everyday because they are all megalomaniacs and sociopaths. They can't "control" things the way they want if they work remote so they want their people in the office with them.

I do find it ironic that the majority of the commenters on El Reg complain about not wanting be treated like worker drones but they want the jobs of worker drones. It's just a weird contrast.

Hollow and goodbye?

However, it does seems there's a race to the bottom in the US at present. The big-name employers are cutting back drastically and that's bound to have a knock-on effect throughout the entire food chain. Everyone is looking to be mean to their staff in the hope that they'll disappear of their own accord - unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer places for them to go.

I'm old enough to remember when the first articles started to appear in the Sunday supplements about software boffins being lured away to the US with promises (and colour photographs) of gourmet canteens and luxuriantly verdant campuses with every type of recreational facility. There's been a continuous cycle of feast followed by famine ever since.

That's hardly unique - there's not much work for kitchen fitters, for example, in an economic recession whereas binmen tend to carry on regardless - but it's weird that the economic cycle for IT staff seems more closely to follow the pattern for luxury goods and services. It's almost as if employers don't know what their IT staff are for and are unable to quantify their value but simply collect them when they have spare cash.

This is like management at Tata is so dysfunctional it can't even navigate their own internal bureaucracy and they just hire people, give them a month to find a job, and fire them if they don't manage it... in the US that's perfectly fine anyway since they're about 100 years behind on workers rights.

'cept those aren't Americans they're doing that to. It's H1B & OPT visa holders. Tata throws them in like having 10 fishing poles going and hoping to get a bite on one of them.

I'm seeing little cracks of daylight finally showing thru at several massive financial and banking companies. One global firm has cut approximately 200 H1B holders locally and word is all of them were unable to find other jobs, so they returned home.

'cept those aren't Americans they're doing that to. It's H1B & OPT visa holders

It's still US labour law though. Particularly shitty law and shitty treatment by Tata because they have just two months to find another job or they have to leave the US... unless they get snatched off the streets before then and sent to a prison in another continent.

Plenty of us working hard to get OPT & H1B outlawed as 30 years. But tech is a major corruptiion partner to Congress along with the pharmaceutical and medical professions.

I definitely agree that the primary goal of this maneuver is to get people to quit so Tata doesn't have to pay severance...

The only way a US employer would be required to pay severance is if the worker is covered by a CBA. Which I doubt any of Tata's consultants are.

The super fancy amenity-stuffed campus is just a Silly Valley thing, and even there is a small number of companies. Massive salary increases are a more universal motivator.

No pun or jokes intended with this question, but does TCS employ any non-Indian people, anywhere? I wonder what the actual percentage of Indians versus non-Indians are that work for this company.

I could name some, so yes — although the people I could name need a US security clearance for their job so it's not like TCS has a choice in the matter.

‘Monitored and called out’…. and H1-B revoked to be replaced by another slave from India.

Why does the headline use "return-to-work" when even the company involved doesn't make the implicit claim that people aren't working outside of the office?

Because work is a location, not an action.

And on that basis... feet up in the office....

Yes, headline perhaps could read 'return to office'. Less chance of unintended implication.

Because it helps perpetuate the idea that many in the anti-WFH camp have of WFH'ers being a bunch of lazy work-dodging freeloaders who treat their days out of the office as little more than extra holidays, leaving the poor hardworking folk in the office to pick up all the slack and keep the business afloat, and therefore any demands for WFH'ers to return to said office are entirely justifiable...

Perhaps a *touch* cynical, but IME the number of people who prefer working from the office but at least recognise that WFH can still be beneficial for the business and are therefore quite happy to let it continue, are far, FAR, outweighed by the number of people who think WFH is an utter disaster and should be removed from existence no matter what.

So as someone who very much thrived during those long periods of pandemic-enforced full time WFH, and who still finds it far easier to get stuff done on the days where I can still contractually or on request WFH, I have no time at all for anyone who's *so* anti-WFH that they refuse to accept it has even the slightest of benefits for anyone. The sooner such dinosaurs cease to have any say in how businesses operate, and we can start to properly embrace the genuine benefits WFH/hybrid/something other than full time RTO offers, the better things will be for all of us still trying to earn a living whilst balancing all the other demands modern life throws at us...

Eh, a bit of strawman here.

Your point is that as a representative sample of 1 you stridently object to the opinions of those who claim that WFH can't ever work. Fine, but those people are fictitious. There are corresponding samples out there that claim that the office is more effective than home for them and who strenuously object to the opinions of those who claim that WFH can work at all. Equally bogus.

The vast majority of people waste some time every day, do some work, and draw a check. It's far easier to waste that time at home in your pajamas, wandering to the kitchen every hour, but I've resisted being 100% efficient for 40 years and I was dodging my boss for decades before WFH became an option. Folks are going to work to their level of integrity, interest, energy, and oversight IN THAT ORDER. If you want to work you'll do it anywhere, same as slacking.

The largest lesson that covid-induced WFH taught was how much waste there was in the old office model. You know most people are doing laundry, making dinner and walking the dog during their usual WFH days, but productivity don't really change. So what were these people doing in the office before 2020? Oversight was illusory then just as its need is now.

But under President Trump, those practices are changing. During his first term in office, very little changed with the program, but in the last few months, -- Not according to "How Trump’s First Term Shook Up H-1B Visas for Indians" [visaverge.com] :

Under Trump, the H-1B visa program witnessed a surge in denial rates. In stark contrast to the 3.2% denial rate during President Biden’s term, the average denial rate soared to around 18% from 2016 to 2020 under Trump. Additionally, the issuance of RFEs [Requests for Evidence] tripled, reaching up to 34% during this period. RFEs require applicants to provide additional documentation to support their visa requests, often resulting in delays and increased uncertainty for applicants and their employers.

I ask you drop political pre-conceptions and consider this post in the context of "https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/07/20/h_1b_job_lottery/" -

"In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science," Lynn wrote. "That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82 percent of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma."

Personally that sounds like a great switch. I'm not a huge m$ fan but I'd rather .net over Java. Plus increasing your employability with an additional language which has resolved a lot of the java craziness.

Anonymous because I'm coding in Java and would love to switch to anything else....

"In several shocking cases, Java developers have been forced into .NET roles,"

What next? COBOL? Haskell?

Now, if a highly proficient, $$$ Java developer is pushed into an entry-level, $$ .NET position, then I agree that this is wrong. If the pay stays the same, I'm not sure.

In the course of my work, I have had to learn PHP and VisualBasic.NET. The cases were annoying, but if they were shocking I wasn't among those shocked.

Having had the pleasure of many languages over the years, including .net, I'd rather stick with Java than almost any other flavour-of-the-month.

Currently doing C code. I forget sometimes how wonderfully simple it is. And just how long it takes to get anything at all of any significance working.

> "In several shocking cases, Java developers have been forced into .NET roles,"

Yeah, it's not exactly what I'd call "shocking". Irritating, maybe. Not ideal for your client who no doubt has been told you're a subject-matter expert. But for the developer in question?

I think the issue is that they are expected to be immediately 100% proficient in the language, and no excuses will be brooked.

Our narcissistic execs miss you!

(Joke icon)

In Tata's defence, how are they supposed to sexually assault the employees if they're at home? /s

They've had to suspend all inappropriate touching, sexual innuendo and pushing people up against the walls in empty meeting rooms throughout the pandemic.

Oh, Tata has these 'fun' team-bonding activities as well? Good to know that it's not just LTIM that excels at 'bringing people closer together' (even if sometimes against their will)

Nothing new unfortunately. I worked for another +91 outsourcing company, one some might have encountered if trying to get help regarding Azure products (don't really care about deanonymisation on the reg all that much so idgaf if you figure out which one, bad practise but burner acc goes brr).

Jesus F Christ on a bike that's falling apart, the management and approach to employees is atrocious in these pseudocorporations (fuck corpos but these companies aren't even close to corp standards). Luckily, being based in EU, the local labour laws are somewhat decent for IT folks and my own team was one of the better manned ones, but even given some protections:

- after two years we had no promotion guidelines, no rules regarding raises, no workplace regulations whatsoever (going against local labour laws of course)

- yearly appraisal ranged from below 10 eurocents to 30 eurocents per hour,

- we got paid two times less than market rates (and contract workers got twice as much despite knowing less than us),

- WORST OF ALL abuse faced by non-EU folks by management was rampant, there were multiple s*xual misdemeanors on part of mgmt,

In general, everything was right fucked up the ass with a cactus. Once one of our own guys got promoted to team leader (the only position that would be considered a promotion and paid pittance in comparison to market rates for doing the same shit), he had to wait nearly a year to have his paycheck recalculated.

I mean, for fucks sake, we had one vile creature yell on the open space at an employee threatening that they'd be fucking deported if they didn't get better results (obv quantity > quality) or complained. At least on one occasion this was the project/department/office head honcho. This happened more than once. The abusive practices were routine. Just dick-waving and propping up egos of the small-souled fucks who were convinced everyone has to obey all whims or be discarded. Just creme de la creme of post-colonial (as in, exploited folks exploiting others to fit in with the worldwide pattern) mentality fixated on generating value no matter the cost, mixed with stratified societal patterns and gung-ho US-style bullshit. Indian capitalism is somehow even worse than central/eastern European flavour and that's not even a contest tbh. And we have pretty bad fucking practices, or had until a decade ago or so, even in 'proper' companies.

Our project was at least somewhat self-contained. The folks in India in central offices were hired just to be benched, given peanuts and 3 months to find a project to be allocated to themselves before given a boot, just a fucking meat grinder if you weren't a senior already.

Oh, speaking of peanuts, the folks in India got 'care packages' of nuts for one of their holidays. Multiple packets were full of literal maggots. Pretty ripe ones at that. Swear on Sir Terry, you can't make up the shit you'll see when you work for a company like that.

Can't even blame the people from overseas that worked on the project with us us that their work was botched all the time, really. How could it be anything more than passable at best when they were working in stressful conditions far worse than ones we had is beyond me. For all the anger and stress our cooperation has caused me over the years, I genuinely pity the Indian folks I worked with. These outsourcing companies are just soul-crushing abattoirs. I got burned out to an extent that if I was younger and less aware of things, I would've probably had to spend some time in an institution due to mental health being just in the deepest fucking pit. If I wasn't living with my partner, I would've definitely drank and smoked way more just to cope with the misery. And I definitely toed the line of being a highly functioning alcoholic for a bit.

Getting a job offer in a field I wanted to pursue was the only thing that helped. Well, that and doing acid during a month-long medical leave to help with processing all the bullshit. Would've gone back to bussing tables if I remained there for a month longer. Or sweeping streets. Or anything that wouldn't mean being a cop, anything at all just to have enough money to survive month to month.

I can't imagine how bad it must be for employees with less options for moving on, or ones brought into the country by the company. This kind of dependency is rotten and anyone that abuses it (i.e. every fucko in the command chain of these 'corpos') deserves a cruel and unusual punishment. I would propose something but I'm on enough watch lists as it is.

Also, fuck TATA, LTIM and all the assorted shits. This year their CEOs had a contest in who will outbid another when it came to proposing optimal working hours in India. I think cookie went to that shit from LTIM who wanted folks to work around 90 hours a week or so.

Burn it all to the fucking ground.

Did you have zero other employment options?

I can also totally understand sticking around at places like this if you are supporting family.

If not, just GTFO even if it leaves you with no money, if of course you have at least one person who can help you whilst you find employment elsewhere.

I’ve had a few jobs at toxic companies over the years which I’ve quit after a few months.

It never ceased to surprise me that some of the poor saps that worked at these places had been there years. Too scared to make the move or perhaps ground down so much they felt worthless.

then enforcing a "Bench Policy," whereby they are encouraged to apply for particular jobs with no guarantee of getting a contract.

Some workers even claim to have been offered roles, have left their jobs, and then been left in the lurch.

one guy i managed got lured away from us by the promise of a nice salary and role at a local consultancy. then it turned out once he joined he had to interview for the role at the client-side that they assumed he'd get. He never got it so ended up miserable on a bench waiting for a crap placement

and that was in the uk only a few years ago

I don't think this is just TCS. Another of the Indian outsources have form with hiring with a UK client in mind, but then upon onboarding me found there wasn't a role.

I was then prospecting for work with half-a-dozens other clients and sat on the bench, facing redundancy after 90-days if unsuccessful. At one stage I was offered a position in Malaysia with the advice "you just have to go where we need you" which - having a young family - I very politely turned it down. A UK role was eventually found, which was interesting in its own ways.

Some people make a good enough life out of working for these outfits, but it certainly wasn't for me.

If you have skills, escape early and become self employed or find a reliable gig, before mass cuts. You may also want to build that side hustle as a plan B and learn other skills.

All that stuff about STEM being the best career option may not have been entirely correct.

someone has to come in afterwards once the lesson has been learned, reverse engineer what the AI was trying to do and reimplement it properly

I sympathise with these guys. I just see Indian companies mimicking the glitz and glamour of 90s american corporations with words like onboarding and the like,with no doubt lots of glossy brochures.

But the underlying company mentality is akin to hiring some farm labourers.

Just be a yoga instructor and come to the uk.Starmer thinks we need millions of yoga instructors. Maybe uk will trick you into advanced computer jobs.

Do they actually still have desks for all their staff? We’ve got rid of several office buildings where I am, maximum capacity now is about 30% of total workforce.

Similar for me (in the UK but it's a US corp).

Implemented work-from-home at the start of lock-down, shut down most regional offices, eventually decided to sell them off if owned, or stop leasing/renting if not owned.

My old office, which was in my local Town, was in the middle of a residential area for some reason (pre dated the company owning the place), was sold and has been redeveloped into housing.

The only offices we retained were some secure locations (specific single clients, not allowed in the building if not on that account), a very small number of regional offices, and some space down in London.

Company C suites are now stating we need to be back in the office for at least 2-3 days a week in order to . But we don't have the desks, and many people, including myself, are no where near close to one of the remaining usable offices, for it to be a viable commute.

The closest, based on time (via train), for me would be London, and that's 4 hours a day (2 hours each way, including tube/bus) assuming no hold ups, and as my contract is work-from-home, the company has to pay the travel expenses, which the account I'm on is refusing to do!

Would never work for these shysters!

Britain is flooded with Indian Outsourcing firms & I'm blocking their numbers at pace. They seem to be getting all the government contracts and even private sector seems to have jumped on the bandwagon.

Western IT - or at least UK/US IT skillset as everything is shovelled away

Same in the USA.

I spent last month literally blocking dozens of calls. Calling about jobs, over 1000 miles away with shit pay. The ones I could understand that is, and I'm really good with thick accents and have nothing against anyone with an accent. But Indian body shops can fuck right off.

So call me suspicious…

But I reckon these edicts actually have almost nothing to do with the remote/WFH efficiency debate, but are simply a tool to reduce redundancy payouts for upcoming staff squeezes….

Whenever you see these stories, it’s always larger companies that are already/about to run large staff restructures due to a decline in profits.

A “return to the office” edict (dressed up as efficiency) will lead to a huge number of resignations, meaning they need to pay out fewer redundancies when they launch their restructure down the line.

There's a few billion others in India more than ready to take your job!

Post pandemic there is zero reason to have a 5 day in the office mandate, unless you're working a F2F client role as no one really cares where you are.

Except, of course, the facilities manager + finance manager!

"we need an excuse to fire you or make your life intolerable until you quit because paying redundancy is expensive"

Very few people get severance pay in the USA.

This is just about getting rid of people.