Discarded Like He Never Mattered: TCS Lays Off 14-Year Old Manager Without Severance Pay, Employee Calls Ordeal ‘Heartbreaking’

IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced the commencement of mass layoffs last month as part of its restructuring strategy and be ‘future-ready’. Since then, there have been scores of employee accounts sharing horrid details on how brutally they have been laid off, some without any warning, while some having only 15 minutes to decide whether they want to leave or continue to work. A user on Reddit has shared a new update wherein a manager with over 14 years of experience got fired without severance pay and was asked to leave immediately. He called the entire ordeal ‘unfair, unethical, and heartbreaking’, while also mentioning that he was ‘discarded like he never mattered.’

Calling out on the brutal corporate culture of the company, the Redditor said that the HR terminated the manager without any warning citing ‘poor performance’ and ‘inability to deliver.’ They didn’t even let him serve his notice period or give him severance pay to offset the blow. The Redditor is a TCS employee himself and has been working at TCS for 4 years. He recalled, “I have been working at TCS for 4 years. About three months ago, our team was assigned to a new project for an American client. The client had around 15 legacy backend applications built between 2000–2010 on IBM technologies that are now completely deprecated and unsupported. The onshore developers proposed a "modernization" of these applications. But once we joined, it became clear: true modernization was impossible without rewriting everything from scratch. The systems were tightly coupled, outdated, and impossible to deploy on modern infrastructure.”

However, the management insisted that the team attempt the impossible and even expanded the team to 10 people. “Offshore managers kept pushing us, since the project was outcome-based (TCS would only get paid if the modernization was delivered).” He added. After working on the applications for four months, not even a single application could be modernized without a full rebuild, as was warned earlier as well.

Soon after, the HR called the manager and terminated him immediately citing ‘poor performance and ‘inability to deliver’. The HR said that since the project didn’t generate billing, he was deemed a ‘non-billable resource.’ TCS did not give him a severance pay, forced him to resign and exit immediately.

“This man has a wife and two daughters. After years of loyal service, he is being discarded like he never mattered.It is unfair, unethical, and heartbreaking that TCS punishes employees for management’s poor planning and impossible client promises,” the Redditor added.

Many such unfair instances have come to light in these last few weeks. The IT union has also conducted protests outside TCS offices to condemn theses layoffs. The company, once lauded for its work culture and employee management, has now introduced new limiting benching policies and is letting go off over 12,000 employees. TCS internal employees say that the number is much higher than 12,000.