There are a lot of cons of working for Optum India:
Shift timings: There is a high chance that you will get to work in the 11 AM to 8:30 PM shift. This shift leaves no time to do the chores in the morning or the evening, and can lead to eating and sleep disorders.
Infrastructure: The laptops available for work could be improved. They have glossy reflective screens which reflect the overheads LED lights in office or tube-lights in the background when working from home. The company does not provide developers with a dual screen monitors for improved productivity.
The company has serious corporate governance issues. Some of them have been described below.
Money issues: The management forces the developers to work overtime without pay. There have been instances where remuneration related to application support was not disbursed to the concerned developers, even though a policy for the same exists on paper. If you raise concerns about such issues, performance issues would be crafted against you and you would be forced to leave. Leaving developers are gas-lighted into signing off an early release and then forced to pay the notice shortfall, even though the developer was wiling to complete the notice period.
Micromanagement: I have had a unique character as my manager who wanted to get hourly reports of what was working on. The same manager also believed in burning out his own team and expected developers to pull all-nighters and work over weekends regularly. They have zero set-up to train managers in the art and science of managing engineers. There was a program called “Managers Alpha” that had the ambitious aim to train the entire workforce in some common management practices, but failed miserably, due to lack of support from the top management and refusal to attend the program by the entire cache of middle and senior management.
Sycophancy: Right from the lowest levels of the workforce, all the way to the top, it is expected, that in order to be retained and have any sort of growth, you have to be a yes man. Examples include, expensive watch being gifted to a manager with money collected from within the team, engineers doing personal chores of managers to gain favours etc. These not only break the ethical code but cultivate mediocrity.
Management quality: Both middle and senior management is mediocre and clueless, both in India and the US. Because of their limited or completely non-technical background, they end up taking decisions that are not viable and does not contribute to the progress of the employees and the organization. Example would include creation of an un-accomplishable curriculum aimed at ‘transforming’ every engineer into a full-stack engineer to be completed in just one year. Technologies included Visual C#, ASP.Net Core, Angular, WPF, WWF, Git, Jenkins, Docker, SonarQube, SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, Azure etc. to name a few, to be completed in three levels – beginner, intermediate and expert for a .Net software engineer. They organize a yearly idea competition only for the ideas to be forgotten and never implemented. When I left the organization, there was a great push happening to create intellectual property via patents, by hook or by crook. US management is clueless and use to come to India every six months in pre-covid times, only to change the delivery processes and make life difficult for the developers.
Hierarchy: It can put a multi-level wedding cake to shame. The organization is top-heavy and as the level of hierarchy increases, somehow, the amount and complexity of work decreases. They do not believe in a flat hierarchy.
Increment and bonus: The company happens to be in a regulated sector of insurance with US being its primary market. Even though it is a market leader in health insurance in US, due to regulation, increasing competition and low service quality levels, it is not able to make decent gross and net profit margins. Due to a gargantuan multi-level hierarchy, it loses a lot of money in operational expenses. Since Optum India is a captive unit, it only caters to UnitedHealth Group and its subsidiaries and hence suffers from the brunt of low money inflow and constrained margins for the services delivered. This translates to low single digit increment in the range of 5% to 7% which does not even beat inflation and 10% to 40% of the promised bonus, depending on portfolio performance and majorly whether your manager likes you or not.
Unethical work allocations: Optum has UnitedHealth Group as their sole client. UHG has hired a number of managers of Indian origin in the US for the sole purpose of exploitation of the Indian workforce. The managers routinely expect and allocate work based on the marital status of the engineer. So if you are a bachelor girl or guy, expect to pull more number of hours than your married counterparts.
