Infosys fires non-performing techies, denies reports of massive layoffs

Global software major Infosys has terminated the services of non-performing employees at multiple levels as part of its involuntary attrition, a company source said on Tuesday.

"As a high performance organisation, involuntary attrition is integral to normal course of business and this (sacking) should not be interpreted as any mass trimming across any level in particular," said the city-based IT behemoth in an e-mail to IANS here.

Terming a media report on involuntary attrition speculative with unofficial numbers (data points), the source clarified that the company was not laying off thousands of its employees at multiple levels.

"The media report is a mere speculation and sensationalisation with wrong data points, which the company never shared," the source asserted.

Involuntary attrition, a jargon used by the companies for firing or sacking employees for not measuring up to its expectations or high standards of performance, has been taking place at the company over a few quarters.

"This is not laying off, if you don't perform for two years or two quarters or whatever then you are asked to go, it's a performance related thing," the source pointed out.

Infosys rival, Wipro, also based in this tech hub, regularly discloses quarterly in its employment metrics the number of software engineers who resign on their own for various reasons and those who quit involuntarily when they are found non-performing.

"We don't hand over pink slips to our employees. We can't share the data as they are internal processes. We don't tell our people you are redundant and hence can leave tomorrow," affirmed the source.

Unlike other firms the world over, the $11-billion Infosys gives its non-performing techies sufficient time to shape up before being asked to go.

Clarifying that disruptive technologies were not factored in assessing the performance of its geeks, the source said "it is a cool narrative but that is not what it is."

The outsourcing firm's consolidated attrition rate on an annualized basis declined marginally to 21.7 per cent for the second quarter (July-September) of this fiscal (2019-20) from 23.4 per cent a quarter ago and 22.2 per cent a year ago.

The company sequentially added 7,457 techies in the quarter under review (Q2) and a whopping 18,747 employees on an yearly basis from the same period a year ago.

The company's headcount is 236,486 as against 229,029 a quarter ago and 217,739 a year ago.