Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services exporter, is facing uncomfortable questions after a viral Reddit post alleged that employees were being forced to resign under threat of poor performance feedback.
The anonymous poster, who claimed to have worked at the company for 21 years, described a process that, if accurate, paints a troubling picture of how India’s IT bellwether is managing headcount in a slowing market.
The post, summarised by The Financial Express on 2 September, said project managers and the company’s Resource Management Group (RMG) “release” employees from assignments without warning. Minutes later, an official email allegedly confirms the release, leaving staff scrambling to secure redeployment inside the firm.
“You are working on your project tasks and all of a sudden the project manager calls you and informs you there is an urgent requirement in another account… In the next few minutes, you get an email from RMG that you are released,” the employee wrote.
The ‘sweet call from HR’
According to the post, what follows is more jarring. “All of a sudden you get a sweet call from HR,” it read. “I will give you two days—you need to resign, otherwise we give you bad feedback.”
The employee claimed to have consistently received top performance bands in recent years but was still asked to leave. They alleged HR offered three months’ salary upon resignation, with the exit processed immediately — bypassing TCS’s standard 90-day notice period, in place since March 2016 according to The Economic Times.
Other anecdotes described employees discovering they had been released only when their office access cards stopped working. A project manager allegedly told one worker, “I just got to know you were released. Not sure if there is any urgent requirement for your role, can you check with RMG once?”
The poster concluded bleakly: “No one cares about your project improvements, your certifications, your T-factor score. You get kicked out just like that.”
The allegations come as TCS’s new benching policy, introduced on 12 June 2025, faces pushback. The policy caps bench time — the period an employee can remain without a project — at 35 business days a year, while requiring staff to clock 225 billable days. If unable to redeploy within that time, employees risk being sidelined, with The Times of India reporting that it could impact career progression and lead to demotion or exit. CEO K. Krithivasan has defended the system as a “more structured version” of existing practice, aligned with client demand.
The controversy also coincides with confirmed downsizing. On 8 August, Reuters reported that TCS would cut more than 12,000 jobs — roughly 2% of its global workforce — citing skill mismatches and restructuring as the drivers. Analysts warn the scale of exits, combined with reports of forced resignations, risks damaging TCS’s reputation as an employer of choice in the $280-billion Indian IT sector.
Attrition has already climbed: TCS disclosed in June that voluntary attrition had risen to 13.8%, the highest in two years. Research firm Greyhound has cautioned that unless wage and workforce strategies are paired with transparency, employee disengagement will persist.
Unions push back
The allegations have not gone unnoticed by worker groups. The Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) has filed an industrial dispute case alleging illegal retrenchment, while NITES, another employee body, has petitioned the central government to intervene. Both argue that if resignations are obtained under duress, they amount to terminations without due process — raising questions under the Industrial Disputes Act.
For now, TCS has not commented directly on the Reddit post or the allegations of coercive HR practices. In public remarks, executives have maintained that the company complies with labour law and treats employees fairly.