Bengaluru founder defends Cognizant's Rs 2.5 LPA job offer: 'Quality of freshers is often so bad...'

Cognizant has been receiving severe backlash after it came to light that it has offered a salary of Rs 2.5 lakh per annum (LPA) to engineering freshers in a mass hiring spree. On social media, several users have pointed out that the meagre salary was undeserving for skilled labour especially when -- as an X user claimed -- drivers earn more. Amid all the criticism, an entrepreneur in Bengaluru has defended the tech giant claiming that the money should be treated as a stipend since the company was willing to train them properly.

"The quality of freshers is often so bad that even Rs 20,000 per month is overspending," Vatsal Sanghvi, founder of 1811 Labs, an experimental studio building micro products mainly in GenAI SaaS, wrote on X. "Most don’t know how to communicate professionally. Most can’t code properly. Most don’t know how to behave professionally."

Listing pointers in Cognizant's defence, he added, "It is a training stipend. It is an open market - Don’t apply if you don’t think it’s fair. Unlike other gigs, plenty of opportunity to grow if these individuals focus on building skill. But you know what - we as a country want free money and the ones sitting in plush offices have an opinion on everything without having an iota of an idea about the ground reality."

Sanghvi's take on the matter, did not however, sit well with several other X users.

"You are talking as if they are distributing free jobs..there will be interviews and they only recruit candidates who clear them. The issue is with the salary offered," countered PhaniKris (@Phanikris). "This package was same when I joined as fresher way back in 2006. Everyone is pointing about correction with respect to inflation."