Cognizant SME salaries in India (Updated 2025)

Likes

Cognizant has its strengths, but I feel there's room for improvement in several areas beyond just salary. For me, the overall experience hasn’t aligned with my expectations.

Dislikes

In my personal experience, I have faced challenges with the lack of qualified managers and team leads. For instance, in our team, we work from different locations, and our team lead rarely conducted regular team huddles. Even when I, as a senior, tried to take responsibility and initiate meetings, he would often find reasons to stop or postpone them. Over the course of the year, he connected with the team only four or five times, which was far from adequate for effective team collaboration. Additionally, my manager has been disconnected from the team for over a year. When he first joined during a critical transformation period, he did not take the time to observe the team members' expertise, interests, or long-term goals. This lack of involvement left us feeling unsupported and undervalued. One major concern was the cultural bias I experienced. Being from Chennai and a Tamil speaker, I noticed a clear difference in how I and others like me were treated compared to team members from Hyderabad, particularly Telugu-speaking colleagues. This disparity in treatment created a sense of alienation and made it difficult to feel like a cohesive part of the team.