- The culture is pretty laid back if you're ambitious, and want to run fast. The extremely bureaucratic culture will force you to slow down by orders of magnitude.
- Despite what they falsely claim, ADP India is most certainly not a product company - it is a services driven offshore op center that indulges in very low quality dev & maintenance work.
- ADP India pays terribly low salaries. They're typically in the 60th percentile on the pay distribution.
- The interviewing processes are awfully slow and arbitrary. I personally interviewed with them over a span of 40 days, and was interviewed by 8 people (Months after I joined, I learnt that many interviewers spoke with me just to keep the schedule while the HR was scrambling to find a qualified person to interview me)
- I worked as a product manager at ADP and realized that their products are 60-year old mainframe systems that are shockingly outdated, and haven't since been modernized. With sparse documentation, there's very little one can do as a PM in such situations. What I learned instead is that a PM role in ADP is really a glorified business analysis job. I've spoken with PMs a across the org, and determined that they're all mostly BAs - please be warned about this fact before you interview with ADP.
- ADP has no career progression plan for PMs. If hired, you're being hired for what you already know. There's nothing new you will learn at ADP. PMs don't have a growth matrix, progression plan, study plan, or continuing education plan. What exists is an org-wide plan that applies to all employees equally (with utter disregard to the challenges of a PM job) - at best you get allocated 2K/year for training (usually something as lame as a company organized program on communication) - good luck with that!
- Oh, and your growth in seniority is a complex function of your age + and years of experience. You can be an outstanding performer, but you'll still work under a loser only because he's done more "time" than you have. Also, the annual review process is a typical curve-fitting exercise where you will get no more than an average rating just because your manager doesn't want to piss-off the majority (who are mediocre as far as the law of averages go)
- ADP claims to be a HCM market leader, but their own HR is terribly disorganized, and inefficient. I found that rather ironic for a company that preaches "HR best practices" to earn its bread. For starters, the induction process for new employees is a 3-day long ritual that is nothing short of a kafkaesque nightmare that leaves you disoriented, without giving you *any* orientation whatsoever about your job.
- In the same light, the separation process is shockingly archaic. Among other things, one has to jump through several burning hoops, permissions, and paper-based sign-offs, before a clerk makes a note of your final hand-off in a paper register. Shocking considering that ADP sells HR software that it doesn't use itself.
- The icing on the cake is that for a global leader in payroll, ADP still hasn't come around to paying me for my last month of service (and it's been over 2 months since I quit!)
