1) Health Insurance.
Coverage is good but price is getting higher and higher every year and insurance process getting more and more complicated for employees. Every year company trying to reduce own costs on it.
For employee this effectively means that every year your salary will get lower on a price of insurance. And also this will cause your 'own' willing to reduce health coverage for you and family to save money with all hard consequences it could cause.
2) Decreasing real income.
In addition to issurance there is no salary indexation process, while cost of leaving is increasing every year on about 3-5%. You could try to negotiate salary increase, but it's all case by case and not guaranteed.
3) Disorganization & slavery.
Basically business of Luxoft in CG is growing because of employee's pashion to survive and stay in US.. Be prepared to work in following environment:
* Very poorly managed projects. E.g. no knowledge base, people trying to not share information with each other for own job security, a lot of polical games and if you lose you kicked.
* Huge segragation between you (contractor) and client developers. CG cares about own employees they have parties, courses, varous programs and so on, but you are temporary and not unique resource for them. They don't allocate budgets for teambuilding with contractors, so sometime management will schedule some teambuildings all togetehr to make you not feel alone, but for your own costs.
It cases differentiation in attitude during work time, CG employees dont really care about your opinion cause they don't feel you are "real" part of the team. You will work a lot, but CG manager will appreciate only own employees and give them bonuses even if they did almost nothing. If you feel bad and ask to cotinue day from home, CG manager could tell you "NO" and ask to get a sick leave, while they could do it regularly and even have 1 working day from home and contractors no.
And in case of any troubles CG could easily ask to replace you and Luxoft management with pleasure help to do it, cause relationships with client are more important.
* Outdated technologies (yes it's California :) ) . CG people just waiting here for their retirement, where they have very good benefits though. They are not interested in learning something new and they don't need to change things. Important point here that they understand that it's required, but they just don't want until somebody from CG push them update library due to security issues and so on.
To summarize: after years here from a confident mainstream developer where i was able easily fit to market in almost every software direction. I became so outdated, that i'm even scared to go to market now.
* Life is beautiful around, but be prepared to have overtimes and high level of stress. So you don't have time and energy for self development and enjoy your life.
4) You are on the hook until you are permanent resident.
Luxoft & CG management both understand that you have no freedom with L1 visa. So in addition to above you can't change things significantly (cause you have no rights:) ). Luxoft will delay your Green Card, could ignore your emails when it's easier to do so. Luxoft may ask you to do something that is not related to your offer/job "just to help", but since you cherish your relationships with a mangement you will do it.
CG is basically use the same benefits of your L1 status.
5) Overhead of working in 'two' companies.
You read two emails, should react on communication overhead of two companies, a lot of managers. Luxoft says that it's all kinda part of your work, while client's expectation that you are working at least 8hours on him. So 'somehow' find time to satisfy both.
6) Forgotten by Luxoft as well.
Trainings are usually in non US hours, our tryings to request at least a recording and share it afterwards were not successful. So if you even ready to invest own time in Luxoft trainings, you are basically very limitted.
Approximately once per half of year Luxoft conduct teambuildings, but they are very boring and again i saw like Luxoft management engage employee to organize it. Teambuildings are usually just a drinks party, forget about something more creative.
