Optum reviews

1) Being into health care domain, worst medical insurance policy, if you really like good insurance for parents, you would end up paying Rs 30,000 per parent, what is the benefit company is providing then. 2) Non technical higher leadership, which adds tons of overhead and pressure down to engineers at field level. Every year they come up with non-sense, no value add so called initiative just to scrap it the next year, which shows how uncompetitive higher leadership we have. Higher leadership cant differentiate between QA testing and Dev unit testing. One of such worst initiatives is the Concept of Bright Idea, which is highly abused by Higher leadership. They say they are Agile, and still considers hours and have a concept of Productivity improvement which considers hours, which is rubbish: this is what happens if you pull your leadership from sales and call center teams. 3) they don't want to create noisy and vibrant system, and want to shut people off by saying, as a leader you are not expected to ask this, and should always say yes sir and okay sir. 4) You would find people saying you Sir, which shows the kind of culture they have. 5) They have inculcated many stupid culture, like not responding to IM (Even if you directly address them), lower grade should not talk to higher grade (You may here, how come a SG 26 and SG 27 talking to director / HR) 6) VPs would ask your manager name in the meetings, if you ask them a tough question. 7) This company has been messed up after the leadership has come to India. 8) Their thought process is : Financial Acumen is all about saving, and hence they end up doing so called Optimization in every aspect even though it is essential and not luxury. They do optimization from tissue papers to coffee cups. 9) Only 85% space would be provided to a team, rest you need to manage, you would feel like sitting in a Public place, even call center could be better. It is called sitting space optimization, nobody have a dedicated space 10) If you have a car or bike you are in trouble, very limited parking space, you would get parking sticker after 6 months of joining. It is called parking space optimization 11) Variable pay 15%, 20% and 25% is not guaranteed. 12) Still follow mandatory Bell curve, and 10% of folks should be rated Not performing, thereby indulging in toxic culture, ideally focal review should be kept separate from performance review. 13) Too much of work pressure, you have to take appointment from yourself even to go for bio breaks. Work life balance is messed up 14) Too much value based, they want numbers for everything. 15) USA team vision and India team vision does not match, and hence you would find yourself in a big mess 16) Only Rs 300 per person for staff welfare (Team outing/lunches, Coffee connects, expense for any other employee expense activities[Anniversary/Birthday celebrations], plus another expense a manager decides to do for employee as part of welfare) 17) Not much focus of employee development 18) To much focus on Excel/PPT update, just for reporting perspective and not for really making a difference and or achieve something. 19) You would be called for work even when you are on leave. 20) Outdated and not so skilled upper and middle management. 21) Leadership quite often pass sarcastic remarks, many times shout on staff 22) Their actions does not reflect what they preach 23) Quite often they come up with some or other initiative just to scrap it. 24) No internet reimbursement, and other employee benefits 25) I don't want to waste too much of time on this, better keep OGS as last option Further a) No onsite opportunities b) Leadership believes in Micromanagement c) 90 days notice period

There are a lot of cons of working for Optum India: Shift timings: There is a high chance that you will get to work in the 11 AM to 8:30 PM shift. This shift leaves no time to do the chores in the morning or the evening, and can lead to eating and sleep disorders. Infrastructure: The laptops available for work could be improved. They have glossy reflective screens which reflect the overheads LED lights in office or tube-lights in the background when working from home. The company does not provide developers with a dual screen monitors for improved productivity. The company has serious corporate governance issues. Some of them have been described below. Money issues: The management forces the developers to work overtime without pay. There have been instances where remuneration related to application support was not disbursed to the concerned developers, even though a policy for the same exists on paper. If you raise concerns about such issues, performance issues would be crafted against you and you would be forced to leave. Leaving developers are gas-lighted into signing off an early release and then forced to pay the notice shortfall, even though the developer was wiling to complete the notice period. Micromanagement: I have had a unique character as my manager who wanted to get hourly reports of what was working on. The same manager also believed in burning out his own team and expected developers to pull all-nighters and work over weekends regularly. They have zero set-up to train managers in the art and science of managing engineers. There was a program called “Managers Alpha” that had the ambitious aim to train the entire workforce in some common management practices, but failed miserably, due to lack of support from the top management and refusal to attend the program by the entire cache of middle and senior management. Sycophancy: Right from the lowest levels of the workforce, all the way to the top, it is expected, that in order to be retained and have any sort of growth, you have to be a yes man. Examples include, expensive watch being gifted to a manager with money collected from within the team, engineers doing personal chores of managers to gain favours etc. These not only break the ethical code but cultivate mediocrity. Management quality: Both middle and senior management is mediocre and clueless, both in India and the US. Because of their limited or completely non-technical background, they end up taking decisions that are not viable and does not contribute to the progress of the employees and the organization. Example would include creation of an un-accomplishable curriculum aimed at ‘transforming’ every engineer into a full-stack engineer to be completed in just one year. Technologies included Visual C#, ASP.Net Core, Angular, WPF, WWF, Git, Jenkins, Docker, SonarQube, SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, Azure etc. to name a few, to be completed in three levels – beginner, intermediate and expert for a .Net software engineer. They organize a yearly idea competition only for the ideas to be forgotten and never implemented. When I left the organization, there was a great push happening to create intellectual property via patents, by hook or by crook. US management is clueless and use to come to India every six months in pre-covid times, only to change the delivery processes and make life difficult for the developers. Hierarchy: It can put a multi-level wedding cake to shame. The organization is top-heavy and as the level of hierarchy increases, somehow, the amount and complexity of work decreases. They do not believe in a flat hierarchy. Increment and bonus: The company happens to be in a regulated sector of insurance with US being its primary market. Even though it is a market leader in health insurance in US, due to regulation, increasing competition and low service quality levels, it is not able to make decent gross and net profit margins. Due to a gargantuan multi-level hierarchy, it loses a lot of money in operational expenses. Since Optum India is a captive unit, it only caters to UnitedHealth Group and its subsidiaries and hence suffers from the brunt of low money inflow and constrained margins for the services delivered. This translates to low single digit increment in the range of 5% to 7% which does not even beat inflation and 10% to 40% of the promised bonus, depending on portfolio performance and majorly whether your manager likes you or not. Unethical work allocations: Optum has UnitedHealth Group as their sole client. UHG has hired a number of managers of Indian origin in the US for the sole purpose of exploitation of the Indian workforce. The managers routinely expect and allocate work based on the marital status of the engineer. So if you are a bachelor girl or guy, expect to pull more number of hours than your married counterparts.