Pluspunten
I'll mention each and every point that you need to know about Crest. Let's start with my introduction: I have been working here since the last ~2.5 year as a software engineer. I've worked under many Project Managers and many different projects having different technology verticals. Therefore I think I'm qualified to write a detailed review. Now, Let's start with some good points. Pros: General: If you want to stay in Ahmedabad and willing to work on platform integrations, this might be a good option for you, because the pay is higher as COMPARED TO other local companies.There are some projects (very very few and short term) where some real cutting edge technology is being used.Most of the people are helpful. For students/freshers: Work environment is better, good people and comparatively less politics if you are a fresher.If you are directly placed from your college, you will be working under complete guidance of your mentors in internal projects.They also provide opportunities in live projects in the early stage of your internship if you are capable enough.
Minpunten
I'll provide cons in separate sections for different roles/readers. Let's start with freshers. General: If you are joining Crest thinking that you will be working as challenging development tasks, beware. The only thing they do is integrations. They call it "security domain". But if you are a developer, you will be making REST API calls and nothing else. It's true that the projects are from product based companies working in security domains, but all you need to know is basic python, it's request library and some of exception handling and your life's good.Most of the projects are platform dependent. By platform I mean Splunk, QRadar, ServiceNow etc. You will be supposed to develop their platform applications. So basically these platforms handle most of the use cases and you just have to write application logic, which will be pulling the data via simple REST API calls. Also consider that the experience you get developing such platform specific applications won't help you in your next job. Because no one knows Splunk, ServiceNow and Qradar except companies working in this domain. Your skillset will be called Python, but at the end of 2 years, you will be expert only in making API calls.Too much of process overhead. They have a special team, which just inspects whether you have followed their processes properly or not.Too much micromanagement by owners.HR/Finance guys are just puppets of owners. Everything is decided by the owners.Most of the Project Managers are modern slaves of clients and owners (I said most of, there are exceptions, of course). And almost all work 14 hours a day and have no work life balance. They won't accept this but this is bitter truth (No exceptions here). If you are joining as project manager/Lead roles, beware. You will be handling minimum 4-5 projects at a time. Each project will have a different US based client and you will be taking client calls out of your office hours for almost all 5 days of the week. Most of the project managers are technically weak (again, with exceptions). No one knows how to say "NO" (because of that developers/QA suffer). Everyone wants to deliver before time even if the quality suffers.You will have to be available 24 hours for them even if they pay you for 8 hours. If a client mails/messages you anytime late at night (because clients are US based), your manager will surely call you to be available immediately. Sometimes that's tolerable, but not fair if this happens frequently. Also most of the client meetings will be after working hours and also sometimes after 10 PM.Coming to the QAs: Too much politics between each other. Everyone is from the web testing domain and thus they will just keep testing validations. Actual functionalities will never be tested. Not a single QA guy is technically sound (including their LEADS).There are people, who are there just to show-off their efforts. you will find them strolling and smoking in working hours and will stay and work (send mails) till 9:00 PM (most of them are leads).Worst policies: Let me give you an example: Work from home is not allowed but still they will give you a laptop instead of desktop. So that you can work from home whenever they want in the name of business critical but if you are unable to join the office due to any reason, you will have to take leave.Coming to IT admins: They have a team of "IT admins", where only one guy knows and does everything and are rest of them are totally dumb.Coming to appraisals, they will set highly difficult goals so that they can do whatever they want at the time of appraisals. If you are a developer, your goal would be to develop with 0 bugs and almost no deviation from your estimates (so your estimates will become your deadline!). Evaluation here is quantitative rather than qualitative. You will have to show a number of bug counts/tickets if you are QA. Also the ratings are sometimes fixed. They set a highest limit and every PM will have to rate you under that limit. Because of such goals, no one would take risks and be creative as your mistakes are punishable here.PF and gratuity: They will say that they will be paying half of your PF and gratuity but both will be deducted from your CTC. Therefore, it gives the illusion of higher CTC but after paying PF and gratuity, in hand income will be slightly low.The Number of public holidays and paid leaves are very less. (especially if you are fresher).If you are a developer, you can not choose under which technology you want to work. They will assign you a technology vertical and you can not change it if you wish.For CloudOps:If you are joining as SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) in CloudOps department, then you will be only following the pre-defined process of commands execution most of the time. No programming/coding is involved. For freshers/students: If you are a student, and reading this, they will publicise themselves as working on cutting edge technologies like AI/ML/DL, block chain etc. Trust me no such technologies are being used here. Don't join if you are willing to work in such domains. They do data collection and sometimes visualisation in the name of data analytics and AI/ML. So either they don't know what actual AI/ML is or this is their hiring strategy.If you are capable enough, they will promote you to tech lead in a very short time. In the name of tech lead, you will be working as PM. I've seen many freshers accepting this role and what they do is only updating JIRA tickets, confluence pages, writing mails, following processes and occasionally some development. I agree that you will get good exposure if you are willing to accept managerial roles in near future but it's not good for hard core developers who are still freshers.If they are capable enough, they will send you to the US (they have an office there) in order to confirm a 1 year bond with you. For Clients: If you are a client reading this, beware. In all new projects, senior developers are involved in the initial phase only. Once the project is well set up, your code is written by a college fresher in the name of highly experienced developers. The senior developers would be moved to other projects to set them up. They will be only there for your weekly sync-ups. In this situation, you will end up paying for highly experienced developers and in return you will get applications developed by our interns.