Avantages
HCL gives good job security though of late they have started focusing on billing hours of employees and seem to have plans to associate this with their appraisal. This is surely going to hurt some talented employees who are not that lucky. Nice quality of work in general includes research/development. HCL has a good brand name (atleast in India). It has a variety of clients and lot of domains and geographical locations to choose from. For mid-management and above, lot of focus is given on numbers (revenue, profitability, headcount etc) instead of the some long-term value/technological adds that will make it a value organisation instead of one more out-of-the-mill services company.
Inconvénients
There are lot of old employees in mid and senior management who have old style of functioning and lack enthusiasm in general. They seem to be complacent and have fix pattern in executing their responsibilities. Worse, many managers/project leads are biased towards employees who have been working for them for a while. This could result in lot of problems when an employee moves from one group to another group (perhaps it might be a better option to switch a job instead of switching a group within HCL ! ). There is not much to say about salary figures. Vacations are not much encouraged