Ahmedabad, India based Cignex Technologies marketing itself as US based Corporation working on open source solutions has started getting very bad reputation in the IT industry because of its unethical business practices.

In most recent incident, Cignex has given out employees’ database of Sr. resources of its competitors to other firms.
In another incident of 2007, Cignex HR were trying to hire a Yahoo resource and said that they were the best payers but the offer made was even less than what the resource was then getting. This triggered off a blog post by him which was written at arms length without naming the company but explaining how its HR works.

In 2008, Cignex attends an Open Source technology event. Rather than learning or participating in technology exchange, its HR started distributing business cards for career opportunities to developers and tech leaders. The presence of HR at the event was just 1 hour with only goal of attending the event for soliciting new hires. Cignex continues to use such forums to hit out at small/medium companies by luring away their key resources. Small/medium companies which adopt technology early and encourage speakers to speak in such events are always at such risk when they get any form of participation from Cignex.

Cignex HR also had been warned of unfair hiring means when they were found directly calling other company switchboard/extensions and if a developer picked it up, they would entice him to just appear for interview.

It is standard industry practice that HR should honor non-compete, prior matters and notice period of new hires. Even startups value this and ensure that new hires do not infringe in any of their prior matters related to non-compete/Intellectual Property. This is not followed in Cignex at all. New employees are asked to leave their previous organizations in a days notice and entrepreneurs running startup firms have started noticing a rogue neighbor in Cignex.

Cignex name also popped up in recent Mobile Conference in Ahmedabad where Ubuntu lovers of Ahmedabad slammed Cignex for not providing them venue on ongoing basis. Cignex had earlier hosted Ubuntu meetup at their venue and committed to support open source meetups at their premises and after few meetups when their means were met; Cignex duped Ubuntu lovers in hosting the meetup.

India has very loose laws of employee poaching, corporate malpractices and hence startups get severely impacted when such instances are found. There is an urgent need for NASSCOM to put up blacklist of companies that resort to unfair business practices whether it involves unfair means used in hiring, bribing clients, non respecting new hires non-competes, etc.

While it is always said what you give is what you get. Lust for money is a major incentive that Cignex uses to lure new hires to quit their jobs without notice period (or paying notice pay), triggering employees to breach non-competes. and it goes back to Apar/Mastech split or NESS Technologies exit or even selling off Mastech employee DB to Rapidigm (then Computer People), promoter of Cignex has long history of unfair business practices.