HCLTech employees greeted chief executive C Vijayakumar with chants of “we want hike” at the company’s 50th anniversary event in Chennai, in a video that has since gone viral.
The clip, circulating widely on platforms such as X and Instagram, captures a packed auditorium breaking into the chant as Vijayakumar walked on stage.
The chant continued for some time while the CEO stayed on stage during the proceedings.
The event was part of HCLTech’s golden jubilee celebrations, marking fifty years since the company’s founding.
The video has drawn mixed reactions online, with some viewers calling it a lighthearted moment and others linking it to wider concerns about pay in India’s IT sector.
Some commenters said the employees deserved credit for speaking up, while others felt the chant was out of place at a company milestone event.
The clip has kept circulating since the celebration, with commentary continuing across social media platforms.
Social media users were divided in their reactions, with some praising the employees for candidly expressing workplace concerns in a public setting, while others felt the moment undercut the tone of a company milestone event.
The episode has been widely shared and discussed as part of a broader conversation around compensation trends and employee sentiment within India’s information technology sector this year.
HCLTech, one of India’s largest IT services companies, employs hundreds of thousands of people globally, making internal sentiment around pay and benefits a recurring talking point whenever such moments become public.
Similar viral moments involving employees publicly airing workplace grievances at corporate events have periodically surfaced from other large companies in India in recent years, often prompting comparable debates online about appropriate conduct versus genuine expression of concerns.
The video’s spread illustrates how internal corporate moments, once captured on phone cameras and shared on social media, can quickly become part of wider public conversations about workplace culture and compensation across an entire industry.
(Image: Itsbilluid (CC BY-SA 3.0))
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