Software engineer says working at Zoho was the worst period of his career, made him hate coding

A former Zoho employee has recalled how his three-year stint at the company left him stressed, anxious and disillusioned with coding. Kewal Agarwal says joining a smaller startup helped him regain his confidence. His post comes weeks after Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu announced that employees would not receive their usual salary hikes this year.

In Short

• Former Zoho employee says he lost confidence and started hating coding
• Joining startup MishiPay helped him regain his confidence in less than a year
• Sridhar Vembu says rising AI and server costs have forced Zoho to defer salary hikes

A former Zoho employee has shared how his three-year stint at the software company left him stressed, anxious and questioning his future as a programmer. Kewal Agarwal, who joined Zoho as a Member of Technical Staff in 2015, says he gradually lost confidence in his abilities and even began hating coding. It was only after moving to a much smaller startup that he managed to regain his confidence and interest in work.

In a LinkedIn post, Agarwal recalled being extremely happy when he landed his first job at Zoho. However, the experience did not turn out as he had imagined. He described the three years he spent at the company as "probably the worst period of my career".

"I was constantly stressed and anxious. I slowly lost my confidence, started hating coding, and lost all hope that I would ever amount to anything," he wrote.

Agarwal worked at Zoho between May 2015 and June 2018. During this period, he was involved in developing Zoho Books, including its US edition and versions for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. His work also included banking integrations and REST API development. His experience changed after he joined MishiPay, a smaller startup, in September 2020. Agarwal said he recovered the confidence he had lost at Zoho in less than a year, despite the startup being nowhere near the same size or scale. He later moved into product management, working at Gameskraft before joining Flipkart in November 2024. He is currently a Senior Product Manager for Cleartrip.

Interestingly, Agarwal clarified that he does not blame Zoho or himself for what happened. He said he was at the beginning of his career and was neither in a position to take the risk of quitting nor mature enough to make certain career decisions. He also expressed admiration for Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu.

His post has prompted a discussion around how the right workplace can influence someone's professional confidence and career choices. Agarwal's takeaway was that even a highly regarded company may not be the right fit for everyone, while an unexpected opportunity at a smaller organisation can turn out to be life-changing.

Sridhar Vembu says Zoho will not give usual salary hikes this year

Agarwal's post comes weeks after Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu spoke about the company's financial challenges and its decision to defer regular salary hikes for employees this year. In an October post on X, Vembu said the software company was facing significantly higher expenses because of rising server prices and growing AI usage. He claimed server prices had increased fourfold, adding to the cost of running data centres and onboarding new customers.

Vembu said Zoho had already reduced its marketing spending and informed employees that they would not receive their usual pay increase this year. He apologised for the decision and said the company would try to avoid mass layoffs despite the difficult outlook for the software industry.

"We have not been growing our employee count for 18 months now," he said, adding that the next three to five years would be important for the company's efforts to reinvent itself.

His comments also attracted criticism on social media, with some questioning why a bootstrapped company with substantial reported profits needed to defer employee salary hikes. Responding to one such criticism, Vembu said the profits being referred to were from the previous financial year, when employees had received salary increases. He argued that the current situation was different because server investments, replacement costs and AI-related spending had risen considerably.

According to Vembu, higher revenue does not necessarily translate into stronger cash flow when the investment required to generate that revenue also increases. He said Zoho had cut marketing expenses and deferred pay hikes to bring its cash flow under control.

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