IIT Boy Received a Salary of Over a Crore? What Will You Get?

If you think parental pressure and peer pressure to crack IIT JEE is too much, check with the IITians during the placement season. The moment an IITian lands a dream annual package of over a crore, the media goes into frenzy. All the parents of the IITians (and non-IITians) whose wards are final-year B.Tech students will start calling them and say, “Son, so-and-so boy from so-and-so IIT received annual package of over 1 crore from Google. You should definitely try that. Will you be able to get such a job?”

Placement is the time for parents to realize all their dreams. They have invested their money, time and efforts on their children and this is certainly the time (according to them) to reap the fruits of their labour. They cannot help but get super-excited when they hear that a student like their son or daughter has managed to receive a salary of Rs 60 lakh, Rs 70 lakh or even a crore every year – a sum they might have not been able to save in their entire lifetime! They just don’t realize that when they compare high packages of other students and peg their expectations too high, how difficult it becomes for their children to live through the phase.

Only a handful of IITians manage such high pay packages. Rest of them have to come up with all sorts of answers to be able to face their parents – and pacify them. Situation becomes worst when one of your friends nab the highest pay package in college. You hear no end of it.

If JEE is a challenge for you, IIT Placement Season may turn out to be your worst nightmare.

Pay package disparity in IIT campus placements is quite high. While the highest pay package for a Computer Science Engineering graduate may exceed Rs 80 lakh, the truth is that annual pay package for IIT graduates in 2014 placement season has not been more than Rs 10 lakh. The figure is even lower for students from other departments who choose to go for core engineering jobs. It means that while few IITians can celebrate their high-paying job offers, most of the IITians are under intense pressure. A pay package of Rs 60 to 80 lakh per annum remains a distant dream for them.

If you were in IIT campus this year, you could have witnessed the sky falling. As many as 12 students from IIT Kanpur have managed to get a package of 1 crore or more till now. Oracle picked up 3 students for Rs 1.3 crore (who refused the offer because of the job profile), Google offered annual package of Rs 1 crore to 6 students, LinkedIn offered Rs 1 crore to 2 students, and Tower Research too offered Rs 1 crore per annum to an IIT-K student. As media said it, it is expected that IIT Kanpur students who secure package of over a crore may reach as high as 40! Dozens of other students received a package of Rs 50 to Rs 75 lakh per annum. The placement drive will continue till December 22 this year and until then (and a few months afterwards), all those who fail to land good enough jobs will have to keep firing up their will power and morale to steer clear of all the parental and societal pressure they will be facing.

Getting such a job is much tougher than cracking JEE. Just imagine! If lakh of students compete to get to a few thousands of seats at IITs, what would be the level of competition for just a handful of seats eyed by all IITians.

Non-IITians also suffer from placement season anxiety. A Computer Science student from NIT Tiruchirapalli got a job offer of Rs 70 lakh per annum from a US based firm. It was the first-of-the-kind for NIT Trichy. Last year, the average pay at NITT was Rs 6.25 lakh per annum for UG students and Rs 5.5 lakh per annum for PG students. Media also reported that an NIT Allahabad student received a Facebook offer of Rs 1.34 crore per annum, Delhi Technology University (DTU) student Priyanshu Jain was offered a pay package of Rs 55.6 lakh from Google, 2 IIT Bombay students also received Facebook offer of Rs 60 lakh each, and even a private engineering student managed to bag a Rs 50 lakh pay package offer. Such news reports fire away the imagination of parents leading to more stress among the IITians (and other engineering students).

If you are from a small town or village, God save you from misery. Your parents want you to secure an international placement and as IIT deans would tell you, it is difficult to make them understand that while the highest pay package for a Computer Science department may be Rs 80 lakh, most students from even this department do not get more than Rs 11 lakh.

It is a myth that all IITians receive multiple job offers and are spoilt for choice. As a Mechanical Engineer from IIT-M reveals, “When I graduated two years ago, all my relatives and friends were sure that I am sitting on a gold mine and I would soon be minting money – most probably in a foreign country. But the fact is that our department hardly receives any international job offers. Their expectations weigh me down and it becomes difficult to shatter their beliefs and tell them the truth.”

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