MUMBAI: K Gopi Krishna is this year’s poster boy at National Institute of Technology (NIT), Warangal. Social networking site Facebook offered the computer science student an annual salary of $135,000 (approximately Rs 84.6 lakh) during the ongoing placements – a record for the institute. Last year, the highest offer at the institute – at $100,000 (then Rs 60 lakh) – came from Microsoft.
The story is similar across other leading non-IIT engineering institutes in the country, where initial apprehensions of a dull placement season are slowly being put to rest. Campus hiring for most engineering colleges begin in mid-August while at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) it begins in December.
“There were apprehensions before the placements started, but so far, the situation for the Class of 2014 is good. We have been able to attract many companies, and 300 of 850 students have already been placed,” said Rajeev Tripathi, professor-in-charge, department of training and placement, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology (MNNIT), Allahabad.
The highest salary at MNNIT so far is Rs 20 lakh from web services firm Directi, but results from the final round of selection by Google are awaited. The firm had offered Rs 56 lakh last year. Facebook is expected in the next semester. The company had made an offer of $262,500 (then Rs 1.34 crore) two years ago.
Back at NIT Warangal, technology giant Microsoft will snag nine of Krishna’s batchmates this year, and those posted at headquarters will get a salary of $120,000 (Rs 75 lakh), said a placement team member who didn’t want to be named. Search giant Google is yet to make its final selection, but the salary offered is $100,000 (around Rs 63 lakh), sweetened by a 15% bonus and 125 company stock units.
“The numbers as of now are good, but there are signs of slowdown since companies are hiring only 60-70% of the number of students hired last year,” said the placement team member cited earlier.
NIT Warangal has a total of 1,200 students to place this year. Delhi Technological University computer science student Himanshu Jindal got an offer of Rs 93 lakh from Google while US-based software company Epic reportedly made the second-best offer of Rs 70 lakh and selected 11 students.
Meanwhile, at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, Japanese firm Works Applications has come calling with a Rs 35 lakh offer. Although the company picked up only one student last year at a similar package, this time it’s expected to hire more. Amazon has offered seven students a salary of Rs 17 lakh each this year while Yahoo will hire students for Rs 14-15 lakh this year.
“Product companies have made good offers, but the manufacturing segment is slow on hiring,” said Siddharth Bhattacharya, placement head for Jadavpur University. Mahindra and Mahindra,HSBC, Alpha Laval, Bajaj are some of the other firms that visited the college. Of the 800 students, 130 have been placed across sectors.
At NIT Surathkal, about onethird of the 700 students have been placed and 50-60 companies have visited the campus, including DE Shaw, Oracle, SAP Labs, IBM, TCS and Adobe. The highest domestic offer till date is Rs 28 lakh from Goldman Sachs. The institute is expecting international offers from the likes of Microsoft.
“Computer science and IT students have been doing particularly well, though percentage of offers in core engineering courses is relatively lower,” said R Shivashankar, department of training and placement, NIT Surathkal. Last year, the highest offer was $120,000 from Microsoft, and there were four to five international offers.
Some institutes have had a better experience than others, with offers pouring in. Vellore Institute of Technology’s (VIT) 2,000 students had approximately two offers each at the end of the first placement session in July-end. Last year, 3,603 jobs were offered to students at the end of first round while this time around there were 3,934 offers.
Accenture has picked 1,688, Wipro 1,162 and Cognizant 1,084 students from the campus. Deloitte, Musigma and Schneider Electric have made offers to 60, 57 and 31 students, respectively. DE Shaw, Flipkart and eBay have all offered a salary of more than Rs 11 lakh.
DE Shaw made offers of Rs14 lakh to students of Bangalore-based RV College of Engineering, according to the placement team. It may not be a season of plenty yet, but it does look promising, despite the sluggish economy.
source : Times of India
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