Deflating Placements

Now that placements here are almost done, newspapers and TV channels are flooded with news about the IIMs, we have gone to the press saying we have the highest salary across IIMs, IIMA has contested that, people are debating whether we deserve such high salaries, etc., it’s time to clarify a few things.

It is that time of the year, when without any elections or bombings, the press has little to write about and thus chooses to waste newsprint on IIM placements. News channels, too, don’t have much to talk about, and IIM fills their airtime also. Given that this is the time of year when people are attending IIM entrance interviews, it’s something that will definitely drawing crowds.

So you have these channels debating over which IIM is the best, and all such nonsense. As I write this, is walking back after convincing a TV channel why a desi job with a rupee salary with a top global consultancy firm is better than a firang job in firangland with an investment bank with a firangi salary.

Some clarifications about the kind of stuff these TV channels are putting:
– IIMB student gets highest salary across IIMs; $193,000 which is > Rs. 80 lakh – Daddu is one of the most brilliant and dedicated guys i’ve met, and he deserves this huge salary. Of course, his actual salary is in pound sterling. Only issue being, IIMA had quoted $185,000 or something as their highest salary so we had to put a bigger number. Also, people don’t know the GBP/INR rate too well, so quoting a pound salary wouldn’t quite have the impact. Also, I’ve to mention here that Daddu has a MS from UC Berkeley and has worked for two odd years – not the typical profile.

– IIMB student gets highest Indian salary of 30 lakh – Venky is another outlier. done his MS and worked for four years before coming here. And he rejected the job, and settled down for something he thought was more challenging that would pay him Rs. 14 lakh. And btw, both Daddu and Venky got their high salaries from the same firm, and both of them had interned there. These are not offers that happened during the campus placements earlier this week.

– Over 20% of students get salaries more than Rs. 30 lakh – Over 20% of the students have got foreign jobs. A half-decent salary in USA is around $60,000, which comes close to Rs. 30 lakh. Similarly with other currencies. Blindly multiplying the figures by the day’s highest exchange rate is what is producing these inflated figures.

– The director of a really highly reputed B school said “Out of the 95 foreign offers our students got, only 65 accepted. That shows the level of patriotism among them”. Mr. Director, it would be nice to tell us how many distinct students got these 95 offers. It is commonplace for people who’ve prepared well for investment banking interviews to crack multiple offers, so I’m not too sure if patriotism is the real reason behind this hit ratio.

Now thanks to the media blitz, we had many people in our batch who were flooded with calls or messages from anxious ready-to-be-your-father-in-law relatives asking them how much they are going to get, even before they got placed. A lot of the media stuff happened much before everyone got placed, leading to much embarrasment.

The artificial inflation of foreign salaries has also not helped. A lot of people here have had to endure “only 8 lakh? what a loser you are!” calls and have had a tough time explaining.

The joy of getting a good job has been, in several cases, extinguished by this unnecessary media hype and publicity. However, we still have to do it, given that we have to hold our own in the A vs B vs C battle.

PS: The views expressed in this blogpost are the personal views of the author, and do not in any way represent the views of IIMB, or the IIMB media cell, or the student body of IIMB.