Abdullah Khan (21), a final year BE student of Mumbai has bagged a job at Google's London office for a package of £120,000. This is for the first time that a non-IIT engineering student has been offered such a huge package. The average salary offered to a non-IIT engineering student is Rs 400,000 at campus placements. Khan, a student of Shree L R Tiwari Engineering College, Mira Road, was invited for an interview by Google after seeing his profile on a site that hosts competitive programming challenges. After a few online interviews, the coding junkie was called for the final screening in London this month.
His package includes the base salary of £60,000 per annum, 15% bonus and stock options worth $85,000 over four years. Khan will join Google’s site reliability engineering team in September. An email from a Google official received in November last year mentioned that they had seen Khan’s profile on the programming site. Explaining the job profile, it mentioned that they were looking for people for locations across Europe. Though Khan, who is doing his BE (computer science engineering), was a bit shocked initially, he showed the email to a friend, who knew someone else going through a similar process.
Khan was not expecting such an offer when he participated in competitions on that site. “I used to participate as it was fun. I did not even know that firms check programmers’ profiles on such sites. I showed the email to my friend who knew someone who had received such an email in the past. I am looking forward to joining their team. It will be an amazing learning experience for me,” said Khan. This is not the first time he has been ranked higher for a programming contest. He has participated in over 150 such contests on several sites and even in college competitions.
The coding junkie did his schooling in Saudi Arabia and moved to Mumbai only after Class XII. “My scores in JEE (Main) were not very impressive and I was not even shortlisted for JEE (Advanced) to get into IITs. I was not disappointed, as I was not even aware of the importance of IITs then,” he said. He later got into L R Tiwari College through the state’s centralised admission process.
