Oracle withdraws campus placement offers
For students of big colleges like IIT and NIT, getting a job in a big multinational company is a big dream come true. But recently, a decision of the American company Oracle has shattered this dream of many promising students in one fell swoop.
The company has suddenly withdrawn job offers with huge salaries of Rs 35 to 40 lakh given during campus placement. This step has not only put a brake on the beginning of the career of these students, but has also revealed the bitter truth of the corporate world that whenever there are fluctuations in the market or companies have to do ‘cost-cutting’ (reduce expenses), the first target often falls on new talent.
Big shock to students
The most painful thing in this whole incident is the placement rules of the institutes. The policy of ‘one student, one job’ is implemented in prestigious institutes like IIT Roorkee, IIT Hyderabad, IIT BHU (Varanasi) to NIT Warangal and VNIT Nagpur. It simply means that once a student has accepted the offer of any company, he/she cannot appear in the selection process of other companies.
Due to the big offer from Oracle, these students had kept themselves out of the race for interviews with big companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Flipkart, Walmart, SAP and Citi. Now, with Oracle pulling out at the last moment, these youth are stuck in the middle. He no longer has any backup job left.
Topper asking for help on LinkedIn
Students who had given the good news of getting a big job to their families some time ago, are today forced to search for employment on the professional networking site LinkedIn. The story of Tansen Lahare, an M.Tech student of IIT BHU, is a living example of this. He got the role of technical staff member at Oracle, but just a month before joining, his offer was canceled. Same is the condition of B.Tech graduate Animesh Sharma of VNIT Nagpur.
An NIT student, on the condition of anonymity, said that 12 students from his college had received pre-placement offer (PPO) after internship at Oracle, out of which three have now been shown the door. According to the student, the experience of working at Oracle was wonderful and no one even dreamed that they would have to look for a job again after the placement was confirmed.
Why did the tech giant take this decision?
The reason behind this sudden decision is the huge organizational change going on within the company i.e. restructuring. According to placement cell officials, Oracle had conducted large-scale recruitment for application developers and server technology teams at a package of Rs 35-40 lakh. Recently the company has decided to close its Oracle Health and application infrastructure related units. The departments for which these students were selected ceased to exist. The company says that it tried to shift the affected students to other teams, but this was not possible due to lack of space.
The truth about corporate cost cutting
The withdrawal of student offers is actually an extension of larger layoffs that Oracle conducted last month. In April, the company had shown the way out to about 30,000 employees globally. Of these, about 12,000 employees were from India alone, which was about 50 percent of the company’s total workforce in the country.
The main focus of this entire exercise is considered to be the acquisition of Cerner Corporation in the year 2021-22, by merging which Oracle Health was formed. The largest number of people laid off are from this Cerner workforce. Employees say that the company had given its teams a specific target not to reduce the number of employees, but to make drastic cuts in the budget.
