Facebook Hires IIT-Delhi Student for Rs 65 Lakh a Year

Facebook finally cracked IIT-Delhi. After failing to hire anyone from the institute the previous year — arriving too late in the placement season — the social networking company returned in December 2011 in the first batch of recruiters and made its first-ever hire from the campus: 21-year-old Ankur Dahiya, a computer science engineering student.

The package: around Rs 65 lakh a year, for a programmer role in Palo Alto, California, after Dahiya finished his course.

Dahiya, from Rohtak in Haryana, had secured an all-India rank of 56 in the IIT-JEE. He told the Hindustan Times, which first reported the hire, that joining Facebook had been a long-standing dream: "Ever since I heard Facebook would come to recruit, I wanted to get in." The interview, he said, was entirely subject-based — coding and programming problems.

The hire was part of a broader push. Facebook, founded in February 2004, had recruited only two students from India the previous year — including one from IIT-Madras — but was now scouting talent across multiple IIT campuses, treating India as a genuine talent hub rather than an afterthought.

The Rs 65 lakh figure made headlines, as IIT placement-season offers always do. But the more durable story was what it signaled: by 2011, the world's most valuable young technology company considered a Delhi engineering campus one of its prime hunting grounds — and showed up early to prove it.