Today Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy visited his first job site, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), as the chief guest for the institute’s 58th convocation ceremony.
Murthy had joined IIM-A as chief systems programmer after his post-graduation from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1969. Murthy graduated in 1967 with a degree in electrical engineering from the National Institute of Engineering.
On the occasion of Murthy’s visit to IIM-A, the institute went ahead and shared some of the interesting stories about the founder of the IT giant. IIM-A shared a post on Facebook with the caption, “#IIMAArchives March 2023 snippet is on Shri N R Narayana Murthy. He worked with IIMA as Chief Systems Programmer (1969-71) and Chairperson (March 11, 2002 – March 10, 2007). We are proud to have him as Chief Guest at the 58th Convocation.”
The post revealed that Murthy had received multiple lucrative job offers after graduating from IIT, Kanpur. TELCO, TISCO and Air India were among the big corporates that wanted Murthy to work for them, and each of these companies were offering him a salary of around Rs 1,600 per month.
However, the pioneer of India’s IT sector ditched all of them to join the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad as a chief systems programmer, and surprisingly this job paid him half of the salary which he would have earned at TISCO, Air India or any other potential employers.
In 2019, Murthy revealed the reason behind turning down a lucrative salary offer and taking up the almost half-paying job at IIM-A. He shared that at that time (1969), IIM-A was in the process of installing India’s first time-sharing computer system, which was also world’s third after Harvard and Stanford.
Murthy knew the fact that if he joined IIM-A, he would get to learn a lot. Murthy said in an interview as part of the IIM-A Archives Oral History Project, “But there was only one catch, and that was the salary.” This made him unsure about what to choose, and in his confusion, he went up to his teacher to seek guidance, and the teacher advised him to chase knowledge instead of money.
He further said, “So I was the only person from my batch of 16 students to have taken half the salary in quest of learning about a modern operating system, about the opportunity to interact with very bright students, about the opportunity to create lots of interactive lessons using computers for students in accounting, in simulation, in finance, in production etc.”
“So, therefore, I chose that path, and that’s probably the best decision I made in my life,” Murthy concluded.
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