My entire journey of becoming an ITcel

[Jason Voorhees]

Props for making it to the US from India that's insanely hard to do. I'm not sure what year you cracked big tech but in case anyone reads this I'd like to stress that contrary to popular advice, projects don't really matter when applying to big tech in 2025. (They're good for improving as a developer but they won't improve your resume/job prospects).

I get where you're coming from recruiters mainly filter by pedigree and prior experience especially for big tech with well defined internship programs that is true. Projects don't matter as much but for mid tier firms startups etc. I'd still argue projects matter when they reflect real world impact. That is the key word. If you've built something end to end deployed it, scaled it and fixed some real world problem it counts. I've seen folks land interviews and gigs because they showcased strong open source contributions or freelance projects.

The main things that matter are experience and your school. For big tech internships, recruiters want candidates at target schools with 3+ software engineering internships by junior year. This means that you should be doing everything you can to get software engineering experience, even if it's unpaid, or remote work for a local company, or research for a prof etc. My advice would be to spend most of your time looking for experience, and only do projects with the intention of learning. Getting experience in high school is ideal.

School + internships are the cleanest path in But for people outside target schools or traditional pipelines. projects, freelancing, or research are usually the only way to get that experience. I feel Tech is much better than finance and law in this regard. In finance and law you don't even get a call back unless you are from a top school. Tech is more meritocratic I've seen people without a CS degree landing jobs too. most of the stuff I learnt in my CS degree I don't even put them to use. Formal languages, general engineering math etc most of these things aren't necessary for a developer but are still taught as part of the program but yes a degree from a prestigious school does help a lot. My university brand tag carried all throughout my journey and opened doors that would have been otherwise closed

"Spend most of your time looking for experience."

I actually did the same I treated projects as stepping stones to experience. Like when I built my full-stack SaaS product, it helped me pitch myself to companies and land freelance/remote work. So it's not "projects vs experience" it's projects and experience if you're intentional

What you said about interviews (DSA and sys design) is pretty good too. This is where projects can be good, since they force you to think about system design. DSA is basically about grinding leetcode + being good at explaining your thought process.

Yes. Also one more thing I forgot to mention is you need to keep refreshing these concepts and algorithms because DSA is one of those things that needs constant practice.

 

[Jason Voorhees]

@holycoper @hopecel

 

[holycoper]

@holycoper @hopecel

My second time being mentioned, already a little bit more confident

 

[Jason Voorhees]

My second time being mentioned, already a little bit more confident

Oh did I my bad I thought you asked for a tag and i forgot

 

[hopecel]

@holycoper @hopecel

bookmarked, will read... thank you for tag, bhaijaan

 

[holycoper]

Oh did I my bad I thought you asked for a tag and i forgot

That's okay , anyway I wanna gain some reputation here

 

[registerfasterusing]

Holy shit bru, mirin

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Holy shit bru, mirin

Did you read?

 

[registerfasterusing]

Did you read?

Ngl i only read the end

 

[SvtvnTr14d]

mirin yo

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Ngl i only read the end

You should it is valuable

 

[Jason Voorhees]

@Panzram @buddhistking

 

[Debetro]

Will read some day
@optimisticzoomer

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Will read some day
@optimisticzoomer

Read it now

 

[Chadeep]

Which coaching should I take if I want to pursue medical?

I did it from Aakash. They have gone shit nowadays tho

 

[LTNUser]

I did it from Aakash. They have gone shit nowadays tho

How much did you score in Science in Boards?

 

[Jason Voorhees]

I did it from Aakash. They have gone shit nowadays tho

Thoughts on this thread bhai

 

[Jason Voorhees]

@davidlaidisme67

 

[Jason Voorhees]

@Thief

 

[menas]

I initially wanted to frame into the ideal way to get into tech. Like this is the best way but when I sat down to recollect my thoughts and reflect on all that I did. I realized I made a ton of mistakes. So I'll just talk about what I did and then say things what I would have done differently in hindsight. My path wasn't linear it was complete chaos at first but then I found myself started building my profile through bits and pieces.

I'll start from the beginning. I was always a bright student since childhood. I graduated 4th in class with 95% in everything and after months of grind got admitted to a tier 1 University. I can't reveal which university because the cohort sizes are small but just think a university in the same tier as IIT Bombay. Top CEOs, Founders and entrepreneurs are part of the alumini group. One more thing to note is my uni doesn't have an attendance policy so I was able to rot doing freelance stuff and whatever I wanted and had plenty of free time to do all this but your mileage may vary.

I was always interested in coding. I already talked about it here

My earliest memories of coding on an android phone

I don't know if kids still do this now or if it is relevant in 2025 but some of my earliest memories of writing code (scripts really) was for on cheat engine and game guardian. I got gifted a smartphone on my 13th Birthday. I don't quite remember what it was. I think it was samsung s6 looking...

looksmax.org

But I never considered it seriously and going in. I didn't know what to expect. I just knew that is what I wanted. So I got admitted into the uni after some counselling rounds and was late admissions. Throughout my journey one thing you'll consistently see is my entire hyper competitive attitude towards everything. My motivation was always pure hyper competitiveness and Envy. Both I inherited from my father. I just cant stand seeing someone get even a step ahead of me. Every time it happens I feel this burning jealousy inside. So you'll see me trying a lot of things trying to find something sticks to the one wall and one upping everyone

Year 1: Admission

I did very well in the entrance exam to got into one of the best unis in the country. Felt like I was on top of the world but uni was a reality check profs don't spoon-feed and the competition is savage. Everyone around me was genius. I felt like I didn't belong here. Everyone was an
ace in their field and I felt dumber everytime I talked to them but I was determined and jealous.

One advantage/disadvantage of going to a prestigious university.

One major pro and con of going to a prestigious uni is being constantly surrounded by certified winners. Every single person in my uni has always been a winner. The main charecter all his/her life with an epic story. National Olympiad medals, founding startups in high school, breezing through...

looksmax.org

Joining every club. hackathons, coding comps, startup pitches. Tried app dev, ML side projects... most tanked because I didn't know what I was doing. I tried learning advanced concepts and algorithms without the basics foundation..like I start learning react frameworks for frontend work when I did not even know html and css properly. My advice do the basics first pick any language and double down. It doesn't matter. Python, C++ they are all good. Just stick to the basics, learn them all well and move to the web trinity

Master the Web Trinity:

HTML: The skeleton of every webpage. Learn semantic HTML

CSS: The styling. Understand the box model Flexbox, and Grid. Maybe even tailwind a

JavaScript (Vanilla):Master DOM manipulation, events, and asynchronous concepts (like fetch for APIs) before touching any frameworks

I am linking a few good resources that I've heard good things about

HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page's appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript).

developer.mozilla.org

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.

developer.mozilla.org

The Modern JavaScript Tutorial

Modern JavaScript Tutorial: simple, but detailed explanations with examples and tasks, including: closures, document and events, object oriented programming and more.

javascript.info

Year 2-Finding a Footing and my freelance work

By 2nd year. All my fundamentals were strong and I was building websites. This is the first website I ever deployed and built. From scratch

On this day 3 years ago. I deployed my very first app

Was scrolling through my old GitHub repos and found this Room Booking System I built for a college project in my 2nd year od unj. The requirement was just a basic CRUD site, but I don't do basic. Average is not in my dictionary. So I went overboard and added as much depth as possible to show...

looksmax.org

I saw seniors flexing FAANG offers via DSA, so I locked in. Striver's DSA Sheet was the plug and started Grinding problems and Freelance popped off because I wanted to make money. Focused on full-stack web dev on Upwork/Fiverr and was getting paid peanuts for my work but I did not mind because I was just getting started and was navigating everything and that amount was still huge for college grad. My parents paid for evrything so all that was essentially free money for me. My pitch was "I build and deploy." Landed 15-16 gigs ($200-$1k each). These weren't just simple sites. I was building MERN stack e-commerce platforms with Stripe/Razorpay integration and custom sales analytics dashboards for marketing agencies using React and APIs. Tried a blockchain NFT project (flopped hard) then built a Flutter app for a client ($700) and also did some DSA tutoring for my juniors. I also did a bunch of online internships for modest pay just for the experience and to get a hang off all the technologies.

Now coming the DSA. This is the single most important topic for technical interviews. In the real it doesn't have a lot of use unless you are in big tech like Google, microsoft where every millisecond costs money. DSA used to be very important back in the day when a computers were the sizes of entire rooms but nowadays not as much because systems have become exponentially powerful.In the startups I interned at double for loops were the norm because shaving off a few ms isn't important they don't have that much scale. So in all honesty DSA isn't "necessary" but I still highly recommend learning DSA.Striver's is god tier for interview logic it teaches patterns, not just memorization and also Solving 300+ problems made interviews look childs play but 200 would've sufficed. A better alternative for speed is NeetCode 150 or the Blind 75.

NeetCode

A better way to prepare for coding interviews.

neetcode.io

Although after this grind biggest realization is my big freelance projects gave me more resume juice and talking points than LeetCode ever did

I also started doing competitive coding on leetcode and hacker rank and did some hackathon and won a few. Participating in the contests simulates interview pressure.

For the MERN stack. This is the gold standard. Wait for a sale you can get this for cheaper. It covers everything from basics to deployment.

React 16: The Complete Course (incl. React Router 4 & Redux)

Dive in and learn React.js from scratch! Learn React, Hooks, Redux, React Router, Next.js, Best Practices and way more!

www.udemy.com

You absolutely must know Git and GitHub. This is how all professional software teams collaborate



Also Learn how to use tools like Postman to test API endpoints and how to use fetch or axios in your frontend to communicate with a backend.

For full stack deployments. I recommend Render and Vercel. Render also has its on DB that you can use

Vercel: Build and deploy the best web experiences with the AI Cloud – Vercel

Vercel gives developers the frameworks, workflows, and infrastructure to build a faster, more personalized web.

vercel.com

Cloud Application Platform

Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS certificates, global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

render.com

Also do not neglect any of the CS fundamentals like Operating Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Networks and system design. Which exact topics. I'll talk about later

Year 3-The specialization

Year 2 was great but FOMO hit hard. I saw peers specializing and landing crazier gigs and making even more money.. The pivot to DevOps wasn't a random choice. it was a market signal.Why DevOps? My freelance clients loved the apps but were clueless about deployment. I always used to get this question, How do we get this online and make sure it doesn't crash? came up on every big gig. That was my lightbulb moment. Every developer needs to know how to ship their own code. And this where I urge you to make a choice. Either double down on software development or specialise in something. The job market is competitive af so you need to be really good at something to get hired.

Companies aren't looking for well rounded but people with spikes of deep knowledge in their domains so pick one and specialise. So I started learning DevOps while continuing to solve harder DSA problems and strengthening my fundamentals

I used KodeKloud for hands-on labs and studied for the AWS Certified Developer Associate and Solutions Architect. You could do the beginner Cloud Practitioner certificate but imo it's too basic to be out on a resume. AWS is a industry certificate. This one.

certified-developer-associate

Earn your AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification. We offer training courses, exam guides, sample test questions, and practice exams.

aws.amazon.com

certified-solutions-architect-associate

Category, Associate. Exam duration, 130 minutes. Exam format, 65 questions; either multiple choice or multiple response. Cost, 150 USD.

aws.amazon.com

You could also learn Azure cloud. A few weeks back I checked it and I liked it very much. AWS still has more services but Azure isn't far behind

Microsoft Azure is so mogger

I was just revisiting Microsoft Azure after around a year or so. I mainly work on AWS and GCP. Not a lot of Azure but I've been seeing a lot of Job posting for Azure so I decided to take a look and damn. Son. They've expanderDevOps tooling. Pipelines, Repos, Boards, Test Plans all...

looksmax.org

More stuff I learnt was I mastered Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), Terraform, and Cl/CD with GitHub Actions.

Marketed myself as a "Full-Stack + DevOps" expert. This let me charge a premium.Landed 8 massive gigs ($2k-$6k) building and deploying a multi-tenant SaaS platform for a startup with auto-scaling infrastructure on AWS. My GPA also took a hit because I was pretty much working full time at this point so i couldn't focus well in my studies but this paid off massively later.

I won't get too much into detail on this part because this path is going to vary wildly on what domain you specialize in. You could get a rough idea on where to begin from this website

DevOps Roadmap: Learn to become a DevOps Engineer or SRE

Learn to become a modern DevOps engineer by following the steps, skills, resources and guides listed in our community-driven roadmap.

roadmap.sh

Year 4: US Internship Bag the oayoff.

All the chaos culminated here. I applied to 100+ roles, flexing my freelance portfolio and DevOps expertise. Got rejected more times than I count. I legit felt heart broken after every rejection email but I kept applying and finally after months.Bagged a lucrative internship at a US tech firm in Seattle and California ($12k/month, flights/housing covered). My "I've built and deployed real-world applications for paying clients" story resonated way more than a perfect GPA. My boss told me he was impressed the second he saw my application. They couldn't fill the role for nearly 7 months and I came in at a critical time so they hired me immediately and I was given work from day 1. Now about the interview.

This wasn't your standard DSA-heavy loop. It was a practical assessment of my skills.

1. Online Assessment & HR Screen: The first filter was a standard online coding test with 1 LeetCode Mediums and one hard. It was one question on Hash maps and one on Dynamic Programming
followed by a quick call with a recruiter to discuss my resume and freelance experience. I crushed the DSA round the HR himself was surprised someone could solve it this quickly and told me about it on call.

2. Technical Shared Screen (1 Hour): This was a hybrid round. I solved one DSA problem (a tree traversal question) on a shared editor, and then spent 20 minutes answering questions about my MERN stack projects and my experience with Docker.

3. DevOps & System Design: This was a practical, scenario-based round. I don't remember the exact prompt but it was: "W Cl/CD pipeline for a full-stack application using GitHub Actions to deploy to AWS. I had to explain my choices for tools and architecture and all the problems that I might face. Also some technical questions. A few I remember are What is the benefit of using Terraform over manually creating resources in the AWS? Why would we use Kubernetes for this application instead of just Docker Compose on a single server

And after all these rounds I got selected and got an email congratulations. I legit was trying to hold back my tears when the email came. My parents called me and congratulated me. My father was proud of me and after all that grind it was done and then I flew to the United States and landed in Seattle. Was there for a few weeks before being moved to California. It was an amazing experience the i finally got to experience with cutting edge tech. The lectures that I got invited to were so interesting. I made a lot of friends also. My Jewish boss was nice af too. He literally mentored me like his own child. I made many powerful contacts and had a blast while still working as hard as possible to get the PPO. Countless sleepless nights. I even made threads talking about sleep problems due to being on call but my boss was empathetic to me

. He would let me take breaks for as long as possible and recognized all of my work and appreciated it within week of me working he assured me I will be given a PPO It is formal letter saying they the company will hire me after this time and he also told the Senior HR to fast track the H1B process and use all the connections he has got to get my H1B applications and stating I was too "valuable" to be let go

After that stint. I came back to India and was going to be filed for H1B but the company i worked at has off shored ak it's work so It remains to be seen if I will go back to the US or just WFH.

I am going back to my uni on 17th August

Finally wrapped up here. Heading back to finish my final year and earn my degree. My employer will submit my H-1B application next April, so now it's all in God's hand and depends on Mr. Trump decision now. whatever the universe has planned will be done. If the stars align I'll be back on this...

looksmax.org

I also applied to bunch of other companies and got shortlisted and given job offers in the UK, US and India. Im still applying for jobs. Currently Product Manager jobs that is a bit different from the technical roles I'm used to.

View attachment 4177703View attachment 4177704


From the interviews that I've given. The main things you need to focus on would be these

Operating Systems (OS)- Process/Threads almost a guaranteed question around this topic. Also semaphore variables, mutex to prevent deadlocks and paging and segmentation problems these are the main topics that get asked

To learn OS you can use neetcode but the gold standard is the famous dinosaur book

View attachment 4177724

2. Computer Networks- OSI & TCP/IP Models- Important topics would be the OSI & TCP/IP Models. The Headers, DNS, HTTPS protocols all of it. Tbh i found my coursework material to suffice for most of the computer networks questions they ask in interviews. So I would just suggest doing some basic course in Udemy. They rarely ask deep questions about network unlike DSA

3. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)- In every single interview that I've sat for has asked OOPs concepts. Learning this is non negotiable. One sure shot question from one of the pillars Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. Learn them thoroughly. This is going to be asked. And it's easy unlike DSA so learn it thoroughly. Do a Udemy course

Learn Object Oriented Programming | Object Oriented Programming Tutorials

Learn about object oriented programming from top-rated Udemy instructors. Whether you’re interested in object oriented programming, or OOP in Python, Java, or C, Udemy courses will help you achieve your goals.

www.udemy.com

4. System Design- This isn't as important and isn't as extensively asked as above. But it is the key to unlocking senior roles and interviews at MAANG-level companies less common for junior roles but still good to learn imo. I personally just watched a bunch of YouTube videos you can skip this concept tho atleast for now

Addressing the AI takeover-

I have to address this because the first comment to this post would be a Al doomer posts that the ChatGPT is coming for our jobs, GPT-5 will write entire codebases etc. You're looking at it all wrong. Al ironically made my life 10x easier.

In my 2nd year. My first website I coded it all from scratch and llms weren't advanced enough to do it but once LLMs could code. I started using and still use to write boilerplate code, unit tests, and simple functions for my MERN stacks. It probably cut my raw coding time by 30-40%. I still charged my clients the same project and. When I was deep into DevOps I used ChatGPT as a senior mentor and asked it to creat scripts and give me the basic framework to build it on and then tweak to make my life easier.

Figuring out what to write is 90% of software engineering. Not how to write. Coding is the easy part. The thing that takes time is debugging, reading documentation, communication with clients. AI is useful for front end work and boiler plate code but for the core logic part you still need a human unless you are okay with having inefficient one time use code with bugs and security vulnerabilities. Al can't talk to a client to figure out what they actually want, it can't design a complex system architecture from scratch, and it can't debug a weird, niche production issue at 3 AM That's still on you

The market doesn't pay you for the hours you spend typing. it pays you for the problems you solve and the value you deliver. Al helps you solve bigger problems, faster and people get paid because of what we call the knowledge gap. I know things that allow me to use AI in such a way that it can do all the work for me and correct the mistakes AI makes..this gap is what Devs exploit that is where the knowledge gap lies. That is what Devs take advantage off. Maybe once AI moves on from advanced pattern recognition and probability machine and can actually think with AGI these jobs will be gone but not now no..

That's it from me. Let me know if I missed something and if have any questions. Im going out now and will answer all your questions later. Thx

did read

 

[menas]

@davidlaidisme67

@Thief

nigga doesn't even bother to tag me anymore

 

[Jason Voorhees]

nigga doesn't even bother to tag me anymore

I already tagged you in this thread niggy

 

[menas]

I already tagged you in this thread niggy

Well, I checked every single post in this thread to debunk this, and guess what? I was right... you did NOT tag me

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Well, I checked every single post in this thread to debunk this, and guess what? I was right... you did NOT tag me

My bad brah... You are in my permanent tag all threads list.

 

[klip11]

@imontheloose @Debetro @4ever @Corleone @davidlaidisme67

So how does this help you avoid Haitian cannibals and Liberian cannibals???

 

[klip11]

@imontheloose @Debetro @4ever @Corleone @davidlaidisme67

So how does this help you avoid Haitian cannibals and Liberian cannibals???

 

[bakpaokukus]

Mogged me to oblivion

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Mogged me to oblivion

Are you a CScel also?

 

[Jason Voorhees]

@Eärendil

 

[Eärendil]

@Eärendil

high quality thread. read it all. mirin competetive spirit.

check pm

 

[Jason Voorhees]

high quality thread. read it all. mirin competetive spirit.

check pm

Bumo that convo

 

[Jason Voorhees]

@GynoGladiator @Luquier @redeemthecard

 

[Jason Voorhees]

@wishIwasSalludon @PersianGymMaxx

 

[Luquier]

Damn you were grinding hard from day 1

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Damn you were grinding hard from day 1

Not day 1 like 1 week after joining for the jealousy to set in

 

[bakpaokukus]

Are you a CScel also?

no, I wish I was. I never continued my education after HS for that due to learning disability

my dad was an ITcel tho, a complete contrast with me

 

[Jason Voorhees]

no, I wish I was. I never continued my education after HS for that due to learning disability

my dad was an ITcel tho, a complete contrast with me

What disability?

 

[vincentzygo]

I initially wanted to frame into the ideal way to get into tech. Like this is the best way but when I sat down to recollect my thoughts and reflect on all that I did. I realized I made a ton of mistakes. So I'll just talk about what I did and then say things what I would have done differently in hindsight. My path wasn't linear it was complete chaos at first but then I found myself started building my profile through bits and pieces.

I'll start from the beginning. I was always a bright student since childhood. I graduated 4th in class with 95% in everything and after months of grind got admitted to a tier 1 University. I can't reveal which university because the cohort sizes are small but just think a university in the same tier as IIT Bombay. Top CEOs, Founders and entrepreneurs are part of the alumini group. One more thing to note is my uni doesn't have an attendance policy so I was able to rot doing freelance stuff and whatever I wanted and had plenty of free time to do all this but your mileage may vary.

I was always interested in coding. I already talked about it here

My earliest memories of coding on an android phone

I don't know if kids still do this now or if it is relevant in 2025 but some of my earliest memories of writing code (scripts really) was for on cheat engine and game guardian. I got gifted a smartphone on my 13th Birthday. I don't quite remember what it was. I think it was samsung s6 looking...

looksmax.org

But I never considered it seriously and going in. I didn't know what to expect. I just knew that is what I wanted. So I got admitted into the uni after some counselling rounds and was late admissions. Throughout my journey one thing you'll consistently see is my entire hyper competitive attitude towards everything. My motivation was always pure hyper competitiveness and Envy. Both I inherited from my father. I just cant stand seeing someone get even a step ahead of me. Every time it happens I feel this burning jealousy inside. So you'll see me trying a lot of things trying to find something sticks to the one wall and one upping everyone

Year 1: Admission

I did very well in the entrance exam to got into one of the best unis in the country. Felt like I was on top of the world but uni was a reality check profs don't spoon-feed and the competition is savage. Everyone around me was genius. I felt like I didn't belong here. Everyone was an
ace in their field and I felt dumber everytime I talked to them but I was determined and jealous.

One advantage/disadvantage of going to a prestigious university.

One major pro and con of going to a prestigious uni is being constantly surrounded by certified winners. Every single person in my uni has always been a winner. The main charecter all his/her life with an epic story. National Olympiad medals, founding startups in high school, breezing through...

looksmax.org

Joining every club. hackathons, coding comps, startup pitches. Tried app dev, ML side projects... most tanked because I didn't know what I was doing. I tried learning advanced concepts and algorithms without the basics foundation..like I start learning react frameworks for frontend work when I did not even know html and css properly. My advice do the basics first pick any language and double down. It doesn't matter. Python, C++ they are all good. Just stick to the basics, learn them all well and move to the web trinity

Master the Web Trinity:

HTML: The skeleton of every webpage. Learn semantic HTML

CSS: The styling. Understand the box model Flexbox, and Grid. Maybe even tailwind a

JavaScript (Vanilla):Master DOM manipulation, events, and asynchronous concepts (like fetch for APIs) before touching any frameworks

I am linking a few good resources that I've heard good things about

HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page's appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript).

developer.mozilla.org

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.

developer.mozilla.org

The Modern JavaScript Tutorial

Modern JavaScript Tutorial: simple, but detailed explanations with examples and tasks, including: closures, document and events, object oriented programming and more.

javascript.info

Year 2-Finding a Footing and my freelance work

By 2nd year. All my fundamentals were strong and I was building websites. This is the first website I ever deployed and built. From scratch

On this day 3 years ago. I deployed my very first app

Was scrolling through my old GitHub repos and found this Room Booking System I built for a college project in my 2nd year od unj. The requirement was just a basic CRUD site, but I don't do basic. Average is not in my dictionary. So I went overboard and added as much depth as possible to show...

looksmax.org

I saw seniors flexing FAANG offers via DSA, so I locked in. Striver's DSA Sheet was the plug and started Grinding problems and Freelance popped off because I wanted to make money. Focused on full-stack web dev on Upwork/Fiverr and was getting paid peanuts for my work but I did not mind because I was just getting started and was navigating everything and that amount was still huge for college grad. My parents paid for evrything so all that was essentially free money for me. My pitch was "I build and deploy." Landed 15-16 gigs ($200-$1k each). These weren't just simple sites. I was building MERN stack e-commerce platforms with Stripe/Razorpay integration and custom sales analytics dashboards for marketing agencies using React and APIs. Tried a blockchain NFT project (flopped hard) then built a Flutter app for a client ($700) and also did some DSA tutoring for my juniors. I also did a bunch of online internships for modest pay just for the experience and to get a hang off all the technologies.

Now coming the DSA. This is the single most important topic for technical interviews. In the real it doesn't have a lot of use unless you are in big tech like Google, microsoft where every millisecond costs money. DSA used to be very important back in the day when a computers were the sizes of entire rooms but nowadays not as much because systems have become exponentially powerful.In the startups I interned at double for loops were the norm because shaving off a few ms isn't important they don't have that much scale. So in all honesty DSA isn't "necessary" but I still highly recommend learning DSA.Striver's is god tier for interview logic it teaches patterns, not just memorization and also Solving 300+ problems made interviews look childs play but 200 would've sufficed. A better alternative for speed is NeetCode 150 or the Blind 75.

NeetCode

A better way to prepare for coding interviews.

neetcode.io

Although after this grind biggest realization is my big freelance projects gave me more resume juice and talking points than LeetCode ever did

I also started doing competitive coding on leetcode and hacker rank and did some hackathon and won a few. Participating in the contests simulates interview pressure.

For the MERN stack. This is the gold standard. Wait for a sale you can get this for cheaper. It covers everything from basics to deployment.

React 16: The Complete Course (incl. React Router 4 & Redux)

Dive in and learn React.js from scratch! Learn React, Hooks, Redux, React Router, Next.js, Best Practices and way more!

www.udemy.com

You absolutely must know Git and GitHub. This is how all professional software teams collaborate



Also Learn how to use tools like Postman to test API endpoints and how to use fetch or axios in your frontend to communicate with a backend.

For full stack deployments. I recommend Render and Vercel. Render also has its on DB that you can use

Vercel: Build and deploy the best web experiences with the AI Cloud – Vercel

Vercel gives developers the frameworks, workflows, and infrastructure to build a faster, more personalized web.

vercel.com

Cloud Application Platform

Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS certificates, global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

render.com

Also do not neglect any of the CS fundamentals like Operating Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Networks and system design. Which exact topics. I'll talk about later

Year 3-The specialization

Year 2 was great but FOMO hit hard. I saw peers specializing and landing crazier gigs and making even more money.. The pivot to DevOps wasn't a random choice. it was a market signal.Why DevOps? My freelance clients loved the apps but were clueless about deployment. I always used to get this question, How do we get this online and make sure it doesn't crash? came up on every big gig. That was my lightbulb moment. Every developer needs to know how to ship their own code. And this where I urge you to make a choice. Either double down on software development or specialise in something. The job market is competitive af so you need to be really good at something to get hired.

Companies aren't looking for well rounded but people with spikes of deep knowledge in their domains so pick one and specialise. So I started learning DevOps while continuing to solve harder DSA problems and strengthening my fundamentals

I used KodeKloud for hands-on labs and studied for the AWS Certified Developer Associate and Solutions Architect. You could do the beginner Cloud Practitioner certificate but imo it's too basic to be out on a resume. AWS is a industry certificate. This one.

certified-developer-associate

Earn your AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification. We offer training courses, exam guides, sample test questions, and practice exams.

aws.amazon.com

certified-solutions-architect-associate

Category, Associate. Exam duration, 130 minutes. Exam format, 65 questions; either multiple choice or multiple response. Cost, 150 USD.

aws.amazon.com

You could also learn Azure cloud. A few weeks back I checked it and I liked it very much. AWS still has more services but Azure isn't far behind

Microsoft Azure is so mogger

I was just revisiting Microsoft Azure after around a year or so. I mainly work on AWS and GCP. Not a lot of Azure but I've been seeing a lot of Job posting for Azure so I decided to take a look and damn. Son. They've expanderDevOps tooling. Pipelines, Repos, Boards, Test Plans all...

looksmax.org

More stuff I learnt was I mastered Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), Terraform, and Cl/CD with GitHub Actions.

Marketed myself as a "Full-Stack + DevOps" expert. This let me charge a premium.Landed 8 massive gigs ($2k-$6k) building and deploying a multi-tenant SaaS platform for a startup with auto-scaling infrastructure on AWS. My GPA also took a hit because I was pretty much working full time at this point so i couldn't focus well in my studies but this paid off massively later.

I won't get too much into detail on this part because this path is going to vary wildly on what domain you specialize in. You could get a rough idea on where to begin from this website

DevOps Roadmap: Learn to become a DevOps Engineer or SRE

Learn to become a modern DevOps engineer by following the steps, skills, resources and guides listed in our community-driven roadmap.

roadmap.sh

Year 4: US Internship Bag the oayoff.

All the chaos culminated here. I applied to 100+ roles, flexing my freelance portfolio and DevOps expertise. Got rejected more times than I count. I legit felt heart broken after every rejection email but I kept applying and finally after months.Bagged a lucrative internship at a US tech firm in Seattle and California ($12k/month, flights/housing covered). My "I've built and deployed real-world applications for paying clients" story resonated way more than a perfect GPA. My boss told me he was impressed the second he saw my application. They couldn't fill the role for nearly 7 months and I came in at a critical time so they hired me immediately and I was given work from day 1. Now about the interview.

This wasn't your standard DSA-heavy loop. It was a practical assessment of my skills.

1. Online Assessment & HR Screen: The first filter was a standard online coding test with 1 LeetCode Mediums and one hard. It was one question on Hash maps and one on Dynamic Programming
followed by a quick call with a recruiter to discuss my resume and freelance experience. I crushed the DSA round the HR himself was surprised someone could solve it this quickly and told me about it on call.

2. Technical Shared Screen (1 Hour): This was a hybrid round. I solved one DSA problem (a tree traversal question) on a shared editor, and then spent 20 minutes answering questions about my MERN stack projects and my experience with Docker.

3. DevOps & System Design: This was a practical, scenario-based round. I don't remember the exact prompt but it was: "W Cl/CD pipeline for a full-stack application using GitHub Actions to deploy to AWS. I had to explain my choices for tools and architecture and all the problems that I might face. Also some technical questions. A few I remember are What is the benefit of using Terraform over manually creating resources in the AWS? Why would we use Kubernetes for this application instead of just Docker Compose on a single server

And after all these rounds I got selected and got an email congratulations. I legit was trying to hold back my tears when the email came. My parents called me and congratulated me. My father was proud of me and after all that grind it was done and then I flew to the United States and landed in Seattle. Was there for a few weeks before being moved to California. It was an amazing experience the i finally got to experience with cutting edge tech. The lectures that I got invited to were so interesting. I made a lot of friends also. My Jewish boss was nice af too. He literally mentored me like his own child. I made many powerful contacts and had a blast while still working as hard as possible to get the PPO. Countless sleepless nights. I even made threads talking about sleep problems due to being on call but my boss was empathetic to me

. He would let me take breaks for as long as possible and recognized all of my work and appreciated it within week of me working he assured me I will be given a PPO It is formal letter saying they the company will hire me after this time and he also told the Senior HR to fast track the H1B process and use all the connections he has got to get my H1B applications and stating I was too "valuable" to be let go

After that stint. I came back to India and was going to be filed for H1B but the company i worked at has off shored ak it's work so It remains to be seen if I will go back to the US or just WFH.

I am going back to my uni on 17th August

Finally wrapped up here. Heading back to finish my final year and earn my degree. My employer will submit my H-1B application next April, so now it's all in God's hand and depends on Mr. Trump decision now. whatever the universe has planned will be done. If the stars align I'll be back on this...

looksmax.org

I also applied to bunch of other companies and got shortlisted and given job offers in the UK, US and India. Im still applying for jobs. Currently Product Manager jobs that is a bit different from the technical roles I'm used to.

View attachment 4177703View attachment 4177704


From the interviews that I've given. The main things you need to focus on would be these

Operating Systems (OS)- Process/Threads almost a guaranteed question around this topic. Also semaphore variables, mutex to prevent deadlocks and paging and segmentation problems these are the main topics that get asked

To learn OS you can use neetcode but the gold standard is the famous dinosaur book

View attachment 4177724

2. Computer Networks- OSI & TCP/IP Models- Important topics would be the OSI & TCP/IP Models. The Headers, DNS, HTTPS protocols all of it. Tbh i found my coursework material to suffice for most of the computer networks questions they ask in interviews. So I would just suggest doing some basic course in Udemy. They rarely ask deep questions about network unlike DSA

3. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)- In every single interview that I've sat for has asked OOPs concepts. Learning this is non negotiable. One sure shot question from one of the pillars Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. Learn them thoroughly. This is going to be asked. And it's easy unlike DSA so learn it thoroughly. Do a Udemy course

Learn Object Oriented Programming | Object Oriented Programming Tutorials

Learn about object oriented programming from top-rated Udemy instructors. Whether you’re interested in object oriented programming, or OOP in Python, Java, or C, Udemy courses will help you achieve your goals.

www.udemy.com

4. System Design- This isn't as important and isn't as extensively asked as above. But it is the key to unlocking senior roles and interviews at MAANG-level companies less common for junior roles but still good to learn imo. I personally just watched a bunch of YouTube videos you can skip this concept tho atleast for now

Addressing the AI takeover-

I have to address this because the first comment to this post would be a Al doomer posts that the ChatGPT is coming for our jobs, GPT-5 will write entire codebases etc. You're looking at it all wrong. Al ironically made my life 10x easier.

In my 2nd year. My first website I coded it all from scratch and llms weren't advanced enough to do it but once LLMs could code. I started using and still use to write boilerplate code, unit tests, and simple functions for my MERN stacks. It probably cut my raw coding time by 30-40%. I still charged my clients the same project and. When I was deep into DevOps I used ChatGPT as a senior mentor and asked it to creat scripts and give me the basic framework to build it on and then tweak to make my life easier.

Figuring out what to write is 90% of software engineering. Not how to write. Coding is the easy part. The thing that takes time is debugging, reading documentation, communication with clients. AI is useful for front end work and boiler plate code but for the core logic part you still need a human unless you are okay with having inefficient one time use code with bugs and security vulnerabilities. Al can't talk to a client to figure out what they actually want, it can't design a complex system architecture from scratch, and it can't debug a weird, niche production issue at 3 AM That's still on you

The market doesn't pay you for the hours you spend typing. it pays you for the problems you solve and the value you deliver. Al helps you solve bigger problems, faster and people get paid because of what we call the knowledge gap. I know things that allow me to use AI in such a way that it can do all the work for me and correct the mistakes AI makes..this gap is what Devs exploit that is where the knowledge gap lies. That is what Devs take advantage off. Maybe once AI moves on from advanced pattern recognition and probability machine and can actually think with AGI these jobs will be gone but not now no..

That's it from me. Let me know if I missed something and if have any questions. Im going out now and will answer all your questions later. Thx

Should I read this?

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Should I read this?

Yes you should. It has 60+ reacts for a reason

 

[Luquier]

Not day 1 like 1 week after joining for the jealousy to set in

Good stuff

Yeah meanwhile I had to go to ER because of it once and the non life threatening situations are countless. Going through school being beaten, stabbed, and even set on fire.

Millennial is by far the most fucked generation. Gotta deal with massive trauma PLUS agecucking PLUS in my case zero economic advantage

Yeah, millenials seem to be the harshest generation. People still brutally bullied each other back then, probably why you see so many severely mentally ill 30-40 yo truecels

 

[Chadeep]

How much did you score in Science in Boards?

89% I had PCMB.

 

[Chadeep]

Thoughts on this thread bhai

Good thread for youngcels if they take this seriously.

 

[redeemthecard]

I initially wanted to frame into the ideal way to get into tech. Like this is the best way but when I sat down to recollect my thoughts and reflect on all that I did. I realized I made a ton of mistakes. So I'll just talk about what I did and then say things what I would have done differently in hindsight. My path wasn't linear it was complete chaos at first but then I found myself started building my profile through bits and pieces.

I'll start from the beginning. I was always a bright student since childhood. I graduated 4th in class with 95% in everything and after months of grind got admitted to a tier 1 University. I can't reveal which university because the cohort sizes are small but just think a university in the same tier as IIT Bombay. Top CEOs, Founders and entrepreneurs are part of the alumini group. One more thing to note is my uni doesn't have an attendance policy so I was able to rot doing freelance stuff and whatever I wanted and had plenty of free time to do all this but your mileage may vary.

I was always interested in coding. I already talked about it here

My earliest memories of coding on an android phone

I don't know if kids still do this now or if it is relevant in 2025 but some of my earliest memories of writing code (scripts really) was for on cheat engine and game guardian. I got gifted a smartphone on my 13th Birthday. I don't quite remember what it was. I think it was samsung s6 looking...

looksmax.org

But I never considered it seriously and going in. I didn't know what to expect. I just knew that is what I wanted. So I got admitted into the uni after some counselling rounds and was late admissions. Throughout my journey one thing you'll consistently see is my entire hyper competitive attitude towards everything. My motivation was always pure hyper competitiveness and Envy. Both I inherited from my father. I just cant stand seeing someone get even a step ahead of me. Every time it happens I feel this burning jealousy inside. So you'll see me trying a lot of things trying to find something sticks to the one wall and one upping everyone

Year 1: Admission

I did very well in the entrance exam to got into one of the best unis in the country. Felt like I was on top of the world but uni was a reality check profs don't spoon-feed and the competition is savage. Everyone around me was genius. I felt like I didn't belong here. Everyone was an
ace in their field and I felt dumber everytime I talked to them but I was determined and jealous.

One advantage/disadvantage of going to a prestigious university.

One major pro and con of going to a prestigious uni is being constantly surrounded by certified winners. Every single person in my uni has always been a winner. The main charecter all his/her life with an epic story. National Olympiad medals, founding startups in high school, breezing through...

looksmax.org

Joining every club. hackathons, coding comps, startup pitches. Tried app dev, ML side projects... most tanked because I didn't know what I was doing. I tried learning advanced concepts and algorithms without the basics foundation..like I start learning react frameworks for frontend work when I did not even know html and css properly. My advice do the basics first pick any language and double down. It doesn't matter. Python, C++ they are all good. Just stick to the basics, learn them all well and move to the web trinity

Master the Web Trinity:

HTML: The skeleton of every webpage. Learn semantic HTML

CSS: The styling. Understand the box model Flexbox, and Grid. Maybe even tailwind a

JavaScript (Vanilla):Master DOM manipulation, events, and asynchronous concepts (like fetch for APIs) before touching any frameworks

I am linking a few good resources that I've heard good things about

HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page's appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript).

developer.mozilla.org

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.

developer.mozilla.org

The Modern JavaScript Tutorial

Modern JavaScript Tutorial: simple, but detailed explanations with examples and tasks, including: closures, document and events, object oriented programming and more.

javascript.info

Year 2-Finding a Footing and my freelance work

By 2nd year. All my fundamentals were strong and I was building websites. This is the first website I ever deployed and built. From scratch

On this day 3 years ago. I deployed my very first app

Was scrolling through my old GitHub repos and found this Room Booking System I built for a college project in my 2nd year od unj. The requirement was just a basic CRUD site, but I don't do basic. Average is not in my dictionary. So I went overboard and added as much depth as possible to show...

looksmax.org

I saw seniors flexing FAANG offers via DSA, so I locked in. Striver's DSA Sheet was the plug and started Grinding problems and Freelance popped off because I wanted to make money. Focused on full-stack web dev on Upwork/Fiverr and was getting paid peanuts for my work but I did not mind because I was just getting started and was navigating everything and that amount was still huge for college grad. My parents paid for evrything so all that was essentially free money for me. My pitch was "I build and deploy." Landed 15-16 gigs ($200-$1k each). These weren't just simple sites. I was building MERN stack e-commerce platforms with Stripe/Razorpay integration and custom sales analytics dashboards for marketing agencies using React and APIs. Tried a blockchain NFT project (flopped hard) then built a Flutter app for a client ($700) and also did some DSA tutoring for my juniors. I also did a bunch of online internships for modest pay just for the experience and to get a hang off all the technologies.

Now coming the DSA. This is the single most important topic for technical interviews. In the real it doesn't have a lot of use unless you are in big tech like Google, microsoft where every millisecond costs money. DSA used to be very important back in the day when a computers were the sizes of entire rooms but nowadays not as much because systems have become exponentially powerful.In the startups I interned at double for loops were the norm because shaving off a few ms isn't important they don't have that much scale. So in all honesty DSA isn't "necessary" but I still highly recommend learning DSA.Striver's is god tier for interview logic it teaches patterns, not just memorization and also Solving 300+ problems made interviews look childs play but 200 would've sufficed. A better alternative for speed is NeetCode 150 or the Blind 75.

NeetCode

A better way to prepare for coding interviews.

neetcode.io

Although after this grind biggest realization is my big freelance projects gave me more resume juice and talking points than LeetCode ever did

I also started doing competitive coding on leetcode and hacker rank and did some hackathon and won a few. Participating in the contests simulates interview pressure.

For the MERN stack. This is the gold standard. Wait for a sale you can get this for cheaper. It covers everything from basics to deployment.

React 16: The Complete Course (incl. React Router 4 & Redux)

Dive in and learn React.js from scratch! Learn React, Hooks, Redux, React Router, Next.js, Best Practices and way more!

www.udemy.com

You absolutely must know Git and GitHub. This is how all professional software teams collaborate



Also Learn how to use tools like Postman to test API endpoints and how to use fetch or axios in your frontend to communicate with a backend.

For full stack deployments. I recommend Render and Vercel. Render also has its on DB that you can use

Vercel: Build and deploy the best web experiences with the AI Cloud – Vercel

Vercel gives developers the frameworks, workflows, and infrastructure to build a faster, more personalized web.

vercel.com

Cloud Application Platform

Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS certificates, global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

render.com

Also do not neglect any of the CS fundamentals like Operating Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Networks and system design. Which exact topics. I'll talk about later

Year 3-The specialization

Year 2 was great but FOMO hit hard. I saw peers specializing and landing crazier gigs and making even more money.. The pivot to DevOps wasn't a random choice. it was a market signal.Why DevOps? My freelance clients loved the apps but were clueless about deployment. I always used to get this question, How do we get this online and make sure it doesn't crash? came up on every big gig. That was my lightbulb moment. Every developer needs to know how to ship their own code. And this where I urge you to make a choice. Either double down on software development or specialise in something. The job market is competitive af so you need to be really good at something to get hired.

Companies aren't looking for well rounded but people with spikes of deep knowledge in their domains so pick one and specialise. So I started learning DevOps while continuing to solve harder DSA problems and strengthening my fundamentals

I used KodeKloud for hands-on labs and studied for the AWS Certified Developer Associate and Solutions Architect. You could do the beginner Cloud Practitioner certificate but imo it's too basic to be out on a resume. AWS is a industry certificate. This one.

certified-developer-associate

Earn your AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification. We offer training courses, exam guides, sample test questions, and practice exams.

aws.amazon.com

certified-solutions-architect-associate

Category, Associate. Exam duration, 130 minutes. Exam format, 65 questions; either multiple choice or multiple response. Cost, 150 USD.

aws.amazon.com

You could also learn Azure cloud. A few weeks back I checked it and I liked it very much. AWS still has more services but Azure isn't far behind

Microsoft Azure is so mogger

I was just revisiting Microsoft Azure after around a year or so. I mainly work on AWS and GCP. Not a lot of Azure but I've been seeing a lot of Job posting for Azure so I decided to take a look and damn. Son. They've expanderDevOps tooling. Pipelines, Repos, Boards, Test Plans all...

looksmax.org

More stuff I learnt was I mastered Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), Terraform, and Cl/CD with GitHub Actions.

Marketed myself as a "Full-Stack + DevOps" expert. This let me charge a premium.Landed 8 massive gigs ($2k-$6k) building and deploying a multi-tenant SaaS platform for a startup with auto-scaling infrastructure on AWS. My GPA also took a hit because I was pretty much working full time at this point so i couldn't focus well in my studies but this paid off massively later.

I won't get too much into detail on this part because this path is going to vary wildly on what domain you specialize in. You could get a rough idea on where to begin from this website

DevOps Roadmap: Learn to become a DevOps Engineer or SRE

Learn to become a modern DevOps engineer by following the steps, skills, resources and guides listed in our community-driven roadmap.

roadmap.sh

Year 4: US Internship Bag the oayoff.

All the chaos culminated here. I applied to 100+ roles, flexing my freelance portfolio and DevOps expertise. Got rejected more times than I count. I legit felt heart broken after every rejection email but I kept applying and finally after months.Bagged a lucrative internship at a US tech firm in Seattle and California ($12k/month, flights/housing covered). My "I've built and deployed real-world applications for paying clients" story resonated way more than a perfect GPA. My boss told me he was impressed the second he saw my application. They couldn't fill the role for nearly 7 months and I came in at a critical time so they hired me immediately and I was given work from day 1. Now about the interview.

This wasn't your standard DSA-heavy loop. It was a practical assessment of my skills.

1. Online Assessment & HR Screen: The first filter was a standard online coding test with 1 LeetCode Mediums and one hard. It was one question on Hash maps and one on Dynamic Programming
followed by a quick call with a recruiter to discuss my resume and freelance experience. I crushed the DSA round the HR himself was surprised someone could solve it this quickly and told me about it on call.

2. Technical Shared Screen (1 Hour): This was a hybrid round. I solved one DSA problem (a tree traversal question) on a shared editor, and then spent 20 minutes answering questions about my MERN stack projects and my experience with Docker.

3. DevOps & System Design: This was a practical, scenario-based round. I don't remember the exact prompt but it was: "W Cl/CD pipeline for a full-stack application using GitHub Actions to deploy to AWS. I had to explain my choices for tools and architecture and all the problems that I might face. Also some technical questions. A few I remember are What is the benefit of using Terraform over manually creating resources in the AWS? Why would we use Kubernetes for this application instead of just Docker Compose on a single server

And after all these rounds I got selected and got an email congratulations. I legit was trying to hold back my tears when the email came. My parents called me and congratulated me. My father was proud of me and after all that grind it was done and then I flew to the United States and landed in Seattle. Was there for a few weeks before being moved to California. It was an amazing experience the i finally got to experience with cutting edge tech. The lectures that I got invited to were so interesting. I made a lot of friends also. My Jewish boss was nice af too. He literally mentored me like his own child. I made many powerful contacts and had a blast while still working as hard as possible to get the PPO. Countless sleepless nights. I even made threads talking about sleep problems due to being on call but my boss was empathetic to me

. He would let me take breaks for as long as possible and recognized all of my work and appreciated it within week of me working he assured me I will be given a PPO It is formal letter saying they the company will hire me after this time and he also told the Senior HR to fast track the H1B process and use all the connections he has got to get my H1B applications and stating I was too "valuable" to be let go

After that stint. I came back to India and was going to be filed for H1B but the company i worked at has off shored ak it's work so It remains to be seen if I will go back to the US or just WFH.

I am going back to my uni on 17th August

Finally wrapped up here. Heading back to finish my final year and earn my degree. My employer will submit my H-1B application next April, so now it's all in God's hand and depends on Mr. Trump decision now. whatever the universe has planned will be done. If the stars align I'll be back on this...

looksmax.org

I also applied to bunch of other companies and got shortlisted and given job offers in the UK, US and India. Im still applying for jobs. Currently Product Manager jobs that is a bit different from the technical roles I'm used to.

View attachment 4177703View attachment 4177704


From the interviews that I've given. The main things you need to focus on would be these

Operating Systems (OS)- Process/Threads almost a guaranteed question around this topic. Also semaphore variables, mutex to prevent deadlocks and paging and segmentation problems these are the main topics that get asked

To learn OS you can use neetcode but the gold standard is the famous dinosaur book

View attachment 4177724

2. Computer Networks- OSI & TCP/IP Models- Important topics would be the OSI & TCP/IP Models. The Headers, DNS, HTTPS protocols all of it. Tbh i found my coursework material to suffice for most of the computer networks questions they ask in interviews. So I would just suggest doing some basic course in Udemy. They rarely ask deep questions about network unlike DSA

3. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)- In every single interview that I've sat for has asked OOPs concepts. Learning this is non negotiable. One sure shot question from one of the pillars Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. Learn them thoroughly. This is going to be asked. And it's easy unlike DSA so learn it thoroughly. Do a Udemy course

Learn Object Oriented Programming | Object Oriented Programming Tutorials

Learn about object oriented programming from top-rated Udemy instructors. Whether you’re interested in object oriented programming, or OOP in Python, Java, or C, Udemy courses will help you achieve your goals.

www.udemy.com

4. System Design- This isn't as important and isn't as extensively asked as above. But it is the key to unlocking senior roles and interviews at MAANG-level companies less common for junior roles but still good to learn imo. I personally just watched a bunch of YouTube videos you can skip this concept tho atleast for now

Addressing the AI takeover-

I have to address this because the first comment to this post would be a Al doomer posts that the ChatGPT is coming for our jobs, GPT-5 will write entire codebases etc. You're looking at it all wrong. Al ironically made my life 10x easier.

In my 2nd year. My first website I coded it all from scratch and llms weren't advanced enough to do it but once LLMs could code. I started using and still use to write boilerplate code, unit tests, and simple functions for my MERN stacks. It probably cut my raw coding time by 30-40%. I still charged my clients the same project and. When I was deep into DevOps I used ChatGPT as a senior mentor and asked it to creat scripts and give me the basic framework to build it on and then tweak to make my life easier.

Figuring out what to write is 90% of software engineering. Not how to write. Coding is the easy part. The thing that takes time is debugging, reading documentation, communication with clients. AI is useful for front end work and boiler plate code but for the core logic part you still need a human unless you are okay with having inefficient one time use code with bugs and security vulnerabilities. Al can't talk to a client to figure out what they actually want, it can't design a complex system architecture from scratch, and it can't debug a weird, niche production issue at 3 AM That's still on you

The market doesn't pay you for the hours you spend typing. it pays you for the problems you solve and the value you deliver. Al helps you solve bigger problems, faster and people get paid because of what we call the knowledge gap. I know things that allow me to use AI in such a way that it can do all the work for me and correct the mistakes AI makes..this gap is what Devs exploit that is where the knowledge gap lies. That is what Devs take advantage off. Maybe once AI moves on from advanced pattern recognition and probability machine and can actually think with AGI these jobs will be gone but not now no..

That's it from me. Let me know if I missed something and if have any questions. Im going out now and will answer all your questions later. Thx

mirin the effort

agree with most things, even though ive no work experience in the field

im currently into my second year of studying C# (i do also have some html & css with js knowledge), and most likely have a job waiting for me right after school (thru connections)

what are ur thoughts on AI?

not good enough yet, but maybe in 3-4 years it could be bad for us

 

[PersianGymMaxx]

How long did it take u to type all this

 

[GynoGladiator]

What high school courses do you think are best for that field

Like physics chem etc

 

[Jason Voorhees]

How long did it take u to type all this

2 hours

 

[Jason Voorhees]

What high school courses do you think are best for that field

Like physics chem etc

Math

 

[GynoGladiator]

Math

Is physics of any use?

 

[Jason Voorhees]

Is physics of any use?

Directly no. Coding is just math and logic