My entire journey of becoming an ITcel

Jason Voorhees

Jason Voorhees

𝕯𝖝𝕯 𝖈𝖗𝖊𝖜 𝕵𝖊𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖗
Joined
May 15, 2020
Posts
72,050
Reputation
206,311
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


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.


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





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


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.



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.


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



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.




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


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


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 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.

1000097502
1000093684



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

1000097505


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



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
 
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Mirin the high effort. Real philanthropy
 
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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


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.


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





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


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. 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.



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.


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



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.




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


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 go up for a rough idea on where to begin from this website


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 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 fill the role for nearly 7 months and I came in critically time and they hired me so 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. My Jewish boss was nice af. He literally mentored me like his own child. I made so many powerful contacts and had a blast and I finally returned back to India with a PPO. I grinded hard on my job. Spent countless nights working..i

Even 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.


I also applied to bunch of other companies and got selected and given offers also in the meanwhile just to be safe and attended a bunch of interviews after and got selected and job offers

View attachment 4177703View attachment 4177704


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

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



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

Ill read later but mirin
 
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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


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.


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





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


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. 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.



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.


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



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.




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


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 go up for a rough idea on where to begin from this website


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 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 fill the role for nearly 7 months and I came in critically time and they hired me so 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. My Jewish boss was nice af. He literally mentored me like his own child. I made so many powerful contacts and had a blast and I finally returned back to India with a PPO. I grinded hard on my job. Spent countless nights working..i

Even 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.


I also applied to bunch of other companies and got selected and given offers also in the meanwhile just to be safe and attended a bunch of interviews after and got selected and job offers

View attachment 4177703View attachment 4177704


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

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



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

Based and intellectual user out here, also please tag me 😡
 
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quick question, did u know shit about IT before going to college?. or u gained all the info when u studied there?
 
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Brutal IT-pill:

While some recently graduated celibate CS Ricecel goes to work at snapchat writing code for the next big update, prettyboy chad uses snapchat to hookup with his 4th girl of the week.

All the Ricecel gets in reward for further enabling this whoredom is barred from taking part in by virtue of genetics is enough money to rent an apartment, and lease a brand new lame ass Honda civic type R.

He copes and he copes that this is the lifestyle he always wanted, he’s made it, his car is cool, he LOVES working for FAANG and blah blah blah meanwhile that broke prettyboy chad who skips classes is at a friday night fray party living life to the fullest.


ask yourself, who will have more to reminisce about on his deathbed?
 
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Read everything. Actually needed to hear this since Im planning on starting my coding journey next year. (Also Udemy is goated I learned how to draw from there)
 
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quick question, did u know shit about IT before going to college?.
A little bit not a lot
or u gained all the info when u studied there?
Not all but some info yes. A lot of what I learnt were things i learnt independently
 
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@Jattgymmaxx @registerfasterusing @ChadL1te @aladdinmaxxer @jeoyw9192 @FramePillGymMaxx
 
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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


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.


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





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


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. 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.



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.


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



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.




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


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


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 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



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

Currently moving back into my own space, the grind will start once I get situated. Definitely will read this once I’m done settling.
 
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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


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.


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





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


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. 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.



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.


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



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.




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


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


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 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



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

that’s tuff
 
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Mirin hard, which I had this level of discipline and motivation, I go to an elite public uni like I’m not dumb but my work ethic is horrid and I do almost zero extra carriculars. This will all bite me in the ass when I graduate 😂

But yeah that’s a pretty insane story man congrats
 
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@Gengar @BigBoy @iblamechico @gooner23 @User28823
 
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@Uehdbwidbfngj @CorinthianLOX
 
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@VV62 @BigBallsLarry
 
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@BigBallsLarry @optimisticzoomer
 
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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


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.


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





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


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. 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.



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.


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



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.




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


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


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 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



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

thats a lot of text

Joe Biden Shock GIF by GIPHY News
Joe Biden Shock GIF by GIPHY News


ill bookmark it and leave a response when i have time to read it :Comfy:
 
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@Beastimmung @Everythingislaw @Thief
 
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I dropped out of school at 15 due to extreme bullying, can’t relate.
A shame that they were still pushing engineering as a vocational course at the time rather than software or my life could have been very different.
 
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I dropped out of school at 15 due to extreme bullying, can’t relate.
A shame that they were still pushing engineering as a vocational course at the time rather than software or my life could have been very different.
Bullying isn't a thing now. If you bully someone it is over for you.
 
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Brutal IT-pill:

While some recently graduated celibate CS Ricecel goes to work at snapchat writing code for the next big update, prettyboy chad uses snapchat to hookup with his 4th girl of the week.

All the Ricecel gets in reward for further enabling this whoredom is barred from taking part in by virtue of genetics is enough money to rent an apartment, and lease a brand new lame ass Honda civic type R.

He copes and he copes that this is the lifestyle he always wanted, he’s made it, his car is cool, he LOVES working for FAANG and blah blah blah meanwhile that broke prettyboy chad who skips classes is at a friday night fray party living life to the fullest.


ask yourself, who will have more to reminisce about on his deathbed?
js rlly unnecessary icl, its a post on careermaxxing that everyone can learn from(atleast middle class), shit like this(which isnt even true) shld js be posted in off topic rlly

achieving goals in life that set u apart from others will always be better than going through whores in ur prime years
 
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js rlly unnecessary icl, its a post on careermaxxing that everyone can learn from(atleast middle class), shit like this(which isnt even true) shld js be posted in off topic rlly

achieving goals in life that set u apart from others will always be better than going through whores in ur prime years
I was expecting these kind of posts anyway. They come regardless of what I make. Why try when chad makes a bank fixing toilets
 
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Bullying isn't a thing now. If you bully someone it is over for you.

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
 
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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
I mean bullying still exists but it is rarely physical.Bullying someone these days is like asking to get suspended out of school. Schools these days have absolutely 0 tolerance policy towards bullying and ragging. Just him complaining about it to school authorities is enough to launch an investigation and get you expelled. Even police get involved if there's even a ounce of foul play.

. Bullies still exist but you are not getting shoved into lockers or getting swirlies in the school bathroom. It's more similar to how foids neg and belittle each other. More emotional and back handed comments to undermine someone than physical bullying
 
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I mean bullying still exists but it is rarely physical.Bullying someone these days is like asking to get suspended out of school. Schools these days have absolutely 0 tolerance policy towards bullying and ragging. Just him complaining about it to school authorities is enough to launch an investigation and get you expelled. Even police get involved if there's even a ounce of foul play.

. Bullies still exist but you are not getting shoved into lockers or getting swirlies in the school bathroom. It's more similar to how foids neg and belittle each other. More emotional and back handed comments to undermine someone than physical bullying

Trust me, we had emotional bullying too. If it wasn’t for the strict enforcement it would absolutely be physical.

I am not talking about getting shoved into lockers, I am talking about being stabbed with knives, shot with BB gun, attacked with aerosol flamethrower and in the worst case being pushed through a window which sent me to ER with severe bleeding and lacerations. And in the end I was the one who had to leave because it was the simplest way to remove the problem for the administration.

And there will never be any consequences for this except for my life being a mere shadow of what it could have been because my potential was destroyed over something as fucking trivial as not looking right and talking with a different accent.
 
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Trust me, we had emotional bullying too. If it wasn’t for the strict enforcement it would absolutely be physical.

I am not talking about getting shoved into lockers, I am talking about being stabbed with knives, shot with BB gun, attacked with aerosol flamethrower and in the worst case being pushed through a window which sent me to ER with severe bleeding and lacerations. And in the end I was the one who had to leave because it was the simplest way to remove the problem for the administration.

And there will never be any consequences for this except for my life being a mere shadow of what it could have been because my potential was destroyed over something as fucking trivial as not looking right and talking with a different accent.
Eastern Europe is such a shithole. My condolences.
 
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Bro is from the UK tho
doesn't explain why he said he used to get bullied for having a different accent. Is he an immigrant? Not trying to shit up your high effort thread though, so idc.

I finally read through it all, and it's truly inspiring to see what you mentally went through at different points through your college years to get to where you are right now, with a promising future ahead of you.

What you could have added, which was brought up a lot by other users, is how you actually learned the different subjects, as you said a lot of it was self-taught, to give them a road map they could follow to educate themselves to a similar level.
 
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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.
Bro went to school in Gotham
 
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doesn't explain why he said he used to get bullied for having a different accent. Is he an immigrant? Not trying to shit up your high effort thread though, so idc.

English-ish in Scotland was enough to be other.

lol at high effort thread, it’s a brag thread and you are glazing him
 
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You're the one user I wouldn't shit on for mass tagging tbh. Good thread.
 
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lol at high effort thread, it’s a brag thread and you are glazing him
Why shouldn't he take a little pride in what he achieved? I don't mind. It's a rudimentary roadmap that users who are about to enter university for a similar degree could follow, why hate on it.

I bet if they asked specifics, he would be willing to give tips and point them in the right direction, too. OP isn't one of these retarded gate-keeping homos.
 
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English-ish in Scotland was enough to be other.

lol at high effort thread, it’s a brag thread and you are glazing him
Why shouldn't he take a little pride in what he achieved? I don't mind. It's a rudimentary roadmap that users who are about to enter university for a similar degree could follow, why hate on it.

I bet if they asked specifics, he would be willing to give tips and point them in the right direction, too. OP isn't one of these retarded gate-keeping homos.


Bragging where? I literally said it throughout my thread that I got rejected, failed, got underpaid did unpaid internships. Felt discouraged. I just wanted to keep it authentic. I even prefaced this by saying what I did was far from perfect. If you want a cosmetic picture perfect roadmap on how things should go in ideal world then there are plenty of stuff you can find online. I was only talking about my experience
 
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Blud career mogs me to death 💀
 
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