Introduction
In today’s world, the competition for grabbing a fresher job in the software industry is as hard as grabbing a good seat after JEE. Folks are confused as hell about what to do and what not to do. The everlasting debate of DSA vs Dev confuses young folks even more.
Today, I will share what I did, what I ignored, and what you can do to get the best possible outcome from your current situation. Keep in mind that I am only considering folks who have no hopes from their college for a good placement.
My Journey.
I began my B.Tech journey in 2019, interrupted by COVID. Explored various tech areas, and settled on Flutter app development. Invested in Flutter course, landed Google STEP intern OA but lacked DSA skills. Started learning DSA, realized its endless nature, and focused on earning money through internships and hackathons. Eventually dedicated 7 months to DSA, succeeded in securing multiple job offers, and chose on-campus placement for better pay.
As you can see, I did everything I could. My fuel was money but I enjoyed coding too. That’s why I had good projects and I landed internships in the first place. Anyway, let’s move on to what you guys can do.
Scenario 1
So, I will divide this into 2 scenarios. Scenario 1 is you have just entered college or are in your second year. If you are reading this now, Congrats! you have potentially saved yourself. You have a lot of time ahead. You have time to experiment and fail. That’s the benefit of starting early. I started with game dev, AR/VR and I failed. Whatever might be the reason, I quit it and picked up something else.
The same goes for you. Pick a thing. AI/ML, Web Dev, Blockchain, App-Dev etc. Pick anything and just start. The content available today is much better than the one available 4 years ago. If you don’t like one, do something else. You will land on one thing and then just keep doing it. Keep getting better by learning advanced topics. You will be internship-ready before you know it. I got my first Flutter internship and I only knew how to make API calls and connect the app to DB. I didn’t know advanced shit like dependency injection, offline storage management, advanced state management, MVVM, MVC, lazy loading etc etc.
If you don’t find anything interesting, start with DSA. You might enjoy competitive programming. If you don’t like that too, then sorry buddy computer science isn’t for you. Maybe explore UI/UX.
Once you enter the second term of your third year, start with DSA. Striver has the best DSA content to get good enough to land a job. I followed his 180 questions sheet initially and then after that, I just did questions on my own.
Make use of platforms like Unstop, Internshala, remoteok, and Twitter to get internships. For off-campus, getting a job by converting an intern to full-time is one of the easiest ways.
Scenario 2
Scenario 2 is for folks who are in their 3rd year or 4th year. This is a tricky scenario because you don’t have time to do both. I mean if you can parallelly handle both that is great but the problem with that is you will have two half-filled jugs rather than one filled jug. If you started earlier, you could have filled one jug completely and then started filling the other one.
Now, you have to make a choice. One good way to tackle this is to look at what your friends are doing. By friends I mean the ones who have already got an internship or won hackathons. If you don’t have such friends, then make one. Ask them how they got the internship, what the company asked them, DSA or development. You can move forward from there. If it is DSA that you want to do, then just do a 180-question sheet and you will be decent enough to crack jobs. If you want to do development, then go with an online YouTube tutorial video and build a clone. Building a clone is not bad if you understand what is happening and how are things working. Once you have built it, try building something else without a tutorial help. Just use Google and official docs. No copy-pasting code from Chat GPT as well.
You must understand that time is against you and you have to put in extra effort. You will have to do things parallel if needed.
Additional Tips
Here are a few more tips to land more interviews or make better decisions
Have a good resume. If you don’t know what good is, ask someone to review it for you. ( A senior, a recruiter on LinkedIn). You can even approach me if you feel I am worthy to do that.
Have at least 3 working projects on GitHub. You don’t need to have a fancy profile. Just have 3 self-made projects. You must be confident with those projects. I can ask you anything about it and you must be ready to answer.
Engage with early-stage company founders/CTOs on Twitter/Linkedin. Early-stage founders are always looking for talent. They will be happy to entertain you if you approach them online. It just saves their time in for searching talent. Even if you don’t land a job/internship, you will make a connection
Think a lot before buying courses. I am not saying don’t buy, but just think. Think if this content (same quality) is freely available, and think if the creator is credible enough or not. Think twice before spending your or your parents’ hard-earned money.
Open Source?
This term has taken the Indian student community by storm. Open-source this open source that. First of all, open source is not easy. I mean it is easy to find scammy projects and increase your PR count but it is not easy to make actual contributions.
Only actual contributions lead to job opportunities. No one is offering you a job if you make a readme change. Not saying making readme change is bad, but don’t expect to land a job by doing that. You will have to make consistent meaningful contributions to complex projects before hearing back.
To make contributions of this level, you must have good knowledge of the tech stack. So don’t jump onto open source straightaway. It will just break you. First, go and learn. Build your projects and then go take the challenge of open-source.
I can write a whole article about open-source and how to approach it.
Yes, Luck Matters and you can’t do anything about it.
No matter how hard you work, luck will always come into play. You might get a grumpy interviewer, your internet might be unstable, and you might forget the implementation of a code that you have done 10 times before. Anything can happen on the interview day. It can be for good or for bad but just remember one thing. You only need 1 one acceptance.
No point in crying about diversity hiring, cheating, and luck. Also, no point in blaming DSA. Whether you enjoy it or not, you have to do it now. Because companies judge you by that. It is what it is. You can cry about it on social media but this is how the world works.
Some companies won’t ask you DSA in the interviews but when you start the job, you will need basic logic to write good code. You can’t write shitty code in good product companies. Your PR will be rejected straightaway without any comments and believe me it will hurt.
So keep your development ego aside and learn basic DSA and logic building. Will help you throughout your life.
Ideal Salary?
The current tech market for freshers is fucked up. Long gone are the days where freshers where being paid 30LPA base salary happily by companies.
The market is correcting itself and salaries are becoming realistic for freshers. The ideal salary to start would be 8-12LPA for a fresher. You must be more than happy if you get this in the current market. If you get more, just take and run away. If you get less, try to negotiate.
Obviously service based companies are not gonnna pay this much so I am talking about product companies. Not very early stage though.
Conclusion
Well, that was a huge rant. Anyway, I have said what I think about the current scenario and what you guys can do. I am attaching important websites where you can look for hackathons, resume builders, and internship/full-time sites.
Resources
Internships & Jobs:
Hackathons
Resume Builders