Hey guys! After Hashnode announced it's #4articles4weeks challenge, I thought it's a perfect opportunity to kickstart my basically abandoned blog. So to help out everyone with some clarity into their job hunt and have a shot at winning a thousand dollars , I decided to share my journey of getting my first SDE Internship.

Twas the crack of spring, so heartwarming;
the placement season's arrival,
little Shaunak, exhausted from the stress of it all;
unemployment being his rival.

CS,IT and Electronics, the only students the companies wanted,
Instrumentation engineers were sworn off, their skillsets not demanded.

Dejected, but not depressed,
our hero marched ahead,
when suddenly he remembered,
a promise he had made.

Tired of the ceaseless academics, 
the hero had once swore,
"To hell with Data Structures!
Leetcode I shall no more"

Doubting his past choices, calling himself a fool, 
his little voyage resumed,
when suddenly, "Infineon: Internship + PPO",
his email notification declared.

"That's a sizeable stipend, and an interesting project,
this is wayyyy out of my league.
But the interview is a great way to prep,
So this is exactly what I seek!"

The résumé sent, the test link received,
the game had now begun,
Three hours of gruesome tests,
And nowhere left to run

From Networking to embedded,
to C-style pointers much dreaded,
the trial was all-encompassing,
the sand trickled in the hour glass,
leaving his heart racing.

Submit; he pressed,
took off from his desk,
the day's work was done,
Invited to the next round,
the first skirmish was won.

"The next round is TOMORROW?"
This really was short notice.
"Ehh, I'll mostly fail anyway",
this really was just practice.

OOP he revised, for it was the easiest,
and brushed up on his résumé,
it was show time, on a day sublime,
This was not your everyday.

C, OS and memory,
were mainly the aspects tested,
he was also asked for projects,
(they were laggy and bug infested :p ).

Three rounds the contest lasted, 
as our hero bested all,
each conflict giving him faith,
now waiting for the final call.

And then, all prayers were answered,
cause soon after, a voice was heard,
the lush and glorious words uttered,
"Congratulations! you've been selected!"

This was the abridged version of my interview and placement experience, but there are a few points I'd like to elaborate on:

Accepting that you might fail will help you

If you really want something, and have expended effort to get it, it stings like hell when failure strikes and the object of your desire slips away like sand in a tightly held fist. When I received this opportunity, I thought of it as a chance to get some interview practice and nothing more. In retrospect, maybe I should have believed in myself a little more, but since I didn't, I approached it with a more gentle viewpoint. I didn't try to force myself to get the job, I didn't hustle for the interviewer's approval. I tried to communicate in a more human manner, showing my flaws and accepting when I didn't know what was asked. I think this helped create a good impression on my interviewer.

40 hours a week is a long amount of time

The thing that matters most after your technical competence is how you are to be around. The interviewer is trying to gauge whether they can bear you for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for a long amount of time. On top of that, if you're actually fun to be around, that's brownie points for sure. Now I'm not asking you to act in a more extroverted manner, or try to make jokes in an interview, but things to build rapport (like interesting hobbies, common ground with the interviewer etc) will go a long way.

On a lighter note, my interviewer asked me about VRAM and Paging, and I said I remember reading about this in my OS classes, but don't remember what it actually is. But then like a lightbulb, this video by Linus Tech Tips popped into my head, and because of the rather amazing illustrations, I remembered the concept pretty well. So thank you Linus.

Now this next thing is cheesy but important:

You have to believe in yourself

Yeah yeah, I know in classic i-know-better-than-you-because-I'm-writing-a-blog-and-you're-just-reading-it fashion, I'm about to get preachy. After I finished high school, considering my grades, I had to make a choice. Either get a good college in a sub-optimal engineering stream, or get a sub-optimal college with the stream I wanted (computer science). I went with the first option, and understandably, A lot of people questioned my choice. Their doubts were valid of course. I didn't plan on going into Instrumentation engineering, and on top of that, the majority of companies don't let fresher Instrumentation engineers sit for SDE job interviews.

But I looked at market trends and how SWE was getting more liberal with their CS/IT engineers only criteria, and decided to go with the better college but 'worse' branch option. Along with that, somewhere along the second year of Engineering I decided that I wasn't going to go the traditional route of learning data structures and algorithms and grinding out Leetcode till my eyes explode (why I chose to do that is a story for another day). Now this goes against basically ALL traditional advice that is given when a fresh grad is trying to get a job. It's risky, severely limits your options and I'm NOT recommending it if getting a job is high priority to you. But at that point I took a leap of faith.

Aaaaand it worked out. Pretty well actually. Will this bite me in the future? Maybe. Will I reverse this decision? Maybe. But the more important take away is that people will try to convince you to take the trodden path. It's safer and more likely to get you where you want. But it might not be the best thing for you. Me getting a job without grinding out DSA is okay, worked well for me, but more importantly it reaffirmed the fact that sometimes going your own way will work out for you, which is honestly a lesson of much more importance than any amount of money or experience that one might get from a job (unless you make a million dollars a year, in that case I'd much rather have the money)

That concludes this week's blog. This was my first time (ever) writing a poem so I'll not be taking any criticisms on it 🥰🥰. Have a beautiful weekend!