My journey from TCS to SDE at NAS Academy, Singapore.
Read the inspiring story of Shubhashish Verma, in his own words.
I started my career with TCS through on-campus college placements where I worked for an year as a JAVA developer. I was not happy there and moved to a startup through Linkedin. I worked the next 9 months for the startup, where I was the only fullstack engineer but we could not raise funds and had to shut down.
After that I joined F1 studios in Bangalore. I was giving it all of my time and hard work but was not very happy.
How it all started?
One day I randomly saw one of my college friends on Facebook in an interview with Vivekanand Sir from Programming Pathshala.
I was not much aware of such programs for engineering students. I saw a Linkedin post of Programming Pathshala with a link to apply for Genesis.
After applying to the course, I had an interview call from Vivekanand Vivek sir. Finally, I was selected and was excited that I will be taught by Vivekanand sir and I can further accelerate my career.
Here comes the first hurdle!
I hadn’t done much competitive programming before in my college days, and we didn’t have that environment as well. Along with my job, my schedule was very hectic. With late-night calls and a lot of workload in a startup, it was becoming troublesome to cover my assignments and classes at Programming Pathshala. But I was sure that I just cannot miss this chance to learn and excel.
There came a question?
Should I quit my Job to prepare 100%?
I had some savings to sustain myself in Bangalore. I believed that if nothing works out, I will at least be able to get a similar job even after a few months.Taking a leap of faith, I decided to quit my job to focus solely on learning.
I devoted my entire time to practice more coding problems related to data structures and algorithms. I worked hard with the assignments provided at Programming Pathshala and apart from that I also tried problems from daily challenges on Leet-Code which was good for revision.
When I was solving problems from leetcode, idea was to practice figuring out the solution from a mixed bag of problems. I realised that most of the variations of questions were covered in the assignments of Programming Pathsala. I was also practicing to think of multiple approaches to a single problem.
I consistently grew with lectures of vivekanand Vivek and Bharat and continuous guidance of Anoop Sir. Apart from Data Structures and Algorithms, other topics such as system design were brilliantly covered in the course. Though I had one year of experience in System design, but Deepak sir’s class made me look at the topic from a different perspective.
We also had a wonderful peer group here, with Shaswat, Srikanth, Ekesh and Ashutosh, we used to discuss so many approaches to a single problem which proved to be extremely helpful during the interviews. Together we also worked on projects for interviews, we also built a peer group portal during our project as part of the program. I got to work in the backend part of it and it was a very challenging yet incredible experience.
Programming Pathshala also helped me in getting referrals, though I couldn’t succeed in most of them, but I got four offers in the last four months.
My first referral was at Squareboat where Deepak sir’s System design class came in very handy as they asked me to design Twitter from scratch and with Deepak sir we had already discussed such a use case. It was not the best offer aspired for and I decided to not to take the Job offer although there was constant news of job cuts everywhere during the pandemic.
I come from a small town in Bihar. I had a deadline from my family to come back from bangalore after December 2020 and prepare for a government job and do UPSC in case I wouldn’t get any good offer.
Here comes a surprising happy ending!
But finally, it all got sorted when I got an offer from NAS Daily. The team comprised of members from ex-UBER, ex-GRAB and I think it couldn’t have got any better.
I am thankful to Programming Pathshala for the support I received throughout my preparation journey and am happy with the way it has been growing.
PPa is good for value, I get a lot of pings from people asking for reviews and I tell them all that it is value for money. It is much better than other programs in the market which are priced ridiculously high. If you are planning to begin or accelerate your tech career then it’s worth giving time.
Most of my peers from Programming Pathshala, are currently in a much better place than we were back before joining Programming Pathshala. Initially, we were tensed if we all will good jobs, considering the pandemic. But at the end, we all settled in good places.
