Vedant

I joined my KPMG as an AWS DevOps Engineer in 2022 But some mishap in project assignment put me in a project that was using GCP, not AWS. Instead of complaining about it, I took the opportunity to learn GCP. I was in a project with a hard deadline. I took that as a challenge. Worked till 2 AM for 2 months. Delivered that project within the time limit. It helped me learn 2 years worth of GCP in just 2 months. And that changed my perspective about learning. I understood that you can learn anything if you’re motivated enough. Deadlines help you overcome your procrastination. Sometimes the “wrong” project is exactly what you need.

If you are applying for a job in a portal, you should send a thoughtful cold LinkedIn DM to anyone who could be the hiring manager. You will DEFINITELY stand out, I'm still always shocked by how little I get this. If they aren't the hiring manager, but you wrote a good message, there's a good chance they'll forward you to the right person.

Corporate lessons from 5 yoe. 1. Document everything, this will be immensely useful for appraisal and will also serve as notes to thyself. 2. Try to maximize salary as much as possible, learning will keep on happening, but earning is most important. 3. Respect your time and boundaries, if you don't, no one else will. 4. Make sure to utilise all leaves, you gain nothing by keeping them unused . 5. Give and seek feedback as much as possible, this will help you grow quickly.

You read a DSA problem How do you easily identify that it is a 2 pointers approach question? Here are few tips: The array or string is: >Already sorted >Or can be sorted without breaking the problem Example: Find pair with sum = X in sorted array You’re asked about pairs/triplets/subarrays: >pairs : 2 pointers >triplets : 2 pointers inside a loop >subarrays : sliding window Keywords that sometimes gives the hint: >closest >pair >sorted >subarray >continuous >longest/shortest window >remove duplicates Sliding Window == Two Pointer: If the problem says: >longest substring >smallest subarray >at most k

I fell in love with this quote: "No matter your age, you'll always wish you started younger, but today is the youngest you'll ever be. So start today."

This guy literally dropped the best mindset shift you’ll ever hear

Solved 2 mediums today and felt like a genius Then remembered I literally froze mid-interview yesterday on the exact same pattern Interviewer asked "what's the time complexity of this" It was a backtracking question I said O(n) He said "are you sure" He said "look at how many branches you're exploring" I said "O(n) but exponential" I don't know what that means I think I invented a new complexity class The thing is I knew it. Solved the exact same problem at 2am the night before. Wrote 2^n in my notes and everything Alone with no one watching I'm fine. The second someone's looking my brain just goes quiet So I stopped practicing problems and started practicing being watched Timed. Explained out loud. Judged. That's the only thing that actually helping me rn.

I appeared for Intuit's SWE hiring process 2 months ago. Here is one the OA problem based on DSA. Other 2 problems were basic SQL and Bash scripting. (soon i will also share my entire interview process, stay tuned)

"Do not learn to code" is the worst career advice of the decade. People are telling college students to skip Computer Science because AI will just automate it all. Andrew Ng just killed this myth at Stanford with a brilliant analogy. When he tried to generate images with Midjourney, he typed: "make pretty pictures of robots" and got garbage. His collaborator, however, understood Art History. He knew the exact vocabulary of lighting, genre, and palette. He spoke the "language of art," and generated masterpieces. Andrew Ng is seeing the exact same thing happen in software engineering right now. AI didn't replace the need to understand Computer Science. It made Computer Science the required vocabulary to control the AI. If you don't understand how computers actually work, you are just typing "make a pretty app" into Cursor and shipping fragile, unscalable logic. Here is Andrew Ng's exact hiring hierarchy today: Level 1: 10 years of experience, but codes by hand (He won't hire them). Level 2: Fresh college grad, but highly fluent in AI-assisted coding (He hires them over the 10-year veteran). Level 3 (God Tier): Deeply understands CS fundamentals AND uses AI-assisted coding. When humanity went from punch cards to keyboards, coding got easier, and more people coded. We are at that exact inflection point again. AI doesn't replace fundamentals. It multiplies them.

i often think about this..

One of my friends just proved this to me. Before marriage, he was taking real risks. He would work after office, study on weekends, switch stacks, interview aggressively, and say yes to uncomfortable opportunities. Back then he was making around 9 LPA. Then he pushed it to 16 LPA. Then to 28 LPA. That growth did not happen by accident. It happened because he was building his life on purpose. Now he is married, earns around 36 LPA, and life is more stable. But the risk appetite is gone. He is not lazy by any means. But his responsibilities are real now. EMI. Family planning. Parents. School fees in future. Need for certainty. Now every career move is filtered through safety first. That is why I keep telling software engineers: the best time to take career risk is when your downside is still small. Learn the hard stack. Switch jobs. Move to product. Build in public. Try remote. Take the startup role. Ask for more ownership. Work on that scary distributed systems problem. Do all of it early. Because later, even if your salary is higher, your freedom to experiment can become much lower. The longer you wait to build the life you want, the more likely you are to inherit a life designed by default. And default life is usually: decent salary, low excitement, high regret. Build early. Take risks while your life is still light. A lot of engineers think they have time. Most do. But not as much as they think.

At my first internship, our CTO told us to learn GraphQL in one day. At that time, GPT had just launched and didn’t have much context, so it wasn’t very helpful. Jumping directly from REST APIs to GraphQL was honestly overwhelming. When I first looked at the docs, it felt hard to understand. So how did I actually learn it? I still remember my approach: 1. I explored open-source repositories that were using GraphQL 2. I read the documentation and then matched it with real implementations in those repos. I did this the entire night and somehow managed to build a small project using GraphQL. The next day, I showed it to my CTO, and he was genuinely impressed with the implementation. Since then, I’ve followed the same approach to learn anything new rather than watching random videos, I focus on real-world code and hands-on implementation.

A person who avoids embarrassment will usually avoid growth too. The same situations that threaten your image are often the ones that expand your life.

One of the most powerful tools that successful people use is visualisation. Imagining an event increases confidence, as if it already happened. The more detailed the mental image, the more the brain treats it as memory rather than fantasy. The thing you're most certain about is the one you have rehearsed the most.

𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 30+ LPA 𝗶𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮 Atlassian 40–70 LPA Postman 35–60 LPA BrowserStack 30–50 LPA Chargebee 30–45 LPA Hasura 35–60 LPA Razorpay 30–45 LPA Juspay 30–50 LPA Groww 30–45 LPA Cred 30–50 LPA Snowflake 50–90 LPA Databricks 45–80 LPA Confluent 40–70 LPA Twilio 30–50 LPA Okta 25–45 LPA Elastic 30–50 LPA Palantir 35–60 LPA CrowdStrike 30–55 LPA Figma 30–50 LPA Redis 25–45 LPA MongoDB 25–45 LPA HashiCorp 25–45 LPA Brex 30–55 LPA Plaid 30–55 LPA Stripe 35–60 LPA Coinbase 30–55 LPA Airbnb (India roles) 30–50 LPA Workday 20–35 LPA ServiceNow 20–35 LPA Skyscanner 20–35 LPA Tower Research 80 LPA – 2 Cr DE Shaw 50 LPA – 1 Cr Goldman Sachs 30–45 LPA Everyone runs after FAANG… but the real bag is scattered here. Bookmark this before it disappears.

An underrated tip to get more shortlisted Candidates often miss this: You don’t get interviews directly anymore. There’s always a filter. A process. A decision before the call. And your pitch is what decides if you move forward. Yet most people do this: “Hi, I’m looking for QA opportunities. I have 6+ years of experience. Please consider me for any relevant roles.” Instead, do this: “Hi, I saw you're hiring for a Senior QA role. I have 6+ years in test automation, currently leading QA for a fintech product where I reduced regression time by 40% using Playwright. I’ve also set up CI pipelines for faster releases. Happy to share more if this aligns.” The difference: - One asks for a chance - The other proves relevance Underrated hack: When you network, don’t ask for a chance. Make it obvious why you deserve one. Comment your pitch below and I’ll give you honest feedback.

When Kobe Bryant said his insane level of confidence came from knowing he’d done all he could to prepare, it taught me that anytime I’m nervous it means I didn’t prepare enough.

Hard truth no one tells you is: You have to go through a grinding phase at least once in your life to succeed. And the trick is, the earlier you face it, the easier your life becomes. If you study hard and build a strong base in school, you sweep through difficult entrance exams later -> better opportunities. Otherwise, you’ve to grind during your JEE years and you get good opportunities later without much hustle. Miss that? you’ve to work hard for 4 years in college and you get to start your career with a good job. Miss that too? you’ve to juggle between your job and studies for better switch, much harder. The thing is, life keeps giving you chances. But the more you delay, more you lose the compounding effect and difficult it gets. Choose your hustle. Act fast. Act now.

STOP REHEARSING YOUR FAILURES IN YOUR HEAD. START VISUALIZING YOUR WINS!

“Practice any art… no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.” - McKellen reciting Vonnegut