How I made it to Amazon after 2 years in Industry?
By: Programming Pathshala
Tags: Data Structures, Codingbootcamp, Software Engineering, Coding Interviews, Amazon

I studied from a normal regional college near Hyderabad, you might not know the name of and applied for innumerable companies in last two years, before bagging offers from Oracle and Amazon.

Hi, I am Srikanth, narrating my story for you to pick some cues for yourself, if you are also on the journey of getting into the best of software companies or be an incredible engineer.

In my college, only TCS, Accenture and Infosys like service based companies visited the campus.

My college did not have much of coding culture but one of my senior guided me to learn Data Structures and Algortihms.

I got through my first internship through Linkedin in a tech company at Hyderabad and continued there as Associate Software Developer, where I worked on frontend but I wanted to go further in my career. In the same year, I applied to amazon but could not get through the Interviews.

I joined Programming Pathshala and in the admission Interview with Vivek Sir, I told him that I want to make it to Amazon. Before that I used to do random questions from GeeksforGeeks or other platforms but could only think of brute force approaches.

At Programming Pathshala, Vivek Sir taught each topic very elaborately and built the concept from very fundamentals while Bharat sir used to be comparatively bit fast-paced but I liked it. Both are excellent teachers and under their guidance, I developed my own intuition to approach any new problem of Data Structures and Algorithms.

I made proper notes, highlighted questions and prepared my own repository of all the questions I got into assignments and contests at Programming Pathshala. Along with this, I sincerely attended the classes at Renaissance and later used to code all the approaches that were discussed during the class.

Apart from Data Structures and Algorithms, I also did System Design & Low-level design classes, in which Deepak sir made us dive deep into engineering of large scale systems. He has previously worked at Amazon, Google and Rubrik with 6+ years of Industry experience, which came handy while discussing case studies, research papers and concepts in detail.

But fortune is not always in our favour, in December 2020, my sibling got severely ill and I had to skip my classes for around a month. Days felt all gloomy, but it was all thanks to my teachers and the peer group at Programming Pathshala — Subhashish, Ujjawal and Shaswat, for keeping me motivated throughout the time and helping me cover all the pending topics.

Together, we did a lot of questions and grew up by supporting and learning from each other’s mistakes. This peer group helped me a lot and filled the gap of not having a coding culture during my college time. In the end, Shubhashish made it to NasDaily Singapore, Shaswat to Amazon and Ujjawal to ShipRocket.

I gave three mock-interviews. Interestingly, Deepak took my mock-interview for ZestMoney on System design. Although I couldn’t clear ZestMoney and got rejected after a tie. But I got a detailed feedback from Deepak, that further helped me in my Amazon interview preparation.

Along with this, my mock interview with Aarth and further discussions with him proved very valuable in finding my mistakes and improving upon them. He boosted my confidence and also gave me relevant pointers on leadership principles which proved extremely beneficial in the later stages of the interview rounds at amazon.

The main advice I will give to my juniors is — consistency. I will also suggest to solve previous problems for revision. If we have really understood a topic then we should be able to solve it at any point of time.

At Programming Pathshala, I became more curious. I want to dive deeper into engineering and gain more knowledge. For career, I don’t have many aspirations for myself as of now and my parents are satisfied with my happiness. I will work on my next project with Amazon and will think over other things later. I would love to mentor students at PPa, it will be great to contribute to Programming Pathshala back.