A Journey to Microsoft
By: Anshul Singhal
Tags: Journey, Microsoft, Software, Interviews And Insights, Engineering

I failed to crack India’s top engineering universities and had to satisfy with one of the private engineering colleges of Delhi but frankly speaking, it was just a half try and due to not having any other aim in life, I decided to pursue engineering.

A journey from tier-3 college to Microsoft

College Days

I was so happy when I was starting my college life as I wanted to enjoy my college days fully. I have not thought of working for Microsoft, Adobe any time in the college as I knew these companies hire from IIT’s and the top companies of my college were Infosys, Sopra and I heard that Samsung is also coming for the first time. I was so happy when I got placed into Infosys and then Samsung who recruited only 4 students from my college.

Samsung: First Company

In my initial days I was thinking like I am the only guy from a random private college in the IIT’s and NIT’s group. I worked as a release engineer for a year and then moved to system engineering mainly Android kernel development. After some years, I was bored in system development and was looking for a change into App development. Honestly saying, it is a big challenge if you want to change your profile and you are from a no-name college. So I started reading blogs and talking to other teammates about the study material and their interview experiences of different companies. I buy a Narasimha karumanchi book to get started. It is a good book to understand data structure concepts. I started applying to different companies after 3 months but getting the calls for interviews was another big challenge. Finally, I got a call from Amazon and I thought I can clear the interview as I have studied a lot but I was rejected in the first round and I thought like what is left for studying but who knows it was just the beginning of rejections or you can say the beginning of success. Further, I was rejected in OLX, Adobe, Spectrum, ION trading, etc.. but after each rejection, I was deep-diving into the competitive programming world and now I was learning from geeksforgeeks, hackerrank, etc. It was a time when my resume got rejected by Microsoft and Google. Finally, I got the offer from Synechron technologies followed by Siemens and Cadence Noida. I joined Siemens Noida in App development profile.

Siemens

Honestly saying, it was a great feeling when I was joining Siemens and the profile that I always wanted for but at the same time I was furious too due to not having relevant work experience and honestly, my manager was having a lot of expectations from me. It took some time and a lot of hard work to learn new technologies. I filed a patent in Siemens and was a runner up in one of the yearly contest. After a year, I got an offer from Oracle in the cloud domain.

Oracle

It was a time when I got a good exposure to Oracle cloud and seriously I applied my previous learning to a new project. I learned a lot about Oracle cloud technologies. Honestly, Oracle is one of the best companies in work life balance. Things were going good but I was thinking to get into tier-1 companies as a next step. After a year, I started applying to FAANG like companies and unfortunately, I got rejected from Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs but luckily I got an offer from Adobe Noida. I was down leveled but did not matter much as it was one of my dream company. It was such a great feeling to join a company that rejected me previously.

Adobe: Game Changer

Adobe is known for taking care of its employees a lot and is one of the best companies in the world. A huge Noida campus with a lot of amenities attracts most of the engineers in NCR. I got an opportunity to develop a product from scratch and deliver it end to end. During my 2.5 years tenure, I learned a lot from product design to development to release. I made some really good friends over here. Now I was thinking to do something more exciting and started preparing for interviews. This time I was looking for something bigger than I achieved so far, so my preparation should have been at the top. It was the first time when I was getting interview calls from all the top companies without even applying such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Atlassian, etc. Unfortunately, it was the covid time and hiring was frozen in most of the companies, and the remaining were taking interviews virtually. This time I interviewed with five companies and cracked Microsoft and Atlassian and reached the final round for Google and Facebook. Honestly, I was recalling the time when my resume was rejected at a screening in these companies and now I am cracking some of them and reaching the finals in the remaining.

Microsoft: Remote Company

It was the covid time when I exit Adobe and joined Microsoft and the experience of exiting a company and onboarding to a new company was unique. I have not thought of working for Microsoft back in college. The journey helped me to dream big and now I have found a way to achieve it. Now I have some bigger dreams and I think it is just the beginning of chasing them.

Interviews cracked so far:

Samsung, Siemens, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, Cadence, Atlassian, Synechron, Infosys, HCL.

Life is like a marathon. Don’t stop. Continue moving till your last breath….