$65k Bay Area WITCH "SWE" - Going nowhere and feel like just giving up on life
About me: BSCS from random unranked state school YOE: Few months US Citizen TC: $65k/year, living with parents Need to stay in the Bay Area for family reasons WITCH = Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Congizant, HCL. I work for one of these companies (1st job out of college). The client where i work at is Apple. I have basically done nothing of value here that counts as experience i can put on my resume. I have ended up doing very little dev work (just some Java and JS) and mainly just some operations work here and there. Many days there is simply nothing for me to do. I want to leave but i have nothing that i can put on my resume to show for my time here. My leetcode progress has been slow. I just really suck at these questions. I know i need to work a lot harder (multiple hours a day) if i want to get to the point where i can solve medium which seems to be the bare minimum for the Bay Area. At this point I will even take a minimum wage job if it is what i need to do to get some actual dev experience on my resume. The longer I stay here, the longer I stagnate and gain no skills. What do i even do in my situation? I am more interested in backend than frontend. So is my best bet to do 2 - 3 in depth side projects and put them on my resume to get interviews, then a ton of LC to pass the interviews? I will be going for the easiest companies possible of course (non-tech companies) rather than FAANG type companies. Thinking of also attending meetups to network and practice LC with others. Anyone have any advice? It would be appreciated
Leetcode at work when there’s nothing for you to do.
Wish I still lived in the Bay Area, I’d be open to networking with you for support. Just hang in there and stay focused!
I appreciate it man. I'll admit that i have been lazy about it because at times it feels like such a big hurdle to overcome but I am done messing around and won't quit until i make it happen
Leetcode hard son
Leetcode will help, other way is open source contributions. Open source contributions into one of your interesting projects will help you understand how it is used etc... you can start with basic bug fixes on it.
Dude just look for another job, even if with a putzy start up- even another 20k with a company where you do real work would be an improvement.
I think you have the right plan. Be persistent and execute
Try for conversion from WITCH to Apple
They dont convert from what i know. If you want to join Apple, you actually have to leave Apple entirely for 6 months before you are eligible to become a full time at Apple
Take an udemy course about interviewing as a swe once you get comfortable with lc. That will help you with hacking the structure
Put more effort into leetcoding as you have free time at work. Apple on your resume will land you some interviews. Nobody looks for experience in the resume these days, just put whichever projects you touched there.
Smaller companies do look at the experience from my recent interview experience and actually a couple of companies rejected me for QA positions since my experience is in Dev or they just lied for the reason of rejection
Thanks. Technically im not an Apple employee, I am a WITCH employee. Any recommendations on how i should phrase it on my resume to maximize the "Apple" and minimize the "WITCH"?
Network to get interview. LC to pass them.
Will definitely network hard as possible to get interviews. My biggest problem is extremely weak resume b/c ive done nothing at this job. Side projects on github would be the best way to remedy this right?