Career growth reflection

I just wanted to write this out because I have a bit of time…I’ve been self reflecting on what I achieved over the course of 4 years with regards to my software engineer career in the Bay Area.

2 years ago I was a software engineer at PayPal earning 96K TC straight out of college with B.S. in CS. I actually didn’t do well in college which is why I accepted such a shitty lowball offer of 86K no RSU or bonus (which eventually moved up 10K in 2 years). But I thought if I worked my ass off, I could move up fast. I did learn a lot on my own and worked pretty hard but nobody noticed. I got forcefully re-orged 4 times.
I worked under Bill Scott’s org. I hated my last team. Manager was super political and verbally abusive, but I couldn’t prove it. Fuck this guy. I wish I had a recorder on me at the time so I could’ve recorded all the BS he was spouting and send it off to HR. I got laid-off by him soon. I should’ve just quit in fashion looking back.

Since I didn’t really get to work on a lot of development at PayPal, my system design skills and raw coding suffered. I needed to work hard on algo+DS. Also my experience was in NodeJS. Java engineers were more sought after/versatile than NodeJS engineers. I couldn’t really aim for front-end because I didn’t know CSS and HTML. Since I was unemployed+inexperienced, many companies overlooked my resume.

In about a week after my layoff I joined a series A startup. They offered me a TC of 125K and barely interviewed me properly…which was a red flag in hindsight. But I accepted because I didn’t have a choice. I know I did the best of my abilities here because I shipped code and delivered. 2 months later I got randomly fired by my manager a day after our pre-Christmas holiday party. He said that he expected me to be more senior. He said I didn’t deserve my TC given my skillset.

I cried a lot that Christmas and spent a month thinking I should change careers. But I got really pissed and did not want to give up. I joined a coding organization. I spent the next 4 months working my ass off and I finally started going onsite to companies consistently. I got offers from Jet.com, Uber, and Amazon AWS. I almost got FB via family friend referral but I messed up with 2 questions onsite (bullshit quick select question and divide without using division question). Unfortunately Google didn’t want to interview me and Netflix and Apple said no to my resume (It was really difficult to get companies to notice me at the time).

I chose Amazon in Bay Area. TC was 176K. In just 1 year and 3 months (last month) I got promoted to SDEII. TC is now 240K. People in my team highly respect me. SDE 3s even come to me for coding advice and help. Manager takes me to happy hour and sushi for lunch on occasion. And most importantly, I'm happy with my high impact work.

This is my journey of the last 4 years in the software industry. I feel incredibly grateful at my career today. Please don’t give up. Just work at it. My only advice is when something unjust happens, just step away immediately. Don’t compromise. Believe in yourself and just LeetCode+Hackerrank all the way towards your goals.