Long story short. In past couple of weeks, I bankrupted my life by burning up 680k which is my entire current saving/retirement fund or 20yr saving at current rate. I don’t want to talk much about why i did what i did or dwell on past actions that I cant change. As much as I am depressed, Only way I see cleaning up this mess is to break in to fang or similar companies and eventually start a business. I am 37 yr old married single income earning family with toddlers working within avionics/embedded field. BTW I got the burden of dealing with H1B restrictions as well. I had 13yrs exp and #career #career My TC is 130k in a small midwest town with decent benifits (recently got bonus cuts, increment cuts & 10% salary cut as well) where I can save 30k a year. Personally, I feel my current skills are pretty bad for fang as we barely write one line of code before talking about it for a month. However, I am well respected in my company and was counted upon as someone who will always fix the issues. Ironically, I think we are full of shit and hate my job but never cared much to change the situation until my nest egg is taken away. So I will sit down & learn algos and practise leetcode for 4 months. I need few good souls to direct me in right path to effectively use my time to do a focussed prep. Eventually help me with Resume, referrals as such....I want to fucking run away from embedded field and find something in ML applications or prototyping.
Start doing it, there is no easy way into any field.
I’ve only saved $100K and I’m in my 40s.
Honestly, I feel bad that I blew my savings but really on other side I feel no indifference on my day to day life. It’s just that feeling is worse than reality. You will do well sir, Good luck!
Thanks, but I’m not so sure now. Thought I hit my big break getting into Airbnb then got laid off the other day.
What does the embedded field have to do with it? I wrote 4000 lines of embedded C++ in the last month alone. With respect to the plan that u want. Start with the fundementals of cs and solve LC problems related to the topic you are studying. Choose good quality questions and do around 300. Start applying and expect to fail in the first few tries.
I just mean that I am not that interested in embedded field. In avionics we tend to keep our code base/logic much simpler to avoid bugs and tend to go through heck of investigation & process work before changing even smallest stuff. Sure, I will focus on fundamentals. When you say good quality, how to define/identify quality on LC?
You can sort on LC by the most solved questions or the most frequent questions by each company. This is a good quality list because these questions target a specific area u need to know or study
You have 600k + savings to burn ? What did you do to burn that ?
Maybe gambling idk, but it doesn't seem like he wants to talk about it
Maybe options trading
Hey man, sorry for your loss. To make you feel better .. I'm 30 and have only 150K saved. Not that I'm a bad saver but I come from a 3rd world country where my TC was 24K and have been in the states for only couple years making 100k TC (you know embedded pay sucks) Anyway, I was in your shoes and I can help you .. I recently got offers from Amazon, FB and apple and can tell you anything you want. I took about 2 months of preparation and solved just 50 LC to crack the interviews and didn't fail any. Not that I'm smart or anything but I think it was god blessing then some hard work... embedded expertise are required in all big tech companies and it will help you tremendously to focus on your strengths. There is no point running away from embedded after 13 years. You can make a switch but ML jump would require some education in addition to interview preparation to support it, I love machine learning and computer vision and do my side projects on them but no big FAANG will take you seriously for a ML application without a master in it or some solid projects/BG knowledge, for embedded they will compete heavily for you though. Just my 2 cents.
Hey, thanks man. My first job is also similar to you. Can I DM you to get your email or something to follow up as i prepare. Yeah I am pursuing ML masters currently part time.
Yes sure go ahead :)
Dude you have 13 years experience. Your problem sounds like Midwest, faang or not, going to a tech hub will yield more money. Also going the management or architecture track is an option. There is more to it then heads down engineer. If you wanna do a startup, you need to be in a tech hub, and start networking asap. Faang on the resume will help, but not nearly as much as a great network
Yeah, I am currently at entry level management. Your thoughts are exactly what I am hoping to achieve. Thanks for validating.
Don't distract yourself with mentors before you have done 300 Leetcode. That's the first step. By the time you commit 300 LC solutions on GitHub, you will be better prepared for the mentoring and referral phase.
Sure, thanks for the insight