Big giants vs My dream project

Early in my 6th semester I had to make a choice, either prepare for the big giants like Google, Microsoft and the likes or work on my dream project which I had always dreamt of and was my goal even before joining engineering, to build something of my own.

I did some analysis before making a call, let me share in-depth what went through my mind then.

Option 1 — Joining big giants

To crack big giants being from tier 3 college you not only have to master the DSA (Data Structures & Algorithms) round but also get your resume shortlisted! Which is the problem that top tier students don’t have to go through, they just have to focus on the former.

Now, to get my resume shortlisted I had 2 methods
1. Get referrals —
In order to do that you had to network with people working in these companies and the best way according to me to do that is to reach out to your college alumni working there or the tougher way is to cold message strangers over LinkedIn who are working there and ask them for a referral. But this process can take months if you want to build an organic relationship, fortunately I had contacts with some alumni already and had prepared for this since my 2nd year so I could manage to get referral easily. Yes, a viable option.

2. Become a top coder in a competitive programming platform —
I had about ~6 months of time in my hand to get really good at competitive coding, but that wasn’t really enough to top the charts of any platform (its possible, but I didn’t really want to invest every minute of my day solving problems defined by people whose only outcome was dopamine hits for every passing testcase). No, not a viable option.

Summing up, all the hardships that were in sight were

Hardships
1. Get a referral
2. Work hard and become top in competitive programming
3. Practice mock interviews to ace all types of questions

Now assuming I worked hard for the next months and managed to crack a big giant so what would be the outcome of it?

Outcomes
1. Big fat package + Awesome culture
2. Big add-on to my resume
3. Impressed college
4. Well settled life
5. Parents, friends and relatives happy

Now, those look like a perfect “life-set” kind of outcomes to anyone, but though attractive they only are short term fantasies for me. You’ll be amazed with your package maybe for the first 1 year and then get used to it, same for the lifestyle, and same for the everyone else around you, the dopamine hit stays temporary but after that the main reality starts seeping in, one of the main reasons I wanted to become a Computer Science Engineer was to build amazing products which impacted the lives of people and make a great living out of it. In this career path I could only do the latter, while the former took a backseat. Sure, someone may argue that you can always pursue building products or join a startup later but the problem with that is we humans are addicted to comfort, would you like to go back to earning 8LPA after being showered with 24LPA and be able to afford the same lifestyle which you were newly accustomed to?

For me, impact + good utilisation of my skills for a decent package was all I was looking for + opportunity to work with amazingly driven people. The long term benefits of working with amazing people is that 10 years down the line these people would be flourishing in their respective domain, i.e. your and your team’s growth would be exponential, can you say the same for a corporate job?(best case it would be a steep linear growth)

Option 2 — Working on my project

I had been fostering a project idea in my mind for long almost since my 1st year and over the last few years I had gained enough skills to bring it to reality, now I had to decide whether I should do it or not.

Hardships
1. Building a product single handedly could take a lot of time and effort
2. Spending entire time on this means not brushing up on DSA
3. Missing out on big tech companies completely

Outcomes
1. If the project is successful, I can take it forward fulltime as a startup
2. If it doesn’t work out, I can use it to land jobs in good startups
3. By building in public and showcasing my learnings I can grow my social media reach on LinkedIn and Twitter
4. I would have gained good system design knowledge which is a round in majority of startups(they do this round instead of DSA)
5. I would have developed the confidence to do take home projects for startup interviews

Now, if I carefully go through both the above options, the 2nd one is something whose outcomes align with my long term goals but sacrifices on a comfortable life additionally increasing the risk of not getting a job soon through campus placements or other traditional ways.

But for the 1st one, I get everything a society would love me to have, but not what I want to actually have. I would miss out on the perfect night’s sleep pondering over “Should I have built that project?”

Ultimately, I chose the 2nd option.

This post is from the series of “My Placement Journey”, to read the other articles in the series please go to the parent link here.