The College Years
You've always been an ambitious person and have known that tech was your passion from a young age. You remember being the kid in every class who would fix the teacher's computer problems, in 5th grade the IT guy even said they should hire you. You know he was only half joking. Your parents still call you up for advice whenever their "internet is off", you smirk and know that their router just had to be restarted and they don't understand MAC addresses. It's okay, you're destined for this. While other kids were playing dodgeball in middle school you watched The Social Network.. twice. You know you want to be the next Mark (you don't even need to say his last name, Mark always means Mark Zuckerberg). You've considered dropping out of UC Berkeley, but you don't know how to tell your parents. Only two more semesters anyway.
You've read all the posts on WSO and Blind- SWE is clearly superior to IB. You know your code is going to change the world and have a real, tangible impact. What is advising M&A anyway? Yes, you take an initial hit on comp but you'll have WLB to make up for it. No all nighters for you (except tonight). You're grinding Leetcode #42- Trapping Rain Water. You've memorized the patterns, you can even do Hard questions within 40 minutes. At this pace, you're even considering gunning for an elite trading firm (think JS/ HRT/ Citadel). $400k out of college here you go.
On Campus Recruiting
You're interviewing at Google right now, just to warm up. All the plebes think Google is S Tier but you know they lowball comp, nowhere near what Citadel will pay. You're even given an easy Leetcode question- binary search. You almost want to laugh, this is going to be easier than you thought. The interviewer asks you clarifying questions, but you realize you're missing something. Google doesn't let you run your code so you don't know where your error is. Panic sweeps over and you break into a cold sweat.. this cannot be happening. You run out of time and you know you've failed. Rejection email comes in 42 minutes later. You still haven't gotten a response from the other FAANG companies yet, nor any trading firm. You're considering Microsoft at this point, you feel ashamed.
Finally, a glimmer of hope. Amazon invites you to an accelerated interview process. You know it's because you're special, they recognize your talent. They're not desperate like all of those haters on Blind say, Amazon pays more than Google anyway. You know Zach down the hall failed the bar raiser round at Amazon, finally you can prove you're better than him.
Two weeks later you get the offer letter, realizing your TC is heavily vested in the latter years. It's fine, you can project what the stock is worth and tell your friends you're making a quarter million dollars. Life is good, you can turn off your beat up Macbook Pro and go have a drink. You don't mind that $28 vodka soda right now, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what you're going to be earning soon.
Performance Improvement... Plan?
It's been 8 months since you started your orientation, which was a joke. Those Youtube videos lied.. you're not making smoothies and chilling on the daybed coding your brilliant ideas. This is the fifth week straight you've had a daily panic attack in the bathroom, your manager refuses to talk to you directly and it's been like this since you missed that project deadline over a month ago. Daily standups are anxiety inducing, you've been stuck on this ticket for almost a week now. You knew Python well but now it's all Java, and the codebase is a mess. You told your mom that you're working on containerizing EC2 instances through this amazing service called EKS, you're working on their Elastic Kubernetes Service. Most of your friends can't even pronounce Kubernetes, you're a technical genius. She thought you were working on shipping containers for Amazon deliveries and asked why you studied Computer Science. It's almost as bad as Max who also works at Amazon, but as a delivery driver. Your friend group back home thinks you both work together. It's okay.. you'll be a billionaire one day and that's what matters.
Chris, your manager, schedules a 30 minute meeting on your calendar starting in 10 minutes. You break into a cold sweat, and then join. It looks like you just got out of a shower with your clothes on, those unhealthy meals don't help your appearance either. Thankfully you work remotely or else HR would be on your case to finally take a shower. You hear the dreaded words.. PIP. You just got PIPed. Performance. Improvement. Plan. This means that your manager thinks you're not worth it at Amazon. This means getting fired. Oh no.
You go home, and by home I mean stand up from your desk and taking a shower (finally) and then getting some sleep. You can beat it, you can prove to them you will work harder and be a productive employee at Amazon. You're not weak. You get a call the next morning from Zach, he's awfully chipper. He joined a startup (he couldn't cut it for FAANG), but they just sold. They generously gifted him options, so now he just made $187,000 pre tax plus his base salary of $130,000. You question your life decisions, but you know you're getting better experience at Amazon. You decline his invite for drinks, you need to focus.
Crypto, DeFi, and Web3
One month of severance. Not bad, it's about $8,500 post tax. You were let go of Amazon. You know who else was fired? Mark Cuban, twice. You don't need an employer anyway, you're going to be an entrepreneur. You've been listening to GaryV daily now, you know what it takes. Crypto is the future. You're going to take the world by storm now, the entire Blockchain World won't see you coming.
You know Java now so you can easily pick up Kotlin to make a mobile app. You're thinking of an app where people can monitor the prices of various coins, have a digital wallet, and get a newsfeed all in one place. But yours is special, the UI you've designed is killer and it'll be based on Web3 to support your DeFi Crypto app. You call it Wall3t.ly, it's brilliant. You know it's competitive, so you want some help with it. YCombinator is the absolute best shot you have at this. You know you'll get in- UC Berkeley CS Major with a 3.92 GPA, ex-FAANG, now working on cutting edge technology. YC Applications were due a week ago but you know Instacart got in late too. You submit your application, confident they'll call you within a day or two.
SWE is paradise.
