From zero campus placements to Adobe: my 2014 job hunt

So, yesterday my TCS joining letter finally arrived! Joining date: 19 January 2015. Months after their offer letter, and well after I’d started at Adobe. LOL. I posted it on Facebook with “No thanks, TCS” and the route I actually took this year:

TCS -> PGS -> Tricon Infotech -> Vinsol -> Webyog -> Adobe

The joining letter, eight months after the offer.

In the same post I wrote that the first interview you clear is still something else. So I thought, why not write this whole year down properly before it shrinks to “and then I got a job”.

A college no company came to

I’m from the 2014 batch of B.Tech CSE at GGSIPU, Delhi. (What I did with those four years outside class is its own post.) Our batch had ZERO campus placements. Zero! Because no company came to recruit. So all we had were open drives and combined recruitment drives at other colleges, anywhere from BPIT in Rohini to PIET in Panipat. Each one took 10 to 14 hours, and trust me, at the end it never felt like they’d evaluated every answer sheet.

So the job hunt started well before the degree was done.

A 2am mail to Wingify

At the end of January, in my final semester, Wingify ran an overnight hackathon at their office in Netaji Subhash Place, hardly 15 minutes from my home in Rohini. And I missed it by a day. :(

So a little after 2am on 1 February, I wrote to their careers address instead, with the subject line “DAMN ! I missed the Overnight Hackathon ! :(”. I opened by admitting this probably wasn’t the best time to write to a careers department, “while you guys must be having a blast there in Hackathon”, and then pitched myself for “Software Engineer -Web Technologies” plus “a bit of Web Designer”. What I had to offer:

• Microsoft Student Partner for my college, running workshops on cloud computing and hybrid apps
• #6 in India on DVLUP, Nokia’s Windows Phone developer programme (#5 the week before)
• Microsoft Certified in exam 70-480, Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3
• apps on Windows Phone 7/8, Windows 8, Nokia S40 and Android
• freelance websites: BitSnapper, EventShare.in and a handmade-gifts store for a client

And near the end: “Now afterall, Who doesn’t love Free lunches ;)”.

Four days later, they replied with a first-round technical screen:

Design a RESTful API for an online store which can be used to manage different products.

They wanted a design document. The API had to support adding, deleting, editing and searching products, and only authenticated users could touch items. The consumer was a mobile developer building an app on top of it, and example scenarios with request and response objects would be a plus.

Before writing anything, I sent back my assumptions. My example store was an “iStore” selling Apple devices, with a collection URI (/products) and an element URI (/products/iphone), four product lines (iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac), and attributes like price, stock, colour and storage. Guests could only view. Registered users could search, use a cart and check out. Only a logged-in admin could add, edit or remove products. Then my real question: did they want just the design document (DFDs, ER diagrams, an SRS, the full college-project treatment :P) or the API itself as well?

Their answer on 10 February was one line: send the code itself, “keeping in mind high scale ie large no of requests being made to it.” So I sent them the code. Nothing came of it.

TCS, at someone else’s campus

In March I got to post, for the first time in my life, “BTECH ALL CLEAR”. Zero pending backs! B|

On 21 March I was at an open drive at IEC College, tweeting that I was “still waiting for HR round after Technical and Managerial round of #TCS ! Damn right life is tough”. And on 26 March it came through: TCS! My post that night was in Hinglish, but roughly: at least this poor guy got placed somewhere, and now there’s a 14-page offer letter to read.

And the joining letter for that offer? It took another eight months to show up.

eLitmus, and three offers in one morning

What actually moved the needle was eLitmus. It’s a paid aptitude test whose percentiles companies use to shortlist freshers, most of them in Bangalore, and it costs ₹920. I found it in my final year after one night of searching for anything better than the usual job portals, and unlike the open drives, it gave me a fair shot.

My last day of college was 18 May. After that it was interviews back to back, without waiting for results in between. I prepared with a spiral-bound folder of interview questions I’d put together myself, one section per topic: data structures, algorithms, DBMS, operating systems, networking, C, C++, Java, C#, .NET, PHP and testing.

Webyog’s hiring drive opened with a written test. A subjective one! For Webyog I also took the Rajdhani to Bangalore for an interview, 34 hours on the timetable, with the 1,024-page Java Complete Reference and two novels in my bag. Me being 6’2”, I couldn’t sit up on the upper berth, so I read lying down.

Then, one morning, this:

Slept like everyday yesterday and woke up with 3 Offer letters in the mail today :P that’s what happens when you keep giving Interviews back to back without waiting for result! :P 3 different designation, different locations, different packages! Let the game begin :D p.s : #eLitmus best ₹920 ever spent!!! ;-)

The three were Vinsol, Principal Global Services and Webyog, with Tricon Infotech still pending.

I picked Webyog, because I wanted to build actual products, and boy, it moved fast! That evening I posted from New Delhi Railway Station: “And the journey begins… #BANGALORED ;) P.s: Offer letter today and joining from Monday”. Offer in the morning, train at night.

Three teams at Webyog

Webyog makes database tools. SQLyog is the MySQL GUI a lot of developers already know, MONyog monitors MySQL servers, and SeaLion monitors Linux servers. I worked with all three teams.

The first thing I did after getting broadband in Bangalore? Updated my Lumia to Windows Phone 8.1, obviously. :D Then came my first salary. Meanwhile, I spent way too much on Bangalore’s autorickshaws, which hardly ever went by the meter. Around then I also started The JavaScript Journey, a blog where I learn JavaScript in public, one lesson at a time.

What I remember most is release time. My farewell mail calls it “the end moment” mess right before a version ships, and then the euphoria once the whole process is done. Around that were career talks, senseless rants about random topics, parties, and table tennis matches I never actually played in.

My job across SQLyog, MONyog and SeaLion was testing: writing and running the test plans, and the functional, regression and stress tests. In short, break whatever the developers built, and help users when they got lost. The part I’m proudest of is automation. I built a test framework with Selenium WebDriver and Java and automated over 250 test cases that we used to run by hand.

The farewell mail that almost didn’t go out

On my last day at Webyog, I wrote a farewell mail from my work account, saved it as a draft and went out to courier my stuff back to Delhi. When I came back, the account had been deleted. Draft and all!

Luckily I had clipped the draft to Evernote with the web clipper before heading out. Phew! So the farewell went out from my personal Yahoo address instead, to the SQLyog, MONyog and SeaLion team lists, and then again with the Portal and CloudMagic teams looped in. A p.s. at the bottom explained why it was coming from Yahoo, and predicted it would land in spam anyway. One line from it: “it’s my First job and seriously I don’t really know how to actually type last day letter.” It ended with “Stay Hungry Stay Foolish”. The first reply came five minutes later.

The day before, I’d mailed my browser bookmarks to myself, subject “Webyog bookmarks!”.

That night I posted “Bye bye #Bangalore! It was a nice experience here! Will be back sometime in future!” and the next day I was at Delhi airport. Home! The day after, I started my car for the first time in months.

Hello, World err… Adobe!

The Adobe job started with a recruiter reaching out to me, after my contributions to Brackets, Adobe’s open-source editor. Then I started at Adobe in Noida. I posted a photo with “Hello, World err… Adobe! B|”, which is about as much as I can say about the first day. ;)

Day one: the badge, the welcome envelope and a coffee.

A week later I was stuck in traffic on a flyover on a Monday morning, which is how you know you’ve settled into a job in Delhi NCR. :P Now I’m settled in, and yesterday TCS’s joining letter showed up for a job that starts in January.

At the start of this year I was writing a cover letter at 2am to a company whose hackathon I’d missed by a day. In between came an offer from an open drive at someone else’s college, three more in one morning thanks to a ₹920 test, and a train to Bangalore the same evening. So, no thanks, TCS! :)