How I turned Pandemic into an Opportunity and got a great job?

Hey, My name is Saurabh! 🙏🏻

I am a passionate Software Engineer, natively from India 🇮🇳, with a strong interest and expertise in Golang and Cloud-Native Technologies. I am a startup enthusiast and have multiple years of experience in building tech startups from scratch ( including mine that I started a few years ago ).

I love open-source and I have contributed to some of the major projects by giant firms like 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲, 𝗚𝗶𝘁𝗵𝘂𝗯, 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗢𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗻, 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗙𝗮𝗮𝘀, H𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝗳𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗵, etc. Also, I made a few personal open-source projects and I am really proud that one of them, called DoAct, got published as an official community tool on one of the biggest cloud providers DigitalOcean.

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” -Albert Einstein

The Corona Virus Pandemic has affected a lot of lives. Millions of people lost their jobs and some of them are still struggling to get one. I believe the opportunity is everywhere. The key is to develop the vision to see it. That’s the reason I succeeded to uplift my career to the next level even during this hard time. It’s been an adventure so far and so I’m excited to write about it here.

You might be still wondering how I got this job? So let’s get into it. :)

During the lockdown, I was so frustrated in the beginning and then I realized that I have a lot of time, after my work hours, in which I could invest in learning and making new things. So, I started learning new kinds of stuff, new Technologies, made some personal projects, and did open-source contributions, including Google, when I had some time. While doing all those, I got to manage more than 12k+ followers on my Linkedin.

Well, That doesn’t mean that I only learned Tech-related things. I learned playing the Piano and worked on my other personal hobbies too. Ah, I forgot to mention that I am a music enthusiast too and have been singing and playing Guitar for more than a decade. So, on weekends I just focus on my music page and channel. :)

With so many exciting things going on with my life, I started receiving many personal interview invitations and job offers. Finally, I joined something that made me thrilled when I got to know about its products and vision.

It’s almost been two months, at the time of writing this, since I started working at Shipa! We’re building a world-class cloud platform for Cloud-Native Applications and reinventing how cloud-native applications are delivered across heterogeneous clusters and cloud environments. The only framework that allows you to think and operate applications rather than infrastructure when delivering cloud-native applications, across any infrastructure.

The interview process is very standard and you might expect 4 rounds or more according to your performance at each round. I got a glimpse of FAANG while giving them, especially the coding round. So, the overall interview process goes like the following:

1. Screening Round (30–45 minutes): If your application gets selected, you could expect a message or an email from them for the initial screening video call. In this round, they will ask about you, your background, Tech-stack, projects that you worked on, open-source contributions, etc to check if you are a good fit for them. You might expect some technical questions as well.
2. Coding Round ( 120–150 minutes ): If everything goes well in the first round, they will ask about your availability and you will get an online coding assessment on websites like Hackerrank, etc. You could expect 4–5 coding problems on Data structures and Algorithms like Array, Graph, Trees, etc and that you have to do them purely in a specific language, for me it was Golang, and some SQL related questions too. I really liked the difficulty level and the standard of the questions. It was like the questions that mostly FAANG asks. Note that each question has some points based on its difficulty level and you get them for each passing test-case. They might ask you for feedback on the assessment. I attempted all of them and thankfully my solutions passed for each question and got points in each of them. :)
3. Technical Round ( 45–60 minutes ): This round will only take place if you perform well in the coding round. During the technical interview, the interviewer will assess your technical knowledge and you will have to discuss your solutions submitted in the coding round.
4. Final Round ( 30- 45 minutes ): This will be more like a behavioral interview. The logic is that how you behaved in the past will predict how you will behave in the future. Also, they might ask for your salary expectations if not asked before.

If all goes well, they will finally send you an offer! :))

It’s been a blast. I’ve already learned so much more in such a short period of time, particularly in the world of Kubernetes and Cloud-native space. The team here is very supportive and all of them are extremely passionate about their work and understand their job well. Everyone I’ve spoken with here seems always ready for helping and sharing knowledge, and extremely excited about innovating new things. I am sure I will learn a lot with time with so much support!

We all go through hard times in life. It’s a part of being alive and it’s the reality we all have to deal with. Somewhere along the road we become numbed with all the frustrations and dissatisfaction. But life itself isn’t always about darkness and sadness, Life is also filled with colors and that makes it beautiful. Never lose hope. Never forget the power of intentions and desires.

Great things happen when you don’t stop believing, trying, learning, and being grateful. :)

I hope that in a few months, I will be able to write another blog post here to share my journey with you, and hope that it helps!

📫 How to reach me?

⦿ Visit my Website 🌐
⦿ Connect with me on LinkedIn 👨🏻‍💻
⦿ Follow me on Twitter 🐦
⦿ Shoot Me an Email💌