Part 2, How I plan to make 60k to 100k in India as a software Engineer

Back After a While

Hello again. I’m back to writing after a two-month break.This pause wasn’t intentional. I’ve been dealing with a health issue for the past year, and over the last couple of months it really took a toll on me. I didn’t have the physical or mental energy to think deeply about much about anything apart from my work. So this space stayed quiet.

I don’t run a newsletter. I don’t publish these posts anywhere, beyond my website.I’m not even sure if anyone reads them. But I still enjoy writing. These posts feel like small relics of my thoughts, preserved on the internet, capturing what was going on in my head at a particular phase of my life.

Anyway, the juices are flowing again. Let’s get started.

Sharing the progress in the last 5 months

Last time after writing the PART I, I started few things:

• Started DSA.
• Bought a premium membership and started posting content on X to increase engagement to attract remote offers.
• started appyling for jobs and started getting some inbound calls.

DSA progress

I followed these two resources to get started with DSA

• Primagean, The last Algorithms course you’ll need.
• Striver SDE sheet, total 191 problems.

ThePrimeagen’s course helped me re-align with the fundamentals and served as a quick refresher. It’s fast paced and while he’s upfront about that, I still found some topics difficult to fully grasp. The course doesn’t cover every algorithm as the name suggests, and at times I had to pause and look elsewhere for explanations.

Thats when I found Abdul Bari’s channel, whenever I was stuck in the ThePrimeagen’s course I used to visit this YT channel, and get my doubts cleared, the guy teaches very slowly and goes in depth,I would reccomend this channel for anyone trying to gasp concepts.

What eventually worked best for me was:

• Using ThePrimeagen’s course outline as a roadmap

• Filling in conceptual gaps with Abdul Bari’s explanations

There is also a github repository setup by Primagean called kata machine to practice DSA. The questions are mostly, leetcode easy and the test cases covered are not comprehensive, although it is written in Typescript so that helps with interviews.

I solved around 13 questions from kata machine, and after around 5 hours of the course I stopped watching it, and moved to Striver’s YT channel, and his website for solving problems, I solved around 50 problems on leetcode

My approach has always been:

• Start with a brute-force solution

• Then a suboptimal solution

• Finally the most optimal solution

• Dry-run solutions on paper before coding

• Always write down time and space complexity

So in the end I stand and around 63, problems solved, I have only now started to understand the patterns in the type of questions asked, I am still not good at it, I want to complete 100-120 problems atleast, before I start revising DSA again, the second time will be better for me to understand the patterns in the type of questions asked.

Yes DSA is hard, you always have to keep thinking about the solutions, even when you are not solving the problems, IMO that gives you the edge, whie doing DSA.

Progress on X / Twitter

It is pretty evident from my dashboard, that for the time I was posting content, I was able to get a decent amount of engagement. I had to stop because, my health issues took over, or this would have been a much better comparison.

Interviews calls and progress

Got calls from companies willing to offer from 40k USD to 50k USD range, most were onsite, gave interviews at 2 companies, both of them ghosted after initial rounds, and I am thinking is because of my asking amount. I keep actively applying for jobs on Linkedin, also have started asking for referrals for most roles in India. Have also tried applying through remote job boards but only get automated rejection emails.

Anyways onto the next one’s, I only have to get one good offer.

Final call

I think since I am feeling a bit better healthwise, atleast to focus on the prep and handle work, I think I should still continue to work on my prep, I still have few things to cover like Low Level Design (LLD) questions, javascript specific round questions and also revising DSA, but I will also continue applying, now I am planning to keep my weekdays occupied with interview prep apart from my job, and weekends will be commited to finding a remote job, by doing direct founder outreach to YC founders, founders running companies outside India who have job postings on various job boards like remote[.]ok, and are willing to pay the amount for my work.

The end

This was the blog guys, I got some clarity while writing this blog, hope you have got some clarity as well, See you in the next one…