How I learned to code in 3 months and cracked Google and Amazon

on april 5th 2019 i was rejected from my last on-campus internship that i applied to and on april 25 2022 i started working as an l4 software engineer at google after quitting my job as an sd1 at amazon and today i want to talk about how i went from almost no knowledge in coding to working at companies like amazon and google and i did this with just three months of actual preparation and i didn't have any internships or fancy projects or hackathons to show foreign and engineering maybe i picked up software engineering so there was a pretty long time that i was coding consistently so of college my first year second year i thought each other coding developments but i had no idea where to start right no i wasn't let me tell you why so if you haven't interviewed for a tech company let me tell you the process and college may i think most of the companies follow the same process so subsequently goes like online assessment and which interview round so online coding assessment may you zero questions next is and this went on for quite some time you know what my biggest problem was knowledge thing that was mostly theoretical and i missed the most important part that was data structures and algorithms this was my mistake number one i didn't study data structures and algorithms i needed to get my things together and i needed to do it quickly placements to put it lightly it was a major situation so i needed to prepare three things data structures and algorithms a project and finally the course here subject that was dbms oops computer networks operating system compiler design compiler designing nobody studies that so i started with the most important one data structures and algorithms i needed to pick a language though either python or c i've already worked with c plus plus but python could be simple but it was a dynamically typed language and also obscure concepts so i went with c class i could have gone with java as well but my job knowledge concepts which are asked all throughout their interviews but i picked up c plus plus now that i had a language in mind i'm going to do next it was to learn the basics of c plus plus first and it's our property and then move on to data structures and algorithms and i would say difficult part because from free ones like geeksforgeeks to paid content i was really confused so i tried all of it when i started i tried to learn the basics of seedless i could not follow along there was so much content that i didn't know what to do then i moved to paid courses uh i picked up interview preparation with c plus plus from coding ninjas and only b which is exactly the same topics for haiti but it was way more structured and they sold my doubts as well so i would say it was a pretty good investment basics variables conditions loops functions patterns arrays searching sorting 2d arrays hash maps and all data structures and then data structures and algorithms manipulate space complexity which is like super important stl recursion oops think layer stack queue pre binary tree vst map priority queue dynamic programming backtracking graphs or through digital topics but these are the main ones that i study and the best thing this program did for me was to explain me the internals of c plus plus so this really helped me going forward because i was really confident in what i was quoting but a basic question do you need to pay to learn to code and i would say the answer is still no last two to three years my youtuber it's not content that i think youtube itself is sufficient and our safe youtube channel i also started practicing questions on geeks for geeks next up was project our project project to show that i can develop as well so my first scene options here web development machine learning or app development or with a blockchain and ai related but no coffee niche topics and i didn't have the time to go into it so i picked up react which is like a front-end javascript library and i built a full-stack blogging platform and i use react for front-end redux for stage management and for the back end i hosted the entire thing on firebase so firebase acted as a back end to my service i learned the entirety of react and redux using youtube and i followed a couple of tutorials and my project was pretty much done it took me like an entire month to make that project but i think you can do it quicker and lastly many of the computer science related uh subjects we device created that was dbms oops computer networks and operating system so i was pretty much ready although it looks like you might make coffee time like i have preparation but the actual time that i spent would probably not be more than three months but now i was prepared february march and april may because companies should get an internship right i didn't get any internships this is where mistake number two comes in i just didn't have enough practice so coding is hard and eight gangnam is not an easy task and there's a difference between knowing data structures and algorithms and knowing how to solve the coding question and what difference completely practice it i needed more practice i wasn't good enough i was shortlisted for a couple of companies but i was rejected in the end so i received my last rejection on april 5th 2019. internships safe data structures and algorithms uh i don't know how many questions i did during that time but these were geeks pay i have 250 questions and lead code baby i did a lot of questions which looking back is not a lot of questions but it got the i am not able to even get shortlisted in them rejections are hard now here comes mistake number three don't target just one or like two or three companies as your dream companies because sometimes it just won't be your day all your preparation would be worth nothing and you cannot do anything about it so just try to keep an open mind i remember that i got my first interview on the 20th company that i applied to i got an offer from the same company many college maker rules are that if you get a placement so i picked up the data science and machine learning course from coding ninjas and uh data structures and algorithms with python and a lot of libraries and python like numpy so i remember spending around four or five months giving contest after contest code forces and record chef paid and i think this was one of the most important steps in my journey that helped me gain confidence in my data structures and algorithms the same jakarta new data structures and algorithms like number theory segment trees fan victories advanced db graph tries and many others so second question do you need to do competitive programming to be good at data structures and algorithms and the answer is pretty easy no you need practice i think you'll read code medium or hard questions and that are really good but you need to solve a lot of them and lead query questions after bar will be held for any because coding interviews and online testing questions the lead course is similar you think so after that i started working all of this took a back seat and my work projects were completed but i took every opportunity that i got for interviewing i interviewed with salesforce flipkart publisher sapient and i got offers from swiggy and amazon and i switched to amazon and i think it is safe to say amazon kafir checks videos an interviewer reached out to me asking if i was interested in interviewing and i said yes first time prepared me but it took me two weeks to prepare and then i took five interview rounds and a phone screen and here i am working as an l4 engineer at google somewhere that i never thought i could be and it has been an interesting journey from not knowing how to go to ending up at google in just a few years time uh it has been a pretty long journey and i have failed a lot and if there's something that i can take out from the story is that if i can do it i think you can pretty much do it as well well if you want to know what all perks you get when you work at google then i'll be making a video unboxing all the things that i got from google over here it's a lot [Music]

Channel: Ashhad Ahmad

Views: 1,530,531

Keywords: how to learn to code, how to crack amazon, how to crack google, how to crack faang, FAANG, software engineering, no internships, google, google interview, amazon interview, learn to code fast, coding for beginners, zero to google, ashhad ahmad, ashhad google

Id: Q8FUQawC_1I

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022