to /r/cscareerquestions - a short post on reddit

First of all, I would like to tell you guys that I was unemployed for 8 months after I finished college. I interviewed everywhere, from Amazon to dinky and sketchy startups. I’ve taken advice and encouragements from this reddit as I pushed forward. On the other hand, I’ve been discouraged by this reddit when the “annual salary” or “what internship did everyone get” threads started popping up. I looked at people on this reddit and thought that someone like me with barely any projects, zero (real) internships, and a whopping 2.4 GPA would never land a good job.

I kept pushing. I used to not get even an email back from companies. Then I slowly got phone interviews.. in which I failed. I guess it’s time to go back to reading reddit, time to start working on leetcode and oh, I guess I’ll get that Cracking the Coding Interview book. Phone interview started to lead to on-site. Let me tell you, I was not ready for those long 4-5 hour onsite grinds.

Eventually, my hard work paid off.

And here’s the thing. I thought the company I accepted the offer from was going to suck. It’s not the Big 4, no one has heard of it. It’s just a medium sized tech company that gave me a job as a “junior devops.” I hesitated because I didn’t work hard just to be a devops, I wanted to be a dev. I wanted an above average salary, not just “junior rates.” Nonetheless, I accepted quickly because a job’s a job. (I didn’t even negotiate.)

A year down the line, I love this job. I love it so much that I wouldn’t leave it for any of the big 4. (except maybe Google). I make average salary in my city but I didn’t expect work life balance to be this great.

Here are some of the cool things I appreciate from working at a “random” company : 30-40 hour work week, free food/beer, go to work 11am-5pm, unlimited paid sick days, amazing manager who really pushes me to climb up the ladder (our first one on one, he wanted me to eventually take his job.) and of course, being a devops. I learned more in this past year than I could have ever imagined. I learned big data(hadoop, mesosphere) ,CD/CI (ansible/docker) , AWS (lambda, ec2, cloudformation, batch, elasticsearch, cloudwatch) and became an SME (subject matter expert) at centralized logging (ELK, nagios, splunk). I also learned like 5% of bash, which basically made me four times as fast when writing scripts compared to school-taught languages like java and c++. I wear many different hats even though the company is about a couple thousand people. I’ve been a product owner, release engineer, and am currently in multiple different teams (multiple scrums a day).

In the end, all these cool things that are associated with my job did not come from a Big 4. It didn’t even come from a well-known tech company (you probably haven’t heard of it). It was given to me even though I have a crappy GPA. How I got a job was just based on tenacity and persistence, how I kept the job was because I took initiative and actually wanted to “at least learn devops so I know both path)”. You guys can do it, no matter how depressing being unemployed can be. No matter how bad the job looks compared to /r/cscareerquestions kiddos’ job. This industry is amazing and wouldn’t give up computer science for any other subject in the world. Thanks /r/cscareerquestions!