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Landing My First Tech Job at 18

Landing My First Tech Job at 18

May 15, 2020

I got my first tech job at Avalara, a $10B+ company, as an 18 year old. Here's how I cleared the interview process.

Clearing the HackerRank round

All the DSA content and practice I did with my Coding Ninjas course helped me a ton.

Also, the coding competitions I took part in during high school helped. There was one in 10th to 12th that I went to another DPS for (maybe RK Puram or Vasant Vihar). The questions were what you might get on an internship application for a big company. I didn't win it but was happy that I solved 1 or 2 questions completely and a couple partially. It's clear why kids from that school go to colleges like Stanford. On the same day of the competition, they had an alumni who was studying at Stanford speak during the stage presentation of the tech fest.

Clearing the personal interview round

I tanked on the SQL questions so I won't say anything about it. I did decently on the personal questions and on all the questions about my resume.

Having clear goals in mind, a decent plan for the next few years, and speaking smartly in the moment helped me for the personal questions.

If you made all the projects on your resume yourself, and you remember the design decisions and the purpose of each line of code, you should be able to answer pretty much anything they throw at you.

Clearing the on-site round

Again, all the DSA content and practice I did with my Coding Ninjas course helped me a ton. I had 2 questions based on immutability and recursion.

You have to think aloud in your interview. Tell the interviewer what is going on in your mind. Reading a bit of the Cracking the Coding Interview book and watching a couple of YouTube videos on SWE interviews was helpful.

DSA course recommendations

  • If you want a great free resource, Striver's playlists and sheets are the way to go.
  • If you want to have skin in the game and invest in a more structured course with TA support, opt for a paid course like Coding Ninjas' DSA course.

Cover: Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash — source