Prashanth Verma

When you join a new org or switch teams in the same, it is quite an unsettling and borderline anxious experience. Here are a few things that I did to ramp up faster. 1. I consciously made an effort to remain unblocked 2. I read a ton of code and its history, sometimes even unrelated 3. I asked questions about the past, the present, and the future 4. I took up relatively mundane tasks - cross-team work, tests, and docs 5. I extended a helping hand in whatever capacity I could 6. I proactively met skip-level leaders and managers to understand the vision Some companies do have a culture of pairing up with someone existing in the team, but even if you do not get a mentor, it is important that you still navigate the situation and ramp up as quickly as you can. The above list is not exhaustive, by any means, and hence you can always add things that you find helpful in your context. but the lowest common denominator is to show extreme intent and interest to get output and drive outcomes. Hope this helps.

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After all the layoffs in so many companies, finally a good news of job openings which can be a chance after long time for so many people. Feb and March are going to have a lot of new job openings. And if you are starting now, here's a list of to-do before hirings start, how to prepare and list of companies to monitor job openings, classification of these companies, job roles and requirements and what products they are working on. Source: Internal town-hall meetings, VPs and leads, HR discussions, and best of all- info. on upcoming ambitious projects and their funding in these companies. In short, anyone who’s been in Bengaluru for a few years and has some connections knows how this info travels. STEP-1: Let's list first, how to PLAN your preparation: 1️⃣ Make a simple Excel sheet, list companies, roles, and their requirements. You’ll thank me later when you start tracking everything properly. 2️⃣ Target at least 5 companies to apply everyday. Do it regularly through Feb–March. Don’t wait for “perfect timing.” 3️⃣ Make 2 resumes, small hack but works like magic. One resume for direct applying when you see the opening. Another one for referrals. (change your phone and email). And if referrals get delayed, you already have one application there. 4️⃣ Update your LinkedIn and Naukri profile. Very seriously, don’t waste time on fancy job alert sites — most of them share fake or old listings. 5️⃣ Track your interviews, make a folder and note down every interview — questions, discussions, feedback, everything. Even the rejections will help you improve. 6️⃣ Work on small AI and LLM projects, try building and deploying them on cloud. These skills will be useful because many upcoming roles are in such teams. Will list them down. 7️⃣ Talk to people from the companies you’re targeting. Referrals still work, there are people who say "koi fark nahi pdta(doesn’t matter)" but don't listen to stupidity. 8️⃣ If you don’t know something in interviews, just say, you have not worked on it but you are willing to learn. Honesty is always better than fake confidence. 9️⃣ Write your own resume. Use Google Docs to make it yourself. You know your story better than any AI tool. 🔟 Try to apply within the first week after a job is posted. No HR will go through too many applications till the end of their excel sheet. STEP-2: LISTING companies here: Tier-1: Vm Ware, Google, PayPal, Nvidia, Goldman Sachs, Arcesium, Intuit, Adobe, Linkedin, Philips Tier-2/3: Myntra, Epam, Sapient, Expedia, Bluejeans, FIS, Twilio, Virtusa I know it looks like few names, but there will be a lot of openings in these companies for different experience levels. And given the domains of these companies, I'm pretty sure soon I'll get info. on some more in the similar sector. Sorry, but due to word limitations, I'm stopping here. Will continue in next post on job roles, projects and more. → Keep learning. It's almost the right time. And keep helping others too, good karmas do come back🫶

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I have researched lots of product-based companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Zomato, Goldman Sachs, Paytm, J.P. Morgan etc., for SDE1 2 roles, and found that these 20 system design questions are almost asked in every interviews, both at the fresher and experienced levels. 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 1. Design a simple URL shortening service. 2. Design a basic chat application. 3. Design a file storage system. 4. Design a simple social media platform. 5. Design a simple search engine. 6. Design a simple e-commerce website. 7. Design a basic ride-sharing system. 8. Design a basic video streaming service. 9. Design a simple recommendation system. 10. Design a basic food delivery app. 11. Design a parking lot management system. 12. Design a simple music streaming service. 13. Design a basic online ticket booking system. 14. Design a simple note-taking application. 15. Design a weather forecasting system. 16. Design a basic email service. 17. Design a file synchronization system. 18. Design a simple calendar application. 19. Design a basic online quiz platform. 20. Design a user authentication system. 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 1. Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly. 2. Design a distributed key-value store like Redis. 3. Design a scalable social network like Facebook. 4. Design a scalable recommendation system like Netflix. 5. Design a distributed file system like Hadoop's HDFS. 6. Design a real-time messaging system like WhatsApp. 7. Design a web crawler like Google. 8. Design a distributed cache like Memcached. 9. Design a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare. 10. Design a scalable search engine like Google. 11. Design a ride-sharing system like Uber. 12. Design a video streaming service like YouTube. 13. Design an online food delivery system like Zomato. 14. Design a collaborative document editing system like Google Docs. 15. Design an e-commerce platform like Amazon. 16. Design a recommendation system for an online marketplace. 17. Design a fault-tolerant distributed database system. 18. Design a scalable event-driven system like Twitter. 19. Design a scalable photo-sharing platform like Instagram. 20. Design a distributed task scheduling system. Learn and solve these, and you’ll be fully prepared for your next System Design interviews.. System design can be tough to crack, but having the right resources makes all the difference. Came across this well-structured, in-depth guide definitely worth a read. 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: https://lnkd.in/gxRRyd2m #tech #collab

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Behind every successful story of switching from @gmail.com to @google.com you see on LinkedIn is a long list of rejections that’s not always clearly visible. When I switched from Amazon to Google: - I was rejected from Uber - I was rejected from few mid scale startups It was humbling, and maybe for the first time in a long time, after being sure of myself, I didn’t feel confident that day. But that was required for me to grow to the next level and push past my limits and while rejections are painful and brutal, they’re also signals. If you’re getting rejected after you reach the final interview round, it’s a sign you need to sharpen your storytelling and communicate your impact with clarity. If you’re consistently falling short in technical screens, it’s a sign your fundamentals might need a deeper revisit If your applications rarely turn into interviews, it’s a sign your experience is not enough or resume or online presence isn’t telling the right story, or you haven’t built the right connections. If you keep hearing “good, but not the right fit,” it’s a sign you need to research the company’s culture and tailor your approach to show you can thrive in that specific environment. If feedback is always generic or non-existent, it’s a sign you need to ask better questions at the end, seek out honest feedback, or build relationships with interviewers and peers who will tell you the hard truth. The story always looks clean and linear on LinkedIn, but real growth happens in the messy, frustrating, deeply personal stretches. You only fail if you stop listening to what your rejections are teaching you. So if you’re facing setback after setback, adjust, reflect, and keep evolving. The best offers come right after you finally outgrow your old limits. Good Luck!

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Top tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon pay 20-30 LPA for SDE-1 roles and 40-50 LPA for SDE-2 roles. But they’ll never give you a direct, textbook problem in a real system design interview. Instead, here’s what you might get: The Celebrity Problem Imagine you’ve built a social media app like Instagram. Most users have a few hundred followers, and everything works fine with your NoSQL database, partitioned by user ID. Now, a celebrity joins. Suddenly, millions want to follow him and like his posts in real time. That one database partition built for average users now handles 95% of all traffic. Your “evenly distributed” backend is collapsing. So what would you do to solve this? ● First, introduce caching. Add a distributed cache (like Redis or Memcached) before your database. Now, when people view his posts, the cache handles most of the reads, taking the pressure off that hot partition. ● Next, scale out your writes. Reads are easier, but what about millions of likes in a few seconds? You need to split up his posts or even the likes themselves across multiple database partitions (“sharding”), so you’re not limited by a single partition’s write capacity. ● Update your business logic. Now your application needs to know where data is stored, across multiple partitions or buckets. When you show total likes, your service aggregates numbers from all shards. ● Plan for real-world problems. With more shards and caching, you might have to live with eventual consistency in like counts and handle more complex code for aggregation and data routing. ● Expect follow-up questions. – What if your cache goes down? – How do you protect your backend from massive write spikes? – How do you keep things consistent for users? This is why companies ask these types of problems in interviews. They want to know if you can spot hidden bottlenecks, scale beyond the basics, and make tough calls under pressure. And this is why just memorizing blog posts, drawing boxes, or using buzzwords never works for real interviews. That’s why you need to see all the components in real time and then think about these solutions. Thanks to Layrs.me, the platform I am building, you can solve problems like this on an interactive canvas, get feedback on your decisions, and actually build the skills that interviews demand. If you want to move past textbook prep and think like a real SDE, try Layrs (layrs.me) and see what difference real practice makes. It is 100% free to try, no paywall, just sign up and get started. Join our discord: https://lnkd.in/g9wGRadq

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No-BS advice for growing and aspiring software engineers from 20 years of lived experiences at Amazon, Google, Paytm, and multiple startups…(this made me who I am today..) 1. Go deep in one programming language, stick with it for 100 days, don’t hop around. 2. Learn at least one strongly typed language, it will teach you to build scalable systems. 3. Master data structures, algorithms, and design patterns, you will use them in real-world systems. 4. Get obsessed with debugging, learn to use logs, tools, and step through unfamiliar code until you find the bug. 5. Think in first principles, don’t take “that’s just how it is” as the answer, go figure out the real reason. 6. When stuck, step away, your best ideas come when you disconnect, not when you force it. 7. Ship an app end-to-end, even if it’s ugly, nothing beats building, deploying, and maintaining your own project. 8. Stay with projects for more than a year, only then will you see the real impact of your design decisions. 9. Don’t chase every shiny new framework, learn the fundamentals and choose tools that stand the test of time. 10. Don’t get intimidated by complexity, every big system is just code written by people like you. 11. Be curious, explore outside your main stack, and learn from every domain you touch. 12. Don’t sleep on AI, start learning and using AI tools, or you’ll be left behind. 13. Crack a FAANG interview at least once, it changes your career, your network, and your earning power. 14. Treat interviews as a learnable skill, practice, mock, and study until you’re good. 15. Don’t job-hop too often, long stints on tough projects get you big-impact, big-trust roles. 16. Learn to spot and grab opportunities, watch for new initiatives, reorgs, or problems no one else wants. 17. Advocate for yourself, document your impact, socialize your wins, and talk about your work. 18. Understand promotions, they’re a game; study how your company does it, and play to win. 19. Keep a brag document, track every win, big or small, and review with your manager regularly. 20. Take control of your career, no one cares about your growth as much as you do.

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