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Consistent and Persistent: This Scrimba Student Battled Depression and Landed a Job at Amazon After 1000 LeetCode Challenges
🎙 About the episode
Meet Khaidem Sandip Singha 🇺🇸! He's a Scrimba student from Assam, India, who recently got a job at Amazon! 🎉 Originally, he studied civil engineering before realizing he was more interested in coding. In this episode, you'll hear how he learned to code, battled depression, and reverse-engineered a path to a FANG company.
You will also learn about his approach to problem-solving and the benefits of practicing on LeetCode - not many students we interviewed did that, but Khaidem completed one thousand challenges! He also shares some details about Amazon's interview process and his approach to keeping up motivation.
🔗 Connect with Khaidem
⏰ Timestamps
- How Khaidem went from civil engineering to learning to code (01:41)
- Chasing coding certificates or mastering the basics - what is more important for landing your first developer job? (03:20)
- How Khaidem reverse-engineered the path to a FANG company (04:33)
- Should you do LeetCode (06:01)
- The importance of consistency and persistency (07:16)
- Why Khaidem focused on LeetCode (08:34)
- Try different frameworks, but then specialize (12:09)
- Khaidem's approach to problem-solving (13:57)
- How Khaidem started his job search while suffering from depression (17:47)
- Khaidem's first jobs and how he knew he was overqualified (21:41)
- How Khaidem discovered Scrimba around Javascriptmas 2020 (23:15)
- Why Khaidem benefited from the Scrimba community (24:15)
- How Khaidem applied for Amazon (25:15)
- Amazon's interview process (27:18)
- How Khaidem got an offer, and why it's important to keep up motivation (30:03)
- Why you shouldn't give up (31:42)
🧰 Resources Mentioned
- Udacity Intro to Programming Nanodegree
- Bob Ziroll's React courses
- LeetCode
- Scrimba Podcast: A Teacher's Job Is Never Done: Get Your Hands on the Keyboard with Bob Ziroll
- Scrimba Podcast: Talent Alone Is Not Enough: How Theo Changed Careers at 49
- Scrimba Discord community
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