This is a post about how I lost way, found it back, and then went from 6 to 45+ LPA in two years, and from being called "just a QA" to a Senior Software Engineer and it is going to be a long one :D
THE BEGINNINGS:-
In 2016, I graduated from a "Tier - 3 university" in B. Tech(CS). Upon graduation, I joined a service-based IT company in Gurgaon, India.
The company had visited our campus for the first time and offered the highest comp among all on-campus companies, 5.25 LPA. Parents wanted me to join as the offer was good and there was a financial situation at home. I was also preparing for GATE(Exam for admission into M. Tech at Indian universities) which I needed to give up if joining.
Initially our college didn't inform us about the role being offered. Just one week before joining, I found out from one of the selected students having connections in the placement department that this was a testing role. With no other option and only a week to go, I had to join.
THE HOPELESSNESS:-
Within a month I realized this wasn't for me. I always liked programming, but couldn't do it here. The job was manual testing. All efforts put in college, subjects studied, projects made, and the preparation for GATE seemed to be of no use. After six months, I wanted to quit, drop a year and restart my preparation for GATE but I just didn't have the option to stop working.
Also, in the industry non-technical manual QA isn't taken seriously. This is especially true in service-based companies, even though they are a part of every project! One time, I was returning from the cafeteria with my PM, Dev Manager, and two friends from the QA team. Both managers started talking about how there is no need for QA and they don't do anything significant, right infornt of us! Even some of my developer friends used to joke about it by saying things like "you're just a QA" or "this guy wants to do full-stack(sarcastically)" when I would ask them about development. Such experiences can be highly demotivating, especially for people in the initial stages of their careers but these experiences and phrases would eventually become my driving force.
After around 1.5 years, working as a manual QA, things had come to a point where I wanted to quit the tech industry entirely. I felt like I could never code again. The stigma associated with the role, non-technical, non-challenging work, and the stagnant pay were killing me.
I started exploring all kinds of options, like preparing for public sector/govt. jobs(SSC, PSUs), starting a business, and even preparing for civil services. Time passed and everything piled up. Eventually I was left with no motivation and hope about the future.
THE STRUGGLE:-
After a year of all this, I decided that the next best thing would be to learn automation testing. Being out of touch with coding for almost 2.5 years, it took me ten months to just learn the basics of Java and basic problem-solving. Just around then, a few of my colleagues got offers of 10-15 LPA from mid-size product-based companies, most of them as SDEs but some also as SDETs. Seeing people from my team getting offers from product-based companies also motivated me. I learned about their interview experiences and how they had prepared. I picked up the speed on my preparation. In the next two months, I finished the remaining topics. I started applying to companies for SDET and got my first interview scheduled with Nagarro. I reached the third and last round, which didn't go well, and they put me on hold. A month later, I got my first offer of 10 LPA from TestVagrant in Bangalore for an SDET role. My comp was 6 LPA at that time, so 10 LPA was a hike of around 65%. I finally resigned from my job!
I also got offers from Deloitte, Sprinklr, with Naggaro again, and the company I eventually joined for 12.5 LPA for as an SDET.
After 3.5 years of struggle and hopelessness, I had five offers with decent compensation, better than a lot of people who doubted me, and a much more technical role than manual testing.
THE GROWTH:-
After joining my second company, the initial 3-4 months were extraordinarily difficult for me. I struggled in understanding the architecture, the databases, the mappings of different tables, debugging the application logs, doing environment setups, and doing prod releases. I would get lost in the automation codebase as it was so huge.
Almost all the tech was new to me. Only thing I knew was programming and basic automation.
But I coped up, mainly because I was getting the these three things which I didn't get in my previous organization:-
- Opportunity. Opportunity to code and do technical work.
- Freedom. Freedom to go deep into the technologies getting used, having access to all codebases.
- Support. A lot of support from some great mentors - mainly my lead, all the developer friends, and the dev manager of my team.
As I got more comfortable, I learned the basics of Spring and microservice architecture. I got access to different codebases and understood them. I went through the code of APIs and understood them in and out. Whatever feature I would test, I would first look at the code changes. I understood the databases, learned how to debug different kinds of issues, and documented everything!
I contributed a lot to the automation suite and infrastructure. Even used to fix some product bugs that I would report, implemented some small features when devs were tight on bandwidth.
After about a year, I grew a lot technically with a good understanding of all technologies we used in the architecture. I became one of the most recognized SDETs in the company. In two years, my compensation also went from 12.5 LPA to 18 LPA + ESOPs.
THE FINAL STEP:-
Last year in March-April, a friend in my team introduced me to Leetcode. The monthly challenges had just started, and I also started with those. I wasn't very consistent and was only solving to get comfortable with DSA, having been out of touch for a year. I had solved around 250 problems repeatedly by September, learned about design, especially in test automation, and started interviewing for SDET - II roles just to test my preparation levels. I got offers from Paytm(18 LPA), WhatFix(23 LPA), Nykaa(16 LPA), MindTickle(25 LPA) in Oct-Nov 2020. I interviewed at GoJek and reached the last VP round.
While I was applying to these companies initially, I had also applied to Facebook from their careers portal, and got an unexpected callback! I interviewed at FB but got rejected in the first on-site round.
However, getting a call back from FB had installed a faith in me that getting into bigger and higher-paying tech companies was also possible. My background would not matter as much as I thought if I put in more effort in preparation.
So I rejected all the offers and started preparing more seriously. I solved a total of 330 questions repeatedly by March of this year. I interviewed at Meesho for SDET-III and Cred for SDET(flat hierarchy) to check my preparation and got rejected. I also appeared for PhonePe for a SET role, cleared the first round in problem-solving but couldn't clear the next round on Automation and Design. I needed to work more on technical skills, designing and scaling the framework, and library related interview questions, but I was doing well in problem-solving.
One of my friends had joined InMobi at that time, got a referral for SDET-III in Inmobi Glance, interviews were scheduled. All rounds had questions on problem-solving. The HM round had detailed project-related, technical, and automation design, for which I had prepared a lot by then. I cleared all the rounds, especially the HM round went great, and I was offered 35 L + 1000 RSUs (32 Base + 3 L PF, Gratuity and Benefits + 1000 RSUs)!
I accepted the offer and resigned from my second company. I was also interviewing with Zeta, Games 24x7, Hotstar, and a good product-based company, that I eventually joined as a SSE. I got selected in Games 24x7 and offered a 38 L (36.25 Base + 0.25 PF + 1.5 Joining Bonus) for SDET-II. I also got selected in Zeta for Sr. SDET but asked them to not prepare the offer as I had decided to join the company I am currently at. I was at the last round with Hotstar and canceled the interview process for the same reason. Upon declining InMobi Glance's offer, they bumped it to around 45.5 L + 1000 RSUs (38 Base + 2.5 Benefits + 5 Joining Bonus + 1000 RSUs). I chose to reject it and go with the other offer I mentioned before as the work was much more technical and comp for later years was higher.
In all this I went from 6 to 45+ LPA in two years starting as a manual tester. I wanted to contribute to the LC community and help people having the same struggles as I have had from the experiences I have gained. Hopefully, it motivates a few people here.
PLEASE UPVOTE AND MAKE IT REACH MORE PEOPLE
UPDATE:-
Thank you, everyone, I never expected a response like this, I hope it would help few people in the same boat! Some people wanted me to connect with them on LinkedIn or reveal my current company, as much I would like to connect, I choose to be anonymous on this for obvious reasons.
Some people asked for interview experiences/questions, I will try to find some time and write a post about it soon. Thanks!