Its been 5 months that when decided to switch. Its not like I had any issue with my current organisation. My journey has been more than successful here. I have been working as a SDE 2 in one of the big tech company in India.

But once i decided to move on. I never thought that, this is going to be this much hard. This 5 month of duration almost brought me to my lowest.

I started with some startups just to get into the interview feeling. But i continuosly got rejected for one reason or another. Be it DS/Algo/Design/Behaviour. (Mostly PS/DS/Algo). So i thought i knew what was missing. I moved to LEETCODE after one month with 3 rejections.

I solved almost 60-100 questions in next month and thought, I am ready. But i could not be more wrong. I was parallely giving interviews as well. I again got rejected in next 5-6 companies. And it almost broke me when i was aksed a question which i have solved earlier but was not able to solve it during the interview. At this point of time, i was so depressed that I thought of moving on from software to some different line of work(like product management etc). These rejections made me think, that i am not good for anything in development. I have 5 years of experience and have been designing scalable systems from almost 3 years now.
It just that i was getting rejected in PS/DS.

I gave it a thought to check what went wrong. And i felt, that i was not giving sufficient time to a problem. I was jumping on to the solutions almost in no time without giving it a thought.

So I thought of giving it one more chance. I started Skienna design manual. Its not like I have had no help. I got a help from a very good friend, he taught me multiple ways and algorithm to solve a question. He even taught me Trie and Backtracking (which to be honest, i was almost afraid of).

After solving 200+ questions and 10+ startups and mid company rejections(all because of PS/DS).
I also got selected in 3-4 companies but they were not able to match the salary expectations.

Hence, I moved to large companies which were my target since the begining. But till this point, its been 4 months with nothing, and i was in a position where i started doubting myself.

I applied 2-3 mid/big companies. Guess what. I again got rejected.

One thing i forgot to mention, which ideally everyone should avoid. During this prepration, my preformance in current organisation went down exponentially as i did not keep track what i was doing to my current work.

So time is mid july, i got a call from FAAMG. And i decided to make this my last interview. Whatever the result, i will focus on my current work and will leave this interview thing for later.

I solved almost 4 easy/ 3 medium questions daily, some hard questions. I went through MIT videos for next 3 weeks. All java and its concurrency concepts, operating systems concepts.

Interview was in mid august. I had never been this nervous in my 5 years.
As i decided earlier that i will leave these interviews behind me and will focus on my current job. I did the same. I was getting some calls for other companies as well. But i had lost the motivation.

After 25 days, i got a mail for my documents and payslip. I got selected.

Now when i look back, in last 5 months, i solved almost 300+ leetcode questions(Mostly medium and easy). Now i know the concepts of algorithm except dynamic programming. I know almost all java concepts, advance concurrency issues. Almost all the design patterns.

When i think of all this, I can finally say, the time, i spent was worth it. It makes up for everything.