From 2.6 GPA to $200K Microsoft Software Engineer

I was a very bad student I didn't have a good GPA okay what was your GPA it was a 2. 6 what I interviewed with meta Google Reddit Amazon Microsoft and out of all these companies I got rejected 10 times telling you Microsoft folks I'm totally open to quitting my job putting that out there they're watching yeah hi everybody welcome back to another YouTube video in today's video we have a special guest Puja who is traveling all the way from Minnesota to Seattle some of you probably have seen her already on YouTube because she's pretty viral uh but one thing you already know about her is that she's also a software engineer at Microsoft so when she told me that she's coming to Seattle I was like okay we need to sit down and we need to record this video because you are awesome I love watching your YouTube videos like you're so creative and you do it on top of your full-time job so Pua tell us a little B about yourself thanks to n for that amazing intro um so my name is Puja and I work at Microsoft as a full-time engineer I graduated from W Madison 6 years ago so I've been in the industry for 6 years and I work fully remote I'm kind of a digital Nomad so I travel around a bit as well and yeah that's awesome so let me ask you this how did you become a software engineer like is this something that you knew from very early on you wanted to do like what was that moment for you where you were like okay I want to become a software engineer so it's a funny story actually my parents are software Engineers okay and they basically because they were software Engineers I decided I didn't want to be a software engineer I wanted to go the opposite route so I went to college and I tried to get into biomedical engineering but that involved a lot of chemistry okay and I quickly realized I was not good at chemistry okay and so then I ended up taking a computer science class and I really liked it it was my intro to computer science class it was a lot of fun you like the intro to computer science I heard like those classes are like really hard yeah but I I loved it it was super fun and data structure it my favorite class wow that's great okay so you were like I don't want to do like biom medicine I want to go into computer science so you change your major in school and then you graduated how did you end up at Microsoft yeah so it took a while to get to Microsoft I first worked at a startup in Chicago and they were fully remote at the time and this was before the pandemic so it was a little bit new as well and I ended up working in Greece full-time that was a lot of fun then I moved over to Target and I learned a lot there okay um and this was around 2019 2020 uh towards the end of my career at Target I started getting a lot of messages from Recruiters on LinkedIn okay and these were big Tech recruiters so it for me like I had never dreamed about working in big Tech I came from like a small Midwest town and so I decided you know what let me just give it a shot so I started interviewing with all these companies I interviewed with meta Google Reddit Amazon Microsoft and out of all these companies I got rejected 10 times so yeah I got rejected so many times I was like at the point where even my parents are saying like you don't even want to work in big Tech why are you trying so hard you're stressing yourself out like so why were you trying so hard I think it was more of like a personal Vendetta like I can do it like it's the challenge like I want to I want to be able to you know be good enough to say hey I got into big Tech yeah and I even told myself some of those companies if I got in I wouldn't even take the job which who knows maybe I would have because I would have been so excited um but yeah so I'd gotten to the point where I just felt really low I was at a low point in my career because I wasn't getting any acceptances um and then I had my last interview with Microsoft and at that point I was a little bit numb so I didn't really care going into the interview okay and I actually ended up performing my best in that interview and I got two offers from two different teams at Microsoft so that is great so like why were why do you think you were faing the interview like what was exactly was it like the coding round the DSA part like what was it it was my I think I was very anxious so I have a bit of performance xiety the coding part I had practiced a lot I had done mock interviews with another colleague actually because he was also looking to go move and he actually ended up going to Google so we would do mock interviews a lot and I would practice DSA but I don't think that was enough because when it came time for the interview I just got really nervous so unless I knew the problem really really well I would kind of stumble over my words but that's when you know after doing so many interviews and getting rejected I kind of didn't care anymore and that's I think it was all the nerves at the end of the day wow so you were were good at coding you were good at DSA you were good at whatever they wanted to know about but you just had like performance anxiety I think so I don't know if I was like good at all that stuff but I think that my biggest problem was the anxiety yeah yeah no that's a good point because like I tell people when like it comes to interview prep like knowing something doesn't mean you're actually going to perform well in the interview you actually have to because you are working with a stranger sitting in a room or like GBC or like a zoom call and then you don't know how to read their body language you don't know how to read their like facial features and like you don't know what kind of reaction you are getting or not getting there's a lot of nerves you have to answer in a specific time frame and if you don't get it then you don't get it so like doing mock interviews like really really helps you build that confidence so when you go into that interview you're able to like perform your best because you have done it and you're numb like you said exactly you've gone around it so many times that you know just it's on automatic for you at that point yeah yeah no that's great so one thing I wanted to ask you like you made it to Big Tech after a few other jobs like what did you do while you were in school did you have any internships why didn't you try for big Tech job when you were in school because a lot of the people figured out that they want to go into computer science after they have graduated with another major but like you already knew so why what was that transition yeah so I did have two internships in college and they were very small internships again I went to school in the midwest so um there wasn't a heavy emphasis on working in big Tech I went to a heavy research based school so lot of like smaller startup companies that were working on kind of more Cutting Edge research stuff right so I worked at a small um data analytics company for one of my internships and then a um Healthcare Company okay and then from there I transitioned to a startup after graduating okay but yeah I didn't really have a desire to work in big tech there was the culture wasn't really there I think if I had gone to school in Seattle or in California somewhere I think there would have been a much bigger push to go work in big Tech but the reason I decided to start interviewing was because so many ERS reached out so I would thought you know it's a shame not to at least try yeah just to see like what happens and you had like personally you wanted to proove yourself exactly on the topic of improving yourself developing yourself in today's market is very important whether you are a software engineer a data analyst a data scientist product manager or some other role and there are hundreds of courses and online programs out there and I know it's hard to choose one of the platforms that I wanted to recommend is simply learned which is reviewed and recommended by Forbes they have 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6 what yeah 2. 6 okay for those who don't know 2. 6 is out of four and what is it like a b c d what grade is it it's like around a B minus C wow average wow so what happened yeah so in high school I was someone who followed the rules I was kind of by the book but by the time I got to college I kind of had a few like Revelations where I didn't really need to do everything that I was told all the time I just kind of decided to take more autonomy on what do I think is right for myself and I wouldn't recommend this for other people but essentially my General Ed classes I kind of just didn't put any effort into them and I fully focused on computer science and like things outside of work that I wanted to work on like fashion projects and so for example there was like an intro to anthropology class very easy class all you have to do is show up yeah I got a D because I just never showed up to class and did you not know that there will be consequences or like yeah I don't know I guess I didn't really care as much I was like you know what as long as I do well in computer science in my math classes like I had discret math and algorithms as well I thought that companies would Overlook it um and companies did but not big tech companies so was difficult to you have to like go push through a system automated system yeah exactly so there were smaller companies that were still willing to hire me just for like the school name because in that area it's a very good school but other than that I think I I ruined my chances of getting into big Tech as my first job so again I wouldn't recommend that if you want to get into big Tech right away but it worked out like yeah and you work at Microsoft now you literally have an OTE job dream for everybody so I think you're doing very well so but like your story is like so inspiring going from 2.