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

• 👨‍💼 Linkedin
• 👩‍🚀 GitHub
• 🌐  LeetCode profile

⏰ 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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