Almost a bank employee to software engineer at Google and Uber
Read the story of my friend Prateek Bhatnagar
From Alternate Roads to FAANG:
I was born in the small town of Ajmer, Rajasthan, and received my early schooling there until we shifted to Jaipur. For all practical purposes, I feel like I was brought up in Jaipur. As is common, I was a decent student under my parents' guidance but started slipping when I got older and self-reliant. I failed a few times in high school. Truthfully, I was not the dedicated kid, one who is determined to do well even when faced with subjects he found boring, like Hindi and Social Studies.
But I was one to harbor interests, and in third grade, when we got introduced to Computer Science, I was hooked all at once and forever. I started out with LOGO and GW-Basic. By sixth grade, I had my own desktop and that opened a new world for me. I was gaming one day when I observed that game files have the same .exe extension as the ones created using Visual Basic. Unaware at the time that any executable file has the .exe extension, I came to believe that Visual Basic can be used to create games and was determined to make one myself. My dad got me an introductory book on the subject from a local fair and successfully started building the interfaces of basic applications.
By tenth grade, I had a much deeper knowledge of Visual Basic and had learned that the main purpose of Visual Basic was not to create games but to code applications. I had also advanced my repertoire to include the skills of HTML and CSS. My growing expertise in Computer Science came at the cost of good grades in major subjects, but it also caught the attention of friends and teachers. I loved being a rebel and pursuing an off-track subject. The only regret I have from school is not scoring a 100 in my Information Technology paper for the twelfth board because I missed the question on the last page.
While exploring my interest, I managed to build an application similar to the format of the Indian TV game show Kaun Banega Crorepati. It asked 13 questions to the user and required me to write 100-150 lines of code back then. I marveled at how if something as simple as this can take so much effort to create, how much more complex the task of creating an Operating System like Windows would be. Since Microsoft did actually do this task, I made up my mind to work for them. Of course, this was before I knew anything about the qualifications required or the process of recruitment. All I knew was that I wanted to be a part of something larger than me, something that touched billions of lives. And if a software engineer was it, then that's what I was going to set my eyes on.
Prateek Bhatnagar currently works as a Frontend Architect at Uber. Read how he started out from Jaipur and made it to Google, Mountain View, California only on https://www.wyzr.in/. Subscribe now!
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