Zero To Job

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Oct 1 '21

Welcome to the blog of ZERO to JOB. I am Keshav Kumar, a student from tier 3 college of Kolkata, as you have guessed from the topic that this blog is going to be the guidance for you from nothing to getting a job.
And don’t worry about resources, every link is provided in the end. Here I will be discussing my learning from my own experiences and from the experience of senior people who work in different big Tech companies. If you want to know about my skills you can check my GITHUB.

Now before guiding you about what to do in your college life, something is more important than that is, what not to do. So lets start,

First mistake that people do is they ran behind certificates of different things which doesn’t have much values like you attended some event and got a certificate that is not going to help you in anyway. Skills are much more valuable than certificates.
Second thing is skipping basics for learning new cool technologies like blockchain, AR-VR. It's great that you have interest in this and you want to learn about these things but before learning these things you must complete your programming language + Data Structures & Algorithms(DSA).
Third thing is not coding everyday, it does not matter how many hours you code. If you can't code a particular day it is going to affect you very much. If you don’t have much time on a particular day at least try to do even 15 minutes of going through previous code and just re-ran that code.
Fourth thing is spending too much time doing assignments, these assignments are not going to help you in placement. Try to copy it from friends and do it in shortcut somehow just finish these things as quickly as possible.
Fifth thing is spending too much time at college fest or in parties with friends. I also enjoy taking part in some events and going out but don’t just submerge yourself into it. Like if you are going out almost every next day then think yourself isn’t that too much. Just make a balance in enjoying life and developing your skills.
Sixth thing is doing unpaid internships, some people do unpaid internships with a thought of it will boost up their resume, but the companies that are not even paying their interns can not add any values in your skills so wait more, learn more and get better internships but something is even worse than that is, paying for an internship means you pay them to get an internship so this is totally scam they will take some money and will give some random project and here you will be losing on money, time, effort everything and mostly such things happens in tier 3 college because here students are naive.
Seventh thing, now this is not a mistake but you may be misguided so let me clear this for you, thinking that Competitive Programming(cp) is a must for a job. The straight answer is no it's not and these are not my words these the words of people who work in these companies, but doing DSA is a must You can try cp and if you like it then surely go for it.

If You think this is going to be valuable and to ask me anything you can connect with me on instagram, twitter, Linkedin, GitHub.

First year road map

Now let's start with the first year road map, this is going to be the same if you are in any other year and want to start programming. For getting a placement in any top company, 2 year of programming is sufficient but you have to code for 4 hours everyday and if you do less or more then you can adjust this 2 years accordingly. Don’t worry about resources, I will be sharing everything in the end.
Here you can start with a language like JAVA, C++(C is not mandatory to learn C++) or Python but what i suggest is don’t go for python when you are starting out not because it’s easy but because most of the things are hidden in python one of the very important topic that is Object Oriented programming is also hidden in abstract layers and because of this many companies not even allow to write codes of coding rounds in python, so now we are left with two JAVA and Cpp, here if you want to become a competitive programmer you can choose Cpp and if you want to just clear coding rounds and want to do development then java is great. Although if you check the top 10 winners of any competition you will find 2-3 java programmers in that. I had started with java and fell in love with it.

Now after doing DSA in 1st semester here comes the massive Great thing that is going to help you in getting referrals and making connections with people around the world and you will learn so much that you can’t even imagine, that is OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTION. Now you might be thinking, what is this thing so have you heard about VLC media player or LINUX, Firefox browser? All these things are built by talented people around the world for free. You can use it, you can add or change features according to your need and you can contribute to these projects. You don’t need to be an expert in order to contribute, even beginners can contribute. You can learn more about this from HERE. You can start this with Web development, Android/ISO development, Machine learning, Cloud Computing, etc. If you want you can explore all these things and can choose one or two. I personally tried web-dev, android and cloud, and finally continued with web-dev and cloud. Before picking any of these learn GIT & GITHUB.

Second Year Plan

So now we are in our second year plan and if you have completed even 70% from the first year road map then it’s a great achievement. You are going to rock it.

Now what we need to do here is get active on social platforms like twitter and linkedin by posting your achievements and projects. It doesn't matter whether you are getting likes on that post or not. Recruiters will reach you and if not then when you will reach people for referrals then they will at least won’t ignore you. Linkedin is great but not as much as twitter. If you watch any tech talk on youtube people are going to say “if you want to connect you can connect with me on twitter”. And it’s my personal experience also that when I reach someone on twitter I get more quick responses in comparison to linkedin but this does not mean you should not post things on linkedin.

Apart from being active on these great platforms you can take part in hackathons, Students programs of Microsoft, GitHub and many others you can find more awesome programs from youtube.
While doing all these things Keep building whatever you have chosen in 1st year and also keep practising DSA from leetcode.

If you completed DSA and Development as mentioned above then you have achieved 70% milestone, Now remaining things are theory. Don’t listen to senior if they say these topics are tough or boring, Once will start by your own you'll find these are like stories you don’t have to remember these things everything in first go, it will be like some fairly tell if you will learn it with interest. These topics are Operating System, DBMS(database management system), and System design. Don’t wait for your college to start and study on your own. You can study about these concepts from blogs/ youtube/ books.

Resources Links

You can learn from these resources as I personally loved but feel free to choose others on your own.

Share it with your friends so that they don't get misguided.