Anshul Mittal

Here are 3 Lessons I’ve learned in my 3 yrs as an SDE that changed my life. LESSON #1 → Asking early saves you time later. Whenever I got stuck, I reached out, paired with a teammate, shared logs, or walked through the flow together. A good engineer doesn’t solve problems alone, they solve it faster with collaboration. LESSON #2 → Take feedback seriously. Whether it was Code or design reviews, the feedback stung at first, but acting on it made me sharper. Each review wasn’t about “fixing mistakes” but about raising my bar. LESSON #3 → Systems break at the edges. The happy path is easy. What I started focusing on were edge cases: timeouts, retries, failover behavior, scaling limits. That attention to detail made me more confident in production environments. Working at Microsoft & now Salesforce, these lessons have shaped me into more than just an engineer who codes & into someone who owns systems end-to-end. So if you’re a working SDE preparing for your next switch to mid-level SDE roles while working full-time, I’d strongly recommend Bosscoder Academy. 🔗 Explore their programs here: https://bit.ly/4gBc1Il They’ve already helped 2200+ engineers land roles in top PBCs with structured prep in DSA, System Design, and Full Stack, 1:1 mentorship, mock interviews, resume support, and 100% job switch guidance. #sdeprep #career #jobswitch #systemdesign #growth #collab

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If you thought you’d leave data structures behind after college.  Think again. – Google Maps, graphs in action, finding the shortest path for you every single day. – WhatsApp, queues, to make sure your messages are delivered in order. – Instagram Stories, stacks, letting you go back through stories one by one. – Chrome’s Incognito Tabs, linked lists, so you can jump between tabs seamlessly. – Spotify, hash maps, to instantly pull up your playlist or favorite song. Also, – Amazon uses recommendation algorithms to suggest products just for you. – Facebook uses priority queues to decide what shows up on your news feed. – Uber uses graph search to find the closest drivers and fastest routes. – YouTube uses tries to autocomplete your search instantly. – Twitter uses rate-limiting algorithms to prevent spam and abuse. You have to practice DSA for interviews, yes. But don’t skip over the foundations just because you’re in a hurry. Because one day, you’ll hit a challenge where the right answer will come from actually understanding how things work under the hood. If you don’t build a strong foundation now, you’ll feel it when it matters most. Because sooner or later, every real engineering problem comes back to the basics. When the system breaks, the deadlines close in, or your code needs to scale for millions, It won’t matter what language or framework you know. What matters is whether you understand the building blocks. That’s the difference between fixing things and just guessing.

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Behind every successful story of switching from @gmail.com to @google.com you see on LinkedIn is a long list of rejections that’s not always clearly visible. When I switched from Amazon to Google: - I was rejected from Uber - I was rejected from few mid scale startups It was humbling, and maybe for the first time in a long time, after being sure of myself, I didn’t feel confident that day. But that was required for me to grow to the next level and push past my limits and while rejections are painful and brutal, they’re also signals. If you’re getting rejected after you reach the final interview round, it’s a sign you need to sharpen your storytelling and communicate your impact with clarity. If you’re consistently falling short in technical screens, it’s a sign your fundamentals might need a deeper revisit If your applications rarely turn into interviews, it’s a sign your experience is not enough or resume or online presence isn’t telling the right story, or you haven’t built the right connections. If you keep hearing “good, but not the right fit,” it’s a sign you need to research the company’s culture and tailor your approach to show you can thrive in that specific environment. If feedback is always generic or non-existent, it’s a sign you need to ask better questions at the end, seek out honest feedback, or build relationships with interviewers and peers who will tell you the hard truth. The story always looks clean and linear on LinkedIn, but real growth happens in the messy, frustrating, deeply personal stretches. You only fail if you stop listening to what your rejections are teaching you. So if you’re facing setback after setback, adjust, reflect, and keep evolving. The best offers come right after you finally outgrow your old limits. Good Luck!

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