Pulkit Agarwal

I had a colleague who left Amazon to join a startup in Bangalore. Suddenly, 50–60 hour workweeks became his new normal. He was young, brilliant, driven. But 2 years in, he was nearly burnt out and struggling with severe back pain. As a software engineer, your body doesn’t have to snap in half for you to lose it. You lose it slowly, one ache at a time. First, it’s the late nights and missed meals. Then the eyestrain, the stiff neck, the wrists that hurt by lunchtime. Then, if you ignore it, the back pain that lingers even on weekends. Your job doesn’t just take energy from your brain. It takes from your body, every day, in small, quiet ways. Most engineers don’t burn out from writing too much code, they burn out from never disconnecting. You might be eating dinner, but still debugging in your head. Lying in bed, but your mind is running sprints. It’s not about how many hours you log at the desk. The real work happens in your head, when you can think clearly, spot patterns, solve problems no one else sees. But to think that way, you need rest. Your body needs breaks. If you’re in your twenties, you’ll shrug off the warning signs. But those tiny aches turn chronic by your forties. And the irony? It often happens right when your title is getting bigger, Staff, Principal, maybe Director. While your salary goes up, your step count goes down. Change your habits now: ● Put your monitor at eye level ● Swap that fourth coffee for a walk outside. ● Get some physical activity in with long work hours ● Buy a proper chair, or better work with a standing desk ● Block time for workouts like you block time for meetings. No bonus, stock refresh, or fancy title will buy back a spine that doesn’t hurt on Monday. If you want to be great at this job for decades, protect your body as fiercely as you protect your codebase.

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I have researched lots of product-based companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Zomato, Goldman Sachs, Paytm, J.P. Morgan etc., for SDE1 2 roles, and found that these 20 system design questions are almost asked in every interviews, both at the fresher and experienced levels. 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 1. Design a simple URL shortening service. 2. Design a basic chat application. 3. Design a file storage system. 4. Design a simple social media platform. 5. Design a simple search engine. 6. Design a simple e-commerce website. 7. Design a basic ride-sharing system. 8. Design a basic video streaming service. 9. Design a simple recommendation system. 10. Design a basic food delivery app. 11. Design a parking lot management system. 12. Design a simple music streaming service. 13. Design a basic online ticket booking system. 14. Design a simple note-taking application. 15. Design a weather forecasting system. 16. Design a basic email service. 17. Design a file synchronization system. 18. Design a simple calendar application. 19. Design a basic online quiz platform. 20. Design a user authentication system. 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 1. Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly. 2. Design a distributed key-value store like Redis. 3. Design a scalable social network like Facebook. 4. Design a scalable recommendation system like Netflix. 5. Design a distributed file system like Hadoop's HDFS. 6. Design a real-time messaging system like WhatsApp. 7. Design a web crawler like Google. 8. Design a distributed cache like Memcached. 9. Design a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare. 10. Design a scalable search engine like Google. 11. Design a ride-sharing system like Uber. 12. Design a video streaming service like YouTube. 13. Design an online food delivery system like Zomato. 14. Design a collaborative document editing system like Google Docs. 15. Design an e-commerce platform like Amazon. 16. Design a recommendation system for an online marketplace. 17. Design a fault-tolerant distributed database system. 18. Design a scalable event-driven system like Twitter. 19. Design a scalable photo-sharing platform like Instagram. 20. Design a distributed task scheduling system. Learn and solve these, and you’ll be fully prepared for your next System Design interviews.. System design can be tough to crack, but having the right resources makes all the difference. Came across this well-structured, in-depth guide definitely worth a read. 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: https://lnkd.in/gxRRyd2m #tech #collab

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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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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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