Coder’s Journey featuring Ayush Khanduri (Software Developer at Amazon)

Coder’s journey covers the experience of programming experts across the globe. With coder’s journey, GeeksforGeeks aims to deliver practical guidance to all young programmers and assist them in launching their dream careers.

Ayush is a Computer Science graduate from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology and is currently working as a Software Developer at Amazon. He has also worked with Nissan Digital India as a Software Engineer and worked on Car Recommendation System for its users. Ayush was a former Intern at GeeksforGeeks as Technical Content Writer and wrote many articles on Data Structures and Algorithms. Apart from Coding, Ayush has interests in playing Cricket, Football, Badminton, etc. He also likes to watch a lot of Web Series.

When and How did “being a programmer” strike you as a perfect career choice? 

I would have to say in 2nd year when I first heard about ACM-ICPC and started exploring Codechef. I was only able to solve two questions completely in my first long challenge but eventually got hooked to the adrenaline rush that the Green tick used to give. I was surrounded by some great friends who had similar interests and were also a part of my ACM-ICPC team. We used to compete a lot with each other which in turn helped all of us get better and improve our coding skills.

You were working at GeeksforGeeks as a content writer. How was that experience in your programming journey?

I discovered Geeksforgeeks pretty early as every time I used to search any programming related problem/topic, GFG was the first one to pop-up and the quality of articles was also pretty great. I started contributing to the portal in my free time and fortunately won the Technical Scripter contest organized by Geeksforgeeks in September 2016 and secured an internship at GFG. It was pretty exciting to discover new topics and go into depth to be able to write an effective article that conveys the knowledge in an easily understandable way. It was a great experience for me which made me feel proud that I am contributing to the community and also learning a lot of new things along the way.

What was your biggest failure and what did you learn from it?

One of my biggest failures was failing to qualify for ACM-ICPC regionals in my 3rd year even though our team was doing pretty good at the beginning of the contest. But the biggest failure was what came afterward as I decided to give up competitive programming after this believing that it’s the best I could do and I wasn’t learning anything new from it. This resulted in even worse performance in the next edition of the contest and also negatively impacted my performance in the On-Campus placements.

I learned a couple of great things from this experience and the biggest learning from this was perseverance, i.e working towards what you want no matter what. If you persist enough you can achieve anything you can think of.

The second was that knowledge never goes waste. If not today it’ll help you tomorrow in getting whatever you want to achieve, so keep learning and keep improving as there’s no limit to it.

How did you bag an offer at Amazon? Could you share some tips for the same?

I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn regarding an opening at Amazon. At the time I wasn’t interviewing but agreed to it as to why let a perfect opportunity go. The interview had 1 online coding round and 4 Face-to-Face interviews. The interviews primarily focused on problem-solving skills, data structures, algorithms, projects, and basics of operating systems.

For everyone preparing to get into top MNCs should work on their DS and Algorithm skills a lot. You can use Geeksforgeeks and Leetcode and also filter questions based on specific company tags while preparing. For cracking interviews Competitive programming is not a necessity but is good to have, as it helps improve problem-solving skills which are at the heart of all technical interviews and also needed in solving real-life industry problems. Freshers or people below 1.5 yrs of experience should also prepare for basics of OS and DBMS too which you can prepare from Geeksforgeeks also.

Also in order to get an interview you should build your network with like-minded professionals and reach out to them whenever required.

What are some of your greatest achievements and what are your future goals? 

My biggest achievements would be presenting our research paper in an IEEE conference along with my team and also winning the Technical Scripter contest organized by Geeksforkeeks that won me confidence and helped me secure an internship there. Apart from these getting a job in my dream company Amazon was also a very proud moment for me.

 I get very intrigued by Algorithmic Trading and would love to build something interesting related to that in the future.

Ayush can be reached at LinkedIn

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