Hi everyone and welcome to Upna College and today we are going to discuss some honest advice that is targeted towards aspiring software engineers especially if we want to build a good career in tech. Now this is hopefully one of those videos which will encourage us to code consistently if we are already working towards our goals or it might also encourage us to leave coding altogether depends upon our mindset. Now the first point that I wanted to discuss with you all is regarding competition.
When we talk about competition then we get to hear almost everywhere that software engineering is a very competitive field which is true. nobody is denying that but we have to acknowledge one more thing that we live in a country like India where there is so much population that if we pick any job with which there is some societal prestige associated and where people are able to earn well whether they are engineers, lawyers, doctors, government exams, in every single field we get to see a lot of competition just because we live in India. So this is one thing which we have to acknowledge.
Secondly, if we talk about competition, then the competition that we see online, in my personal opinion, it is the bloated form of competition. Because real competition, the on-ground competition is actually much less than that. Generally when we interact with tier 3, tier 4 college students, then from there we get a general consensus after our interaction. that if there are around 1000 students in a college who are going to sit for placements, then 500 to 600 students are even not serious about placements or placement preparation. And its major reason is distraction, whether it happened through social media or due to other reasons.
Today, everybody knows that if we want to take placement in software engineering, if we want to take an internship, then what should we learn, how should we learn, but there are very few students who are actually sitting down and putting in the work to learn those things. to learn those skills. It is basically like thinking that we know that we have to learn trigonometry in today's date. But we have spent 2-3 years of college and in this time we have only explored 20-25 books that what content is written there but actually we have never read trigonometry.
So in this situation, yes there is a lot of competition because a lot of people are setting for jobs, a lot of people are applying for jobs but the real competition which is about having on ground skills is very less. So in current times, I am personally opining that if we are students like this, then we should be able to learn who can cut their distractions and sit at one place, work on their skills, work on themselves. So we actually stand a good chance in securing a good placement or a good internship, whatever our current goal is.
Along with this, one more additional advice or tip I would suggest you to keep in mind is that always have a good circle of friends around you. Means if we are going to college, the way we are interacting with our classmates and friends, sometimes we don't know but they really have a major impact. on what our life is going to turn out like.
If I take my personal example, the kind of friends or the kind of classmates that I had, the majority of them had to go into the software engineering field, due to which our majority discussions regarding placements, internships, projects, hackathons used to take place. Due to which, I got to learn some additional things. Similarly, I had a lot of friends in college who used to interact in English, due to which, my communication skills improved a little. Because personally, I do not come from a background where English... was the primary medium of communication or where English speaking was very much motivated.
Now, temporarily as a college student, the kind of friends or the kind of classmates that we have, understanding its importance may be a little difficult, but if we imagine it in the long term, the kind of company that we keep is going to have a long term impact on our career and on our life itself. So, the group of people with whom we are hanging out on a regular basis, we have to pick them very mindfully, we have to choose them very mindfully. And second advice is regarding packages.
There will be many students among us who have uploaded 50 LPA 6 on YouTube. videos, videos of day in the life, which we will see and feel that initial inspiration which we decided that there are high packages in this field, then we have to go into this software engineering field and now we have to start coding. And if this was our mindset, then it's perfectly okay, there is nothing wrong in it because majority of software engineers who work in this field, their initial inspiration were the high packages that this field offers and that is why they are working in this field because this is an ever changing field.
There are complex problems that you need to solve on daily basis and people are doing all that in majority cases because of the high packages. But here the thing we always have to remember about the package is the on ground reality. If every year 15 lakh engineers graduate in India, then around 2.5 lakh jobs are being applied. And the average package for freshers in India is still around 5.5 LPA to 6 LPA.
So the average package which is around the number of majority of students, one should be our understanding. Second, we don't need to associate our self-worth with our package. If someone gets a high package, it doesn't mean that they become better as a human being. So, your self-worth, personal self-respect, you don't have to associate it with your package. And second advice, this advice will seem a bit filmy, and this movie of 3 Idiots has already given us, that you don't have to run after success in life.
You have to run after excellence in life, success will come after a snap. It sounds very filmy to listen to, but in the software engineering field, it actually applies. You don't need to run after packages.
You work on your skills. If you have worked very well in a niche for 4 years of college and if you have worked very well on that skill and you know that you are really good at that skill compared to your peers then definitely packages, whether they are high packages, they are going to come. But till you keep thinking how high package will come every day, how high package will come, that will not be the case.
We will have to work on our skills every day and the package will come automatically and that is what actually happens in software engineering. Third advice is regarding starting early. If we take the example of any field, except for exceptions, the majority of people who are successful in any field are those who started working in that field at an early age.
Or at an early age they had started something. Majority of entrepreneurs who are successful in their 40s, if you look at their trajectory, then the majority of them started working in their early 30s and that is why we see a lot of results in their 40s or 50s. So the same thing applies in this field too. If your goal is already clear in your mind that I want to go into this field, if it is clear in your mind, then whatever direction you are picking, whatever niche you want to make, whether you are preparing for on-campus, off-campus or any other niche so you just have to get on top of that and don't waste time for example if you are somebody who has decided to sit in on-campus placements so in that case we have to start working on GPA, we have to start studying from DA because majority of the companies that come on campus come from DA we have to start working on resume we can also find niche in good projects that we have to make in web development or in app development or on any other technology whatever technology you are interested in, make 3-4 good projects based on that technology which you have made hands on, which you have learned something from add that in your resume and you should know that you should have a wow factor in your entire profile it's like having a yellow cap which helps you stand out in the middle of the crowd and that thing is very important now your yellow cap can be anything, it can be hackathons It can be our open source experience, competitive programming experience, intensive internship experience. But the point is that we have to work hard to bring that experience on our resume and profile.
So if we have decided that this is our on-campus direction, then we have to do these things. If we have decided that off-campus is my direction and let's suppose I want to go into web development. So then in your peers, if you are targeting for fresher role, then the level of web development your peers get, campus mein stand out karane ke liye aapko usse better karna hi karna padega.
Usse case mein bhi aapme projects to banane padenge par kuch additional skills hain jine jaake aapme explore karna padega. Chai wo devops related ho gayi, chai wo deployment related ho gayi, chai wo hamari containerization related ho gayi. Par hame ek level aage jaake cheezon ko seekna padega to be able to stand out in on campus aur off campus.
and these things will work only when we take an early start we can't sit 2-3 months before placement and think that we haven't done coding till now but our package will also look good and we won't have to put in that much hard work because if we don't put in that hard work then there are going to be people, there are going to be peers of yours who are ready to put that hard work next advice is for students who have already put in heavy effort of 2-3 months on coding but they still feel like that they hate coding Now I am using the strong word hate intentionally. If we are programming continuously for 2-3 months, 4-5 months, then we will become bored at some point. If we are doing artistic work like singing or acting, then there too after one point, because repeated work is done in every single field, so people tend to become bored and becoming slightly bored is okay, it's normal.
But if after 2-3 months of programming, we feel bored that I hate this work and this is not for me but still we are sticking to that thing just because we have seen high packages in this field or seen some lifestyle or seen something else so here I will advise you that you need to pause and once you have to try that we should also try to explore some alternate career paths around us because sometimes it can happen that an alternate field or another such field can exist where maybe we don't have that hatred field towards that work in that field it may happen that our starting packages come for example. If students don't like tech, then some of them shift towards non-tech positions, towards consultant roles or some other roles. So, there, it is possible that starting packages are less, but gradually, with time, if we put hard work and effort there too, then no field gets spoiled in any way.
It is not that high packages can be found only in this field, and not in other fields. If, wherever... We feel that we can do this thing, it aligns with our capabilities and if we put our hard work in there, then it is possible that we can get more output and more benefits in the long term.
So this is an analysis that we should do for ourselves. If we have already put in two to three months of effort, it is not that we just saw today, we tried coding once, so we left it just because we found it hard. There is a major difference between feeling hard and hating something.
And second thing is that when we know that apart from programming if we see any other alternate then we are ready to put in hard work there also. It is not like that just because we found programming hard then we shifted to another thing, started doing government exam, Government exam is hard then we are shifting to third thing, we don't have to get stuck in that cycle. At the end we have to choose one field which will be hard for us but if we stay in it for long term.
So we build our specialization in that which will help us to survive in long term. Now fifth advice is related to timely analysis of ourselves. If we have to analyze that whether our preparation is going on or not, then we can do self analysis on that. And for that we have to ask some basic questions to ourselves.
When was the last time when we did the code continuously for 4-5 hours? That code can be from DSA also, that code can be a major project on which we are working. We can learn new things in tech. But when was the last time when we were continuously learning something new in tech?
When was the last time when we gave a week consistently or regularly to programming? When we were contributing something every day, coding, programming, working on a project. When was the last one month when we regularly invested in learning something in tech?
When we do this self analysis, we get to know the reality of how much hard work we are putting in this field. Because we feel that we are sitting on social media and we see the content there which is our aspirations. But watching content on social media is very different from actually sitting and coding.
So when was the last time when we actually coded for many hours and we did it continuously in the week and in the month. And if we come to know that we are not remembering such last time So that means we are slowly coming into that category which feels like there is a lot of competition but they are not part of the real competition. And here we need to change ourselves.
If we want to be part of that real competition, if we want to be part of that specific number of students who are actually doing hard work everyday, then for that you will have to cut off social media distractions once again and sit on your things. Second thing in self-analysis is that whenever we go to the job market, internship, placement to apply, then before that, we have to analyze our resume. How can we analyze?
First of all, we have to think about our resume, if we are applying for an internship position or placement position, so is this the resume that you would want to hire for your own startup? If you are doing a tech startup and you have to hire a coder, then would you hire this person? So from there also you get a different perspective that what should be improved in our resume, that we should like to hire him. Second thing, whatever your one year immediate resume is, not 2 year, 3 year, 4 year seniors, 1 year immediate seniors, who you know have got their placement or have got their internship, so once you compare your resume with their resume, and you have to see what things we need to improve, what skills we need to improve, what wow factor we need to bring, what things we need to work on in our profile, so that we can also be shortlisted and selected for similar opportunities.
So, that self analysis instead of relying on someone telling us that we are in confusion, we are applying in companies again and again, we are not able to get shortlisted, we are not getting invites for interviews. So, before someone else does that analysis for us, it is better to do our analysis ourselves and see that if skill level exists from 0 to 100, then where are we now, where do we want to go and what are the skills and things to bridge that gap, on which we have to work. So self analysis is really really important which we have to do time to time.
You have to do this self analysis in college, in placement time and also in company. You have to see what kind of growth we are getting in the company, what kind of opportunities we are getting, what skills we are learning, so this analysis should go on lifelong because eventually If we don't think about our career, we won't get the growth that we have made in our mind. So if we want our reality to meet our expectations, then self analysis is very important for that. Which every student should do.
So I hope that all the things we have discussed will help you in your professional journey. Along with this, I also understand that tech can be a confusing field sometimes. There are so many things to do, we have limited time, we have to explore a lot of things, we have to enjoy college life. There are many things but if we do a little bit of structuring, then we can keep balancing things to a great extent. There is exactly no true balance, that we will enjoy it and we will get a good placement, but a little bit of balance can be brought, but for that we have to start early, along with that we have to keep structuring things.
Structuring things means that we do one thing at a time. If we are learning DSA now, then we should focus on DSA and bring strong command in it. If we are learning web development, then we should bring strong command on web development. If we are learning app development, then we should bring strong command on app development.
If we are learning machine learning, if we are learning cyber security, then we should bring strong command on those things. As a student, we cannot do all the things, but we can do 2-3 things in our college life in a very good way. And eventually, those things become our niche and they help us the most in our professional journey to take our first job. So as a student try to do one thing at a time but we have to do that one thing in such a good way that one thing should make us stand out in a crowd. So always pay attention to that thing.
I hope today's session was beneficial for you. That's all for today, see you in the next video. Till then keep learning and keep exploring.