Second year at GL Bajaj. Every single person around me had the same plan, printed from the same invisible manual: grind DSA, 500 LeetCode problems, clear the OA, land the service company job, exhale.
Teachers said it. Seniors said it in that tired been-there voice. The whole placement machine hummed the same note.
I didn’t do it. I opened Kaggle instead. And I didn’t look up for eight months.
Not because I’m disciplined. Because it was the only thing that felt like play while everyone else was treating their own brain like a punishment.
nobody tells you what DSA actually is
DSA is a filter. That’s it. It exists so a recruiter staring at 800 resumes can reject 790 of them before lunch. It’s real, it’s hard, and it teaches you almost nothing about building the thing you actually want to build.
I looked at Karpathy. I looked at Andrew Ng. I went looking for one person who got where I wanted to go by grinding LeetCode. Couldn’t find them. Every single one went stupidly deep on one thing that was about to matter, right before it mattered.
So I made the bet. Skip the filter. Learn the work.
it was lonely as hell
I won’t romanticise it. When your entire batch is walking one way and you walk the other, you feel the distance every day. There were nights I was sure I’d wrecked my own career on a hunch. No placement safety net. No proof yet. Just Kaggle notebooks and a stubborn feeling.
mehnat toh ho rahi thi. bas direction alag tha.
then it paid
3x Kaggle Expert. Then the content. Then companies. Then a life that looks nothing like the one the placement machine was selling me.
I’m not telling you DSA is useless. If the place you want filters on it, learn it, clear it, move on. Just don’t confuse the filter with the work. The filter gets you through a door. What you build after is the whole point, and no one’s LeetCode rating has ever shipped a product.
Pick the thing that’s about to matter. Go dangerously deep. Let everyone else grind the filter.