I’m Ashish Sarkar, SDE-2 at PayPal and was formerly working at Walmart. Here’s my experience with Scaler Academy, hope this gives people from non-CS background or people starting late a great motivation. I was one of the earliest students to join Scaler Academy.
Coming from a non-tech background, I had basic knowledge of coding, but not a concrete grasp of DS Algo. Being a 2016 passout from a non-CS branch, I didn’t see a lot of people doing competitive coding or coding as a hobby, as we see now. We didn’t have much resources back then either.
In 2019, I made up my mind that I would give DS Algo a shot, and would take a crack at getting into product-based tech companies. People really fear these topics, and I finally wanted to try them for myself. So I started prepping, and I had used InterviewBit back in 2017.
I had personally met both the co-founders Anshuman and Abhimanyu, and I decided to give Scaler a chance. I cracked the test, and was one of the first people in the early batches. I wished for some structured guidance, because whenever I reached out to people, they would suggest sites and articles, but not how I could go about the entire process. Scaler can define a path, but it’s you who has to walk it. But the path they set is an excellent one.
In the first few days, it was really overwhelming, but people who managed to stick around gained a lot. I stuck around because already having known frontend, I mainly wanted the guidance on DS-Algo and System Design, which I got.
Siddharth Taneja and Sundeep Babbur, two of the instructors, knew I had had some stellar experience building a stack from scratch, and they understood exactly what I needed. I’d already been in the industry, and I knew a lot of topics, but the pure CS concepts were a bit lacking, where Scaler really came through for me.
Mentorship was another aspect which really shone for me, I wanted some guidance from industry stalwarts. The mentor, Sushant, I got from Scaler was great, and we’re still in touch! The mentorship aspect really surpassed my expectations.
There were two people who’ve stood out to me over the years. One was Abhimanyu, and being a frontend guy, I approached him directly. I had his phone number and I could ask for his inputs whenever I needed some help. The other person was Nihal Srivastava from Google. He was one of the top rated instructors at Scaler at my time. Everyone else was also really helpful and experienced, but these two stand out to me. I’m still connected with them!
The knowledge and skills that I have gained through Scaler have helped me crack multiple MNCs like MakeMyTrip, Walmart Labs, PayPal, Amazon to name a few out of which I decided to go with PayPal.