Hook

Their other posts in the index, biggest breakout first.
I'm in my early 20s and this has been my career path as a full time software engineer, a part time master student and a content creator. I'm also gonna disclose salary ranges so if you're uncomfortable with money please keep scrolling. In high school I was a literal fetus that did not take any computer science classes so my salary was $0 per year. At University of Toronto I took my first CS classes and I found it to be relatively okay. Relatively okay as in I did have to sell my soul a couple times to get the grade I want but I pushed through, get a couple A's, kissed professors' asses and wonder why I'm doing so many math courses? I was a literal beggar at the stage applying anywhere and everywhere to get an intern position. Mostly got rejected but got part time uni intern projects, little above minimum wage like ~$21 per hour. Then I got my first external internship at Orange Gate, it was a literal company of 6 people at the time. I built a smart home and presented at a tech conference! For that one I was getting $23 per hour. Then after third year with the experience I had I got my first real internship at Wattpad. This was high impact, the culture was amazing and I was very glad to be working for a company that honours writing fanfiction for Levi Ackerman. Here I helped build the story details feature and got paid around $60,000 per year. Then I graduated and was very scared to be an adult... applied to a lot of companies and universities and I think I got rejected from all of them. Ended up leetcoding quite a bit, literal 4 months of Light Yagami locked in state. I was breathing in DP problems and exhaling Dijkstra's algorithm. Went through 4 hours of interviews at Amazon and I got the software engineer role. The total compensation for that was $160,000 per year. At the same time I was also accepted into Oxford so I was doing part time classes in UK every year. At Amazon I was a slave / Sisyphus to Bezos and I really worked a lot. I worked under the AWS DNS service team and delivered a lot of high impact projects which eventually got me a promotion 1.5 years later. So as now Software Engineer II, my salaries changed to $220,000 per year. Then later that year Amazon was forcing employees to relocate which meant sacrificing everything I have here and moving abroad. And I didn't wanna do that just yet because I would actually be financially spending more money even though I would be making more. So I leetcoded again and I did so much that even looking at a wall for five minutes was a serene experience. I went through a lot of interviews at companies like Stripe and LinkedIn but I ended up choosing Pinterest. And Pinterest had the best benefits, remote work, 3 months work from anywhere in the world, interesting ML team and great pay. Not going to disclose my exact salary but the range is around 250K to 270K per year. So yeah that's where I am right now and I hope that was helpful, don't forget to look at trees and touch grass.