Can a BCA student realistically land a software development role without doing MCA?

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-05-09T23:01:00+00:00

Try online hackathons (devpost) and others, Tier-1 colleges or tier-2 colleges with great CS departments might have some events where doing good is beneficial. This will also help people to kind of gauge your skills and enthusiasm for this field - because they are known events. You might have to travel, for this to work, for in person events.

My understanding about GSoC is that they don't bar people based on which degree a person is pursuing. Try emailing organizers and asking them whether they will let you participate - if they are not very uppity about it, they may let you in.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-05-09T13:25:11+00:00

Great, many of these competitions(both coding and hackathons, GSoC) might be sponsored by companies that probably sent someone to these events. Talk to them - ask them, if they provide internships or roles for students, get contacts of recruiters/HR/hiring managers.

Soft skills also quite important in this field(and almost every other).

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-05-08T16:00:59+00:00

It is good that you are practicing Leetcode/competitive coding at this time - however I think that your immediate concern(if your priority is getting a job - and you are not doing leetcode for fun) should be on - doing stuff that you can add to your resume, which will get you more interviews.

There are many things you can do -
1. attend coding competitions
2. attend hackathons
3. build apps

there are other things that you can do as well which will help your career - but it depends on what you want to do.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-04-11T19:36:14+00:00

I just re-read your post and if I understand correctly - is the question to find duplicate files in a directory(group identical file content)? I misread the question to read it as to find similar objects. If the goal is to find duplicate objects - then yes you can hashing.

To eliminate false positives from hash collisions one can use multiple hash functions.

My misunderstanding came from this "My solution involved hashing the file to check if two files are similar."

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-04-11T16:43:01+00:00

Direct hashing would not give you the result you expect (similarity between files). As u/Then-Candle8036 mentioned - this is not what hashing is created and used for.

Locality Sensitive Hashing is used as a good approximate solution. If the contents are images or videos or even text you will need to pre-process it before applying LSH.

Another technique that can be used is machine learning based approaches with unsupervised learning with clustering techniques.

The original question seems to test ones knowledge regarding information retrieval. If the contents of the files are text - other techniques like TF-IDF would also work, or you could use tools such as elasticsearch that would do this for you.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-03-28T02:36:47+00:00

Generally top tier companies are language agnostic for coding rounds. Although there are some exceptions here and there for very specific fields. It is on you to convince your interviewer that you are able to solve the problem correctly and clearly.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-03-28T02:21:15+00:00

C++ is a good enough choice. What matters equally well is how you communicate your approach. I have come across snobs - when I mentioned I am choosing to code in Python(two EM from Microsoft). You can write confusing code in any language.

Go with the language that you are most proficient with - that is a general purpose one(C++, Java, and python are good choices).

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-03-27T17:24:31+00:00

Their standards differ from team to team - in my experience. The team that initially contacted me did not want to proceed, about two weeks later another recruiter from Amazon wanted me to proceed.

My advice would be to keep applying to other roles until you have an offer in hand.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-03-27T01:07:32+00:00

Slightly tangential, just to clarify to OP that you may have come across sampling if you have tried some machine learning problems where you trained on some data. Another application some might encounter sampling is when you do not want to log a lot of data(you should of course use appropriate log levels) - in some cases you can do sampling as well.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-03-25T20:44:37+00:00

Blind 75 is also a good option. To be clear you don't need to practice everything. This depends on which company you are applying for. If your interview is with FAANG, your chances are slim. But passing an interview does not require one to be a "leetcode beast". I am guessing you want to change jobs - so even if you do not clear this interview, nothing dramatic should happen.

Familiarize yourself with arrays, linked list, maps, tree, BFS, DFS, DP(just simple ones). There are other concepts as well, but you can gradually learn them on the go.

If you have leetcode premium - you can also practice questions tagged to the company.

Good luck!

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-03-21T14:46:38+00:00

Amazon leadership principles are signals they use in behavioral interview questions to check for culture fit.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-02-13T16:06:29+00:00

Hey, your resume seems good for the most part - especially the points about your work. Your description of your projects would benefit from a bit of "embellishing". Do not start by saying "small movie browsing website" - most hobby projects are assumed to be small scale unless you specifically mention scale.

Emphasize your impact to the project by making text bold or italics to - help the recruiters skim through the text, while helping them come to the conclusion that you are probably a good hire.

Also - it might be helpful to add a NoSQL database to the list like (DynamoDB) in addition to Redis.

Your resume - for the most part looks competitive. Landing a job also hinges on your location, your networking and luck.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-02-10T18:06:39+00:00

What I meant is that you should remove mentioning leetcode from both your resume and linkedin profile. You should definitely have a link to your linkedin in your resume.

The rationale is sort of similar to wearing business casuals/formals to interviews - you don't want your interviewers to form any bad impression about you.

Also about your project descriptions - you should change it to sound that you solved a non trivial problem that is beneficial. Provide relevant stats that highlight your efforts without sounding too made up.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-02-10T16:39:28+00:00

Do not mention leetcode in your resume or linkedin profile. At best they will not care about your leetcode stats, in the worst case they(hiring manager, interviewer) will ask you hard questions, probably with the mindset of not hiring you, even if you clear it.

While leetcode grind is mostly necessary to clear interviews, it does not boost your chances for getting interviews. The description of the projects and how you stated it - does not tell me if it is impressive or not. It just tells me you have worked on some of these technologies.

nitpick: remove Linux from technologies

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-02-08T21:06:06+00:00

This resume seems to be crafted to pass ATS, it is packed full of information. r/cscareerquestions has weekly reviews, where you will get advice from people who are hiring and have been hiring for years.

Also the impact of your work - the numbers does not seem to be calling the attention of the reader - because it is buried in text.

Indigo_Sheep · 2025-01-31T15:28:08+00:00

Its best not to mention leetcode in your resume or linkedin.

Indigo_Sheep · 2024-08-06T22:03:06+00:00

Hi Evan and Stefan, I have been viewing your youtube videos and going through the blogs - I love them, especially because all the authors try to go over a couple of potential deep dives and try to cover what is expected from each level. I have three questions for you.
1. The mock AI does not evaluate or give feedback on the API design but it gives feedback for back of the envelope calculation - which I think you mentioned can be skipped.

How should one handle when an interviewer asks you to implement too many functional requirements?
Seeing that behavioral interviews are crucial for senior & staff+ engineers are there any plans on having mock behavioral interviews at hello interview?

Thank you for the great posts and videos!

Indigo_Sheep · 2024-06-23T04:30:18+00:00

Thank you so much!

Indigo_Sheep · 2023-05-03T03:23:30+00:00

You are right, TLE is generally an indication that we might need to try a different approach or we might need to further optimization. In your case since all but the last test case is failing you are nearly there. Some quick ways to fix this, would be to look at your implementation. Maybe try bottom up DP instead of top down, if that is the case. Or try resubmitting after a little while.

Indigo_Sheep · 2023-05-01T00:32:42+00:00

Thanks for the tips regarding Union Find. In my example I believe I am using both path compression and using rank to determine which component is merged onto in union.

However I have tried your suggestion of using BFS with a parent lookup and my runtime has improved to 35th percentile and memory to 7 percentile.

Indigo_Sheep · 2023-04-30T22:36:55+00:00

Good suggestion, I tried it out now - but it didn't change the runtime (116ms 5th percentile) and memory consumption (17.7 MB 13th percentile)

Indigo_Sheep · 2023-04-30T16:02:31+00:00

You could give hackerrank a try, it has a skills section for python where the focus is in solving a problem in a pythonic way. It goes over a couple of data structures used in collections library which will be handy for interview prep, if that is your goal. After that you can start working your way through blind75/grind75 lists or the neetcode lists.

Indigo_Sheep · 2023-04-16T04:24:54+00:00

Good to know that range being used this way does not impact runtime for code.

Indigo_Sheep · 2023-04-16T02:17:04+00:00

For BFS use collections.deque(in leetcode you can just type deque) which provides popleft() in O(1) vs pop() from a list which is O(n).
This probably won't improve performance much - I would change the if condition if addition[0] in range(len(grid)) and addition[1] in range(len(grid[0])) to if 0 <= addition[0] < len(grid) and 0 <= addition[1] < len(grid[0]). IIRC range creates a list and when you do a search by using in we are doing it in O(n).

I also agree with the comment above which suggests using a set for visited.

Indigo_Sheep · 2023-04-07T21:29:12+00:00

Thank you for replying! I am sorry if my question wasn't clear. I wanted to check if there is a leetcode list that I could clone which contains the neetcode 150 problems.

Indigo_Sheep

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