Bangladeshi CSE graduate’s road to Google job

Bangladesh is predominantly an agricultural country. But, to cope with the modern trend, the country is now trying to revolutionise through digitalisation. The previous decade saw Bangladesh focusing on information technology (IT) progress heavily. Still the country has a long way to go. It ranked 73 in Global Connectivity Index last year. Its best tech universities hardly find themselves among top two thousand universities in the world. Still, when someone from this technologically lagging country gets a job in one of the world's biggest tech giants like Google, the news is bound to grab people's attention.

Shadman Protik, a computer science graduate from Islamic University of Technology (IUT) Bangladesh, recently secured a prestigious job in Google. The young talented software engineer was offered a position in Dublin, Ireland in December last year. On top of this job offer, he had another offer from e-commerce giant Amazon in January this year. But he chose Google over Amazon for his passion for coding and problem solving. However, Covid-19 crisis caused a delay in joining. As everything is coming back to normal now, he is set to join the global company by the first week next month. Just before setting foot on one of the biggest companies in the world, he shared the story of his endeavour with delight.

"I never thought that I had to solve countless problems. Rather, I focused on necessity than quantity," said Shadman about how he gained efficiency in problem solving. As competitive programming is becoming more and more popular in Bangladesh, recruiters nowadays prefer some competitive programming background as well. Hence, most of the CSE students or aspiring programmers tend to dive into numerous problem solving tests. But, Shadman believes that the number of problems solved should not be the prime concern here. It is a necessity of learning new skills that has to be given the emphasis on. Whenever he felt the urge to learn something new, he solved some specific problems required to learn that particular skill. That is how he enhanced his efficiency.

Shadman's foundation for future success was built when he participated in Math Olympiad and earned a national prize. Math is crucial for a successful career in programming as it improves problem solving skills. That said, Shadman participated in his first ever programming contest when he was a college student. To begin with, he just read a book on C programming and completed an online course in Python. However, serious learning began only after joining IUT. He made his place in the IUT programming team. This team securing second position defeating a world final team in the ICPC warm up contest was Shadman's first notable success in his competitive programming journey. After that, success came in numbers as he saw his team becoming champion and securing position in top five frequently.

"I saw many securing jobs in big companies in Singapore even before finishing graduation," Shadman said when asked about his courage of applying for Shopee, a US$ 3.8 billion company, just a week after graduation. And before a month passed, he got a job there. While working at Shopee, he applied for the position of a software and site reliability engineer at Google in mid-2019. After two successful phone-interviews, Shadman left Shopee and returned home to prepare properly for Google's five onsite interviews which took place in December last year. And the final call from Google came in January this year making him a Google employee just a year from graduation.

So what was the core reason behind this enormous success of Shadman? What does it take to be a Google employee? Well, many might think experience is the answer. But Shadman secured a job there shortly after graduation. "Well, a bit of experience of working with a big company could be useful, but it is problem solving skill that matters most," said the man with confidence. Out of seven interviews Shadman faced, five was on problem solving and one each for Abstract System Designing and behavioural test. Contest programming at the graduation level is very important to succeed in these interviews. Also, Shadman refers to some online learning platforms and components like HitCode and Grokking for the eager learners to sharpen their ability. Problems one could face in these interviews usually have difficulty of div2 a,b,c or d level in Codeforces.

"One shouldn't forget about the behavioural test which is very important," warns Shadman. One could watch YouTube videos for behavioural interview preparation. Situation based questions, leadership questions and questions that scrutinise one's attitude towards company policy and culture- are usually asked in this interview. However, one doesn't need to be worried as recruiters helps with references about how to take preparation.

Rather, making the recruiters realise the applicant's potential while applying is very important. Academic and extra-curricular projects help big time in this regard apart from experience and competitive programming background. Overall, it is confidence that could be the trump card here, suggests Shadman. Building a quality circle, being pushed by peer pressure and growing curiosity to play with newer problems everyday could necessarily bring one the dream job in Google.