I have tabs in my browser that I named for different purpose.
It's not named anything dramatic really. Most of them just end with "prep". Inside of which are months of my life.
Data Structures and Algorithm practise over the weekend. System Design some other days I feel diagramatic, dramatic, or a bit adventurous to put my thinking cap to work:
"How do you design a highly available payment processing system that guarantees exactly-once processing and prevents double-debits or duplicate credits?"
Questions that’d make you question why you were born.
It’s not a first rodeo. I’ve joined mock interview rounds where I said "let me think out loud" and then thought nothing at all. Learnt and embodied leadership principles I can now recite better, unprovoked through years of practise.
I want Amazon. I've said it publicly. I've said it so many times that sometimes I wonder if I still mean it, or if I'm just afraid of what it would mean to stop saying it.
Nobody talks about what the chase costs. Not in money exactly. But in self.
It costs you the evenings you used to spend building things just because they were beautiful. It costs you the ability to look at a problem without asking "what's the time complexity?" It costs you a strange kind of peace, because every rejection email arrives polite, and polite rejection is the hardest kind to argue with.
"We've decided to move forward with other candidates."
Other candidates? You thought I applied for decoration or because your logo looked nice? Am I that much of a joke to you?
As if somewhere there's a version of me who got it right. As if he's out there, walking into the office, swinging the same badge.
But here's what the chase also gave me, and I'm only now learning to say it out loud.
It made me sharper.
It made me humble in rooms I used to walk into with my chest out (not in a bad way tho). It taught me that "not yet" and "never" are different words, even when they arrive in the same email template.
I still want the badge. I'm not going to pretend I've risen above it.
I just refuse to let it become the only mirror I check to see who I am.
Because long before any recruiter looked at my résumé, I was already an engineer. I was already a teacher (and there’s every record of that). I was already the person who stayed back to help someone debug their code or jumped on a quick call to explain a concept.
No offer letter created that. No rejection can remove or take it away.
The folder stays. The prep continues. But I'm keeping a second folder now. It's called "me."
And you’re probably reading from it already.
Final thought: what have you been struggling with recently, and how are you coping with it?
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