Nitin Gupta is currently working as a senior Software Development Engineer in Amazon. He has worked on multiple different teams at Amazon (Shopping Lists, Customer Profile and Size Recommendation Engine) and has experience in System Design to support features for variety of businesses. He has also worked with Cisco previously as a software engineer. He pursued his M. Tech from IIT Delhi.
Our speaker, Nitin
Gupta is currently working as a senior Software
Development Engineer in Amazon. He has worked on
multiple different teams at Amazon (Shopping
Lists, Customer Profile and Size Recommendation
Engine) and has experience in System Design to
support features for variety of businesses. He
has also worked with Cisco previously as a
software engineer. He pursued his M. Tech from
IIT Delhi. He completed his graduation in
Computer Science from Tezpur University in 2010.
Mr Gupta, being in the very first batch to have
graduated in B.Tech CSE from Tezpur University,
had no seniors to look up to or seek guidance
from about what to expect from the industry. So
now, through CS Symposium, he is here to talk
about his personal experience in the industry as
an effort to guide all the participants.
Mr Gupta also went through the same dilemma that many students go through. He was initially planning on doing MBA but never had any answer as to why he wanted to go for it. He attempted GATE in his pre-final year just for trial and to his surprise got a very good score. This is when he realised that he was actually zealous about the technical aspects of CS and started preparing sincerely for GATE and aced it.
After getting into IIT, Delhi, Mr Gupta realised that the gap was huge and it is how most students feel when they get into one. He says that he had very limited knowledge about the world then and felt like a ‘nobody’. There were people who already had start-ups and had far more knowledge than him. He got to know of many ‘unknown unknowns’ – things that he never knew existed. But in spite of these hurdles, the exposure he got from an expanded industrial view and knowledgeable professors and peers that helped shape his career.
Mr Gupta said that the difference lies in maintainability. In former, the code is written with the intention of running only once but in the latter, the code stays – it needs to run for a long time, has a lot of cost and serve millions. It is the main investment of company. So the code has to be extensible and sustainable.
Mr Gupta said that Amazon doesn’t restrict the engineers to use a specific language but Java is the mostly used one. He also states that the coding skill tested in interviews and the coding to be actually done after getting the job are little different. But, as Mr Gupta says “Coding is fitness” via which the interviewers judge the skills. He says that the work culture in Amazon is tough. People need to be open to learning as there will be a lot of challenges. The code written goes through a strict and thorough review process and also performance, stress and load testing before getting pushed into the main line. There are a lot of teams that work on different components and layers of code that gets executed when processing a request.
He advises to approach the alumni working in the relevant industry to know about job opportunities. Since we do not have the benefit of being at the job location, we have to depend on networking. So never hesitate to approach people if you have the right skillset.