He graduated from an NIT and could not get placed. So he took a credit-card sales job — pitching cards in malls and parks for five months. Then back-office work at an insurance office, until he was let go. Then four months unemployed, learning and applying and taking part-time work at a supermarket. Then a night-shift logistics job: 10pm to 7am, hauling trolleys and unloading trucks, screamed at by a manager, until a heavy trolley ran over his foot and broke his toe one night and the manager told him to keep working. He resigned the next day, deciding that maybe tech was never going to happen for him.
A friend suggested a BPO instead — the pay was decent. He got a role in Noida and was two days from joining. The evening before the train, packing his bags in the same room where he had once ground through coding problems on a whiteboard, he had tears in his eyes.
Then the phone rang. A work-from-home internship — four rounds, all data structures, conversion based on performance. He asked the BPO recruiter to postpone his start date, spent the day grinding, and cracked it. From the internship came a full-time offer; from there, a startup role in Hyderabad. That is where he is now — still learning, and taking calls to move again.
His advice for anyone unemployed right now: take whatever honest work you can find, and be there when the one random call comes. It nearly didn’t.