#137 Rahul Pandey quit his $800,000/year FAANG developer job to build a startup
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2024
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Rahul Pandey. He's a software engineer who left his $800K / year FAANG job to build his own startup.
We talk about:
- The post-layoff developer job landscape
- Developer interviews and how to differentiate yourself
- Why salary negotiation still makes sense
- His belief that 10x engineers exist – and even 100x and 1000x engineers
Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 1969 mowtown classic.
Also, I want to thank the 10,443 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Rahul's Android app tutorial on freeCodeCamp (4 hour watch): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-how-to-build-and-publish-an-android-app-from-scratch/
- Rahul's video about post-college job offers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rceUVaiXQgU
- Taro, Rahul's company: https://www.jointaro.com/
- The story of a software engineer who moves back to India to run his father's chemical business after his death: https://anandsanwal.me/2018/06/19/dad-company-sale/
- Conference talk about the correlation between interest rates and developer hiring, by Pragmatic Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpPPHDxR9aM
- Rahul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpandey1234/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | It's just incredibly hard to write a ton of code and not be a good programmer. Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. |
| 0:30.4 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freecodecamp.org. |
| 0:34.5 | Each week, we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people getting |
| 0:38.7 | into tech. |
| 0:39.7 | This week, we're talking with Rahul Pandey. |
| 0:43.0 | He's a software engineer who left his $800,000 a year fang job to build his own |
| 0:49.7 | startup. |
| 0:50.7 | We're going to talk about the post layoff developer job landscape, developer interviews, salary negotiation, and landing venture capital as a startup founder and more. |
| 1:02.6 | Rahul, pleasure to have you here, man. |
| 1:06.0 | Quincy, thank you for having me. It's been really fun to collaborate with you and Free Code Camp over the past few years. I'm excited to chat. Absolutely. And I am going to put a link to one of Rahul's |
| 1:16.5 | courses. He has a comprehensive Android app tutorial. It's about four hours long if anybody wants |
| 1:21.4 | to see his teaching in action. But I just want to start by acknowledging Rahul that you are one of the winners of the tech boom and that you've been able to build your network, your skills, your reputation over the past few years. |
| 1:34.8 | But there are a lot of people who've been laid off recently who may not feel like they have a lot to show for the time that they spent working in tech. |
| 1:41.2 | What would you say to someone who approached you who thought that they might have |
| 1:44.8 | made a mistake learning the code and getting into tech? I would say it's not too late. It's never |
| 1:50.9 | too late to get into tech. It's never too late to learn these, what I would consider fundamental skills |
| 1:56.2 | of working with computers and working with software. I've been coding or thinking about tech in some |
| 2:03.0 | capacity since I was 18. I'm 32 now, right? So I've been doing it for a long, long time. And I think |
| 2:08.4 | when people come to me and say, hey, I've been doing it for three months or six months, it's not |
| 2:11.5 | making sense to me. I was, hey, you still have another 15, 20 years until you can say that you've |
| 2:16.9 | been doing it for enough time or long enough time. |
| 2:21.0 | So that's one thing. |
... |
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