India: I'm yellow on Topcoder (the best in my college). I am a 3rd year ECE B.tech student with arrears, and I have CGPA of 4.0 . I have immense hatred towards my ECE branch. I'm afraid I might not get placed because of my low CGPA. What should I do?

and mentioned everything needed. Let me just add 2 lines (kind of proof) I was placed at directi (for intern and later got PPO), I did not even mention my CGPA in my resume. I had one backlog then. I was yellow on topcoder. They never care about your CGPA, all they need is talent! Drop me your resume, I can refer you to directi.

Hi! You seem to be exactly like me! I am a 6 pointer from IIT Kanpur from EE branch and prospects seemed grim for me before placements. I am a high yellow coder and an ICPC World Finalist and a much much better coder (at least when it came to algorithmic coding) than all my batchmates. I hated EE and barely managed to pass my courses but my concepts in Algorithms and Data Structures were crystal clear. I was quite sure of a good placement before the placements started, but as the placement season inched closer, and shortlists started coming out, I started getting more and more depressed. Most of the good companies (Google, Microsoft, Oracle US, RocketFuel) were not open for me. Companies like Tower Research Capital and World Quant which were open for me did not shortlist me because of my CGPA. Whichever companies took tests, I used to ace them, but apart from Pocket Gems and Goldman Sachs, I did not have any options left. Then came the final blow in the coffin, rumors started that Pocket Gems wasn't coming for placements because not enough people (read only 1) did well in the test! And a finance job (GS) was something I hadn't seriously considered before. I had no shortlists in any software job for the next two days of the placement season and DirectI was my next and only option. But but but.... this is not the end! If you are a good programmer, you will at the worst, get an average coding job! Most companies do have coding tests and if you end up doing substantially better than your classmates, your low CGPA wouldn't matter much. There are a number of companies you can apply to off-campus. Though, I will be truthful, getting into companies like FB or Google directly with a low CGPA would be tough (I haven't managed to). But there are a number of other companies you can still try and apply to, like DirectI (which doesn't look at CPI at all! Just at your coding skills and is a very good company to start at), some startups as well and after a couple of years of experience, your CGPA wouldn't matter, just your experience in the industry. If you are a yellow coder, I am sure you would have a number of similar coder friends in software jobs. Contact them, ask them to forward your CV (which they would be happy to!) to the company they work in and hope for an interview. Worst case, you might work at an average software company for an year or two before you jump to a good company. All the answers below have some wonderful resources and suggestions as well. And remember, within two years of graduating, your CGPA wouldn't matter at all and I am sure you would be able to go to the company of your dreams. And I will end the answer with a Zappa quote: "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible".

Don't worry, being Yellow on Topcoder is great :-) 1. Participate in  http://hackerearth.com and http://codeeval.com where companies post challenges and hire people 2. Also participate in codesprints of http://interviewstreet.com  or  http://hackerrank.com . Companies hire programmers even from here 3. For getting placed in google or facebook do well in contests like Google code Jam or Facebook hacker cup. They call people for interviews who perform well in these contests. As you are Yellow on TC you will be able to perform well in all the above. IMPORTANT POINTS : Apply off-campus to all companies you want . Don't mention your CGPA in your resume . But definitely mention that your are Yellow on topcoder and all other achievements in coding contests or competitve programming. If they ask your CGPA happily tell them that its 4.0 and the reason for that is I am not interested in my branch and I had to take it because of so and so reason. Convince the interviewer by saying, Sir, its me who is gona come to office, interact with you, work with you and your company not my CGPA. Moreover, make them understand that even having a CGPA of 10.0 in ECE is not much useful  for both of us, as I  want to become a software engineer and You want to hire the same. Tell him that even though I got into branch which I don't like I didn't leave my passion and worked hard for it ( i.e being yellow on TC ) and hence I deserve this Job. ALWAYS REMEMBER : Companies only want talent. They don't  really want 9 or 10 pointers. If that is the case all companies must only contain 9 to 10 pointers . They are many cases where 9 - 10 pointers got rejected by almost all the companies. They only consider CGPA  so that their shortlisting process will become easier and generally high pointer or CGPA implies that he is hard worker/dedicated and passionate towards what he do. EDIT : Proof for my above point 1. see 's ( Co-founder at http://HackerRank.com ) answer to this question. He  also says , Remember, companies are ALWAYS looking out for smart programmers. ALWAYS. You only have to prove that you are "smart". For a TC yellow, it shouldn't be that hard. 2.See  's answer (got ppo at Directi) to this question. 3.see 's answer to the question

Yellow at TC is very good. To improve on that, I suggest you have a look at github if you haven't already, and start contributing to some really good open source projects. Start a good project on your own and make it open source. Improve your github profile. Consequently, start applying to good startups. Startups generally take in people who are passionate about coding and do not emphasize the requirement of a high CGPA. As others have mentioned in their answers, campus placements might not yield the best for you but trust me, getting into a good startup is absolutely worthwhile. Improve your profile and have a go at startups and see how things pan out. While applying, make sure that you genuinely highlight your skills and passion to write quality code. Have a couple of good projects under your belt. You get the idea... The most important thing is to keep faith in your abilities, an open mind, a constant reality check on your skills and your passion to code. Drop a comment if you need any other info. Will be happy to help if I can. All the best and cheers!

Infact, I got recruited by my employer when I had backlogs and didn't even have my degree. Heck, I wasn't even a good programmer back then. But my employer took a risk and hired me and even allowed me take a day or two off to study for my arrear exams ! So cheer up. You're far more better than how I was when I finished my B.E CSE.

I'm answering my own question here. It's been around one and a half year since I posted this question and I want to thank all those who answered and commented. I really appreciate it. I received a reply to one of my comments asking what actually went down after this, so I just thought I'd let everyone know how things turned out. Briefly after I posted this question, at the end of my 3rd year, I decided to drop out. I was so fed up my "education" at that point that I'd rather take my chances as a dropout than continue putting up with the daily nightmare. I did not attend the final semester exams. During that time, web development had my attention. I instantly fell in love with it because you get to use your own creativity and imagination and you can build absolutely anything you want, the way you want it, unlike some derivation where there is a pre-defined set of equations already made up by someone and you just understand or memorize it and reproduce it in the exam. And I did not mention this in my question earlier but when I was in the 2nd year, I built a little online GPA calculator for my university and even to this day, almost everyone in the university uses it whenever the results come out. That was the first time I had used my knowledge and skills to build something practical that was actually useful in the real world and that is what i wanted to do. Anyway, sorry for going off-topic. I got carried away. As I was saying, I did not attend my 6th sem's final exams, told my mom that I was going to dropout and convinced her that I would somehow make it work, came home during the vacation and spent the entire vacation just learning more and more about web development and building a few static and dynamic sites. When the vacation ended, I went back to where my university is. I was staying in a flat with some of my friends. I couldn't stay at home because only my mom knew about me dropping out and nobody else in my family did and I wanted to keep it that way to avoid unnecessary complications. Around 3 weeks after that I started applying online for a job as a full-stack developer and within a week, I found one at a 2 year old startup in the same city. It was an already established startup and I was hired to build a new social writing platform from scratch as one of their products(I don't want to go into detail about it). I worked there for about 10 months, successfully built what I had to and it was receiving an average of 7,000 daily visitors within the first month of the launch itself. Nothing that huge but I was satisfied. When I was building it, a lot of my ideas went into it too and I was more than just a developer coding in PHP, etc. Starting from the point when I dropped out  and up to this point, I had learnt and grown much more than I had in the last 3 years of college. While working there, after what I built was launched, I started looking for a new job as I wanted to shift to Bangalore and very soon, I found one. I was going to be a part of the core team of a completely new startup still in development in which I'd get some percentage of the founder's equity too. This is where I'm working right now and I enjoy my job. I've realized that I only scratched the very surface of web development and there is much more in it for me to explore and learn and my current goal is to keep becoming better and better at it. And if you're wondering how I'm doing financially, i'm making more money already than what most of my classmates will be making, who recently finished their 8th sem final exams and are now sitting at home learning C and SQL while waiting for their call letters for some software job after spending their last 4 years learning about electric circuits. But most importantly, I get to wake up everyday and pursue my passion with nothing to hold me back.

Don't worry, you'll find a good job; or a job will find you. Or you will find a way to start a company and make money. Just keep kicking ass at Coding, and make sure you market the hell out of yourself. And PM me if you can't find a job. I will not give you a hard-time for sticking with ECE, but for everyone else reading this answer - please don't waste time in a branch that you are not interested in. Especially if you are good. Talent and Skill is all people are after; you need a degree if you are mediocre; but not if you are really good, especially in software development. Find ways to prove that you are good - contribute to open source, do some consulting, build a portfolio; work that you can show off.

If you Frank Zappa part in your question description is a reference to , read remaining part of answer I mentioned that the person can apply for Google after a year or two. Anyway, to answer your question, everyone at that point of time are afraid, I should tell you, don't be afraid. Trust yourself, you can do lot better than what you are assuming you will. And yeah about killing yourself, not a good idea. I'll not give up without trying.

Killing yourself? do not do crazy stuff. Try contacting a therapist if you feel suicidal again. Just remember that your life is not over not matter what. Damn you are nothing but gifted with such programming skills. I will suggest you start working as a freelance programmer. If you can finish your current course, then well and good but if you think it is really impossible, drop out and start training yourself online. In this age of internet there are so many brilliant self-taught programmers who make it big. There are so many resources online to freelance. I do not know what kind of programming you know but if you are good at Web-Programming then you can very easily get some freelance work. http://Freelancer.in  can be a good starting point. There are tons of sites like this available online. Try reading some of these website according to your preferences. Freelancing is not that difficult when you are already a good programmer. Try to financially stabilize yourself if you are not able to crack google, facebook etc. Google, Facebook are the not the end, there are tons of other startups which do good work. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://learncodethehardway.org/ http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocadv.htm http://pythonbooks.revolunet.com/ and Lastly i would like to point out that your degree will not be of any worth once you get into your first job. It is the experiences that matter. So learn as much as possible ( of what you like ) during college life and in the same time have some fun. you will not get back your twenties and you will regret for being so depressed when you look back at yourself at a later point of time in life. Everything shall pass.  IF you feel suicidal again PLEASE try calling one of the helplines http://www.aasra.info/ ( Just randomly googled) Good luck.