50+ Rejections, 20 Years Old, and the Space Between Building and Prepping

Yesterday was my birthday.

Ironically, I got an email from Google.

Rejected.

That pushes me past 50 off-campus rejections.

Two companies came to my college this year. I lost the first DSA round in both. Before that, I hadn't really done DSA seriously — just arrays, basically. Those two losses are what actually got me started.

Then came Infosys.

I cleared Round 1. I cleared Round 2. I made it to the SP L3 interview (21 LPA).

Here's what happened there.

Two DSA questions. Thirty minutes to solve one.

It took me 7–8 minutes to figure out the logic under those constraints.

One question asked us to count arrays where every adjacent pair's bitwise AND has exactly K set bits, with N up to 10⁹ and M up to 100; answer modulo 10⁹ + 7.

Genuinely insane for 30 minutes.

I sarcastically wrote a loop for 2^100 and walked out.

Here's the timeline behind all this, because it didn't start this week. I should've spent the past few years building my DSA foundation, or at least split my time better. I didn't.

I spent those years building things instead.

HGDM. NCM. Windows-MCP, an open-source PR merged into a project with thousands of GitHub stars. 829 GitHub contributions.

I spent real time on those projects, and I won't call that time wasted. But right now, I can't confidently call it the best use of my time either.

I thought even if they weren't perfect, a recruiter would look at them and think, okay, this guy actually built something. Maybe I was wrong.

Now two options are sitting in my head, and I don't know which one's true.

One: smart work beats hard work, and I should've put those years into DSA instead of what I actually did. My brain just doesn't work the same way for DSA as it does for building. I don't know why. I know it's a shit excuse to some people. It's still true.

Two: maybe my projects just aren't good enough.

Fifty-plus off-campus rejections have a way of making you question everything you've built.

There are nights when I sit in front of this same computer and replay every major decision I've made over the last few years, wondering if I chose wrong every single time.

I don't even know what 'better' means anymore. What I love versus what I need. A job. Somewhere to actually grow from.

People keep saying AI builds projects easily now, so it doesn't count the same way. I don't buy that. I still remember the exact days I had a split screen open, Firebase docs on one side, VS Code on the other, reading every line before I touched it. Now I use AI instead of the docs. Funny how fast that changed under me, and I still don't know what it means for whether the thing I built actually counts.

I don't have an answer yet.

I just have the rejection count, the two options, and this.

Twenty years old. First LinkedIn post.