Physics

I've been working in software for going on 6 years now. Zero formal CS education. I majored in physics. The plan was graduate school but I graduated June 2020, right as the world was falling apart, and grad school just wasn't going to happen. I had no backup plan at all. So I started reaching out to people who graduated before me just asking what they were doing with their lives. One of my buddies who also majored in physics was working as a software engineer at a large aerospace and defense company. He told me they were hiring, gave me the stack they used (C#, .NET, WPF, etc) and basically said if I could learn it he could get me an interview through an internal referral. I didn't know a single thing about programming. Like nothing. But the world was shut down and I had nothing but time. So I locked myself in my room for 6 months, taught myself C# from online resources, got the interview, got the offer. Now here's where the market context matters. 2020-2022 was a completely different world for software jobs. The amount of linkedin recruiters in my inbox during those years was insane. I swapped jobs 3 times in like two and a half years and went from $75K to $105K in a MCOL area. I'm now 6 years in sitting at $135K. I've been laid off twice in the last couple years, once from a company that decided my side project was "competing" with them (lol) and once just from mass layoffs. Finding work in 2024-2025 honestly wasn't terrible but every single job I landed post-layoff was through connections and networking from previous roles. Not one of them had a leetcode style interview. And thats the thing. I've gone this entire career without ever doing a real DS&A interview. Every role I've had I've done just fine at. Shipped real software, solved real problems. So I just convinced myself leetcode was this ridiculous disconnected gatekeeping exercise and used that as my excuse to never sit down and grind it. But now I want more. I want to go after FAANG level companies. I want to 2x or 3x my salary. And the only thing standing between me and that is... reversing a linked list? Binary search? Breadth first searching a matrix? Like are you fucking kidding me? I used perturbation theory to solve for the wavefunction of the hydrogen atom. I derived the quantization of the electromagnetic field by hand. I solved partial differential equations that would make your eyes bleed. I spent entire semesters buried in lagrangian mechanics, tensor calculus, and statistical thermodynamics. I taught myself an entire production tech stack from zero during a global pandemic with no CS degree, no mentor, no bootcamp. And I'm supposed to believe that a two pointer problem is whats going to keep me from $200K+?? That sliding window is my ceiling?? Absolutely fucking not. I've been grinding for the past couple months now and tbh the single biggest thing that's made a difference is handwriting solutions on pen and paper and talking through them out loud. I think like 90% of people just sit in silence staring at VS Code trying to pattern match to a solution they memorized and then wonder why they freeze up in interviews. Bro in the actual interview you are writing on a whiteboard and explaining your thought process to another human being. So practice that way. The improvement has been night and day. Idk this is part rant part advice. If you're out there with a non-traditional background convincing yourself you're "above" leetcode or that it's beneath you, just shut up and do it. You've done harder shit than this. I've done harder shit than this. Like what the fuck am I doing letting binary search hold me back lmao