Indian techie laid off by Tesla bags Rs 4 crore Meta job. He refused offers from LinkedIn, TikTok

Hemant Pandey has been working with Meta for about two-and-a-half years. (Image credit: LinkedIn)

Hemant Pandey bagged an internship at Amazon during his graduate program in Delhi in 2018 before landing a full-time software role at Tesla in the same year. It was a dream company and the pay was "top-notch". He thought there was no looking back for his software engineering career.

But seven months later, Tesla laid him off. It was a summer when he had invited his parents from India to visit him in California, US, Business Insider reported.

"It was my first job and getting laid off meant having to build rapport all over again in just six months," he told the publication. "I needed to prove myself again."

Now, however, Pandey is a senior software engineer role at Meta with a Rs 4 crore per annum salary. He had also received offers from LinkedIn and TikTok.

Pandey told Business Insider that he had applied to Meta in 2021 after learning about the company's "crazy" salary packages on tech forums.

Although his GPA during the master's degree was not very "impressive," Pandey credited his conscious résumé decisions for landing him impressive offers. He also had a few tips to share with younger professionals.

1.) When it comes to summarising work experiences, Pandey likes to keep it very ambiguous. In an interview, "if people ask me what I did at Salesforce, I can help them know more by explaining rather than writing a paragraph." And he sticks to three short bullet points for each role.

2.) Pandey uses the experience of scoring low GPAs in his master's as an opportunity to connect with recruiters during an interview. "I generally share how I bombed my first semester and was intimidated," he said about his low GPA and almost losing an internship he was offered. He also talks about how he had to push himself to keep up with stronger students and eventually scored better in the following semesters. "This makes a good growth and learning-from-failures story," he said.

3.) Pandey explained that as software engineers grow to senior roles, the job becomes less about coding and more about leading teams and delivering projects. "But if I still interview for a startup, they don't really care about how I'm leading or shipping products," he told the publication. "They care about whether I can write code or be tech-savvy enough." Accordingly, he lists projects and links to his past coding work to showcase his technical skills.