Ste

TL;DR: I quit my job as an entry level QA/STE/SDET/whatever you want to call it last June. Life doesn't go quite as planned, so I spent last July to March of this year being sad and doing nothing. I decide to go all in on LeetCode for \~3-4 months, and land multiple offers from big tech companies, learning a bit about myself & the study process along the way. Where it all began: I left my job in testing almost exactly 1 year ago today for a handful of reasons. I would say the biggest reasons were that I wanted to make a transition into SWE and burnout from poor WFH practices that I had. I told myself I would take a \~2 month mental break before getting back to the grind. The day after I put in my 2 week notice, I get dumped by my girlfriend. This makes me sad. The 2 months I set aside for myself pass, and I start trying to do LeetCode (henceforth abbreviated LC). It was hard and I felt like it was going nowhere. At some point in November I began applying to jobs, hoping that having an interview would push me to study. I get ghosted/rejected by every company. This makes me even sadder and I sink into a slump that lasts until March, where I do not accomplish anything career related. I instead sunk all of my time into playing video games, because I was good at these. Eventually I realized that I was deriving almost all of my happiness and self value from how good I was at these games. This made me very scared about the direction I was heading in my life and I decided to make some major changes. The power of habit: I had about \~100 LC problems solved prior to all of this. Link to my LC profile if you want to see just how closely the submission history matches the story I am telling: <a href="https://leetcode.com/aTastyStrawberry/.