A series of bad decisions that I thought were worth taking !
TL;DR: 2025 grad with ~1.5 YOE left multiple roles hoping for better opportunities, but faced burnout, offer revocations, ghosting after verbal confirmations, and poor work environments. Despite consistently clearing interviews and getting offers, repeated bad timing/decisions led to a 5-month career gap. Now looking for a stable engineering role and advising freshers not to resign early without a solid next opportunity.
Hi folks,
I am a 2025 grad with 10.5 months of Intern experience and 6 months of FTE. Back in college I was above the lot and participated in many activities, got an offer for Internship on-campus and spent most of final year there, hoping I would get a good package when I get converted to full time, but things went downhill in the second half of my internship and they offered a pretty low package, then I resigned hoping I would get a better offer. (First bad decision)
Then within 15 days I was able to grab two offers, through referrals and then I eventually joined in one. It was a startup and there was a lot of learning at the first and a senior engineer helped me a lot, I got stronghold of my fundamentals there and stayed for 6 months, but the work hours was insane. I was working for around 16 hours a day, across two different timezones and attending 2 stand-ups daily. The task delegation was very poor, because I saw some employees coming to the office simply winding away the time and going out. At this point, I was exhausted even though there was a lot of learning involved and I quit hoping to take a break and continue or to choose a different career path. (Second bad decision)
Then for 1 month I didn't do anything and was under complete rest, then started the job hunt, I didn't plan for doing any masters because at that moment all the admissions were over. Then I started up-skilling myself, built a good resume then started applying to many orgs, immediately within 20-25 days of applying was able to secure 3 offers. Offer details attached.
Company A - midsized company - 200-300 employees - could sense toxic management - onsite - 5% increase from my prev salary
Company B - early stage US startup - 5-10 employees - good management & peer team - complete remote - 10% dec from base salary
Company C - early stage US startup - 5-10 employees - got offer for only intern position
So I chose company B over all these. During my joining when I read through the agreement then only I came to know that there is a decrease in my base salary itself, because I was pretty sure that my base salary remained the same and on top of it my performance bonus was added, when I asked the HR she was blaming me the whole time that I didn't understand the offer properly, so they revoked the offer, since I was not satisfied, they didn't even invite me for a discussion. At this point, I already dropped the offers from Company A & C. (Joining Company B was my third bad decision). Hoping I would get a better offer soon.
Then some time passed by I was passively interviewing because I was in a dilemma, whether to continue. Then attended some interview in which most of the people ghosted me. Then came another company, it was a AI company and I started giving the interview there were totally 3 rounds and a final co-founder round. The tech rounds went well, but the co-founder grilled me on STAR principles, prev. exp etc., then he said he'll inform the HR to rollout the offer and offered a verbal confirmation. I even sent all my pay-slips, etc, for rolling out the offer. Then the HR started ghosting me, I initially didn't sense it and stopped applying to other companies and even skipped a interview (fourth bad decision), because already the co-founder gave confirmation. But the HR after two-weeks said that my position was put on hold, the interview process stretched for a month long. Lost all my hope again and hit 4 month career break.
Started applying rigorously again, then got around two to three leads, finally was able to land an offer at an Indian startup with no increase in my base but offered some performance bonus and equity. The founder was pretty chill and young, finally thought that I landed a perfect role, only to visit the company and see it was a like a dungeon, where no one cared even for a new joiner, and gave a laptop like a brick, which was a pretty old and asked me to build in it, since my onboarding has not been done yet, I declined the offer immediately and left. (fifth bad decision was accepting this offer and wasting my money relocating there)
I've lost all my hope at this point and don't know where to search for a job again, I've exhausted all my connections, getting no-replies for all my cold-dms through LinkedIn, wherever I am applying they are asking for 2-3 years of exp. All this time I thought that the next decision would be right for me but all of that ended up pretty bad. Any suggestion on how to continue my job search would be much appreciated.
For folks who have less than 1 yoe, do not leave/resign unless you have a good company with a good hike, however toxic the management can be.