How to actually get a Top-Paying Software Engineering Role

Written not by AI or some writer, but by a regular dude who became a top-earning Software Engineer by following these steps (I'm literally writing this during my shift cause Claude is in the background thinking).

First of all, who is writing this?

I'm Ugo! Currently working as a Software Engineer at a Tier 1 Company, which, for a mid-level engineer in the USA, averages about $263,000 USD per year. And that's just mid-level. Senior Engineers get paid as much as 400,000 USD or more. Don't believe me? Search up levels.fyi and look up what they are getting paid. It's insane.

For context, the left is where I used to live when I was in university. It was a basement, not too shabby but not too great either, and on the right is where I live right now. I own investment properties, have a lot of money in the S&P and I also travel a ton. I didn't get here through dropshipping or through some funny method. I got here simply through a job. A 9-5 Software Engineering Role.

And we're here today.

Anyways I also have a YouTube Channel where I have been documenting Days in my Life as a Software Engineer, Travel Vlogs, Cooking and just really enjoying my life ever since I got into a good-paying position. Now that you've seen my credentials, I'm going to give you the rundown on how I was able to become a top-earning software engineer and it's honestly...remarkably simple (not easy tho). This might be a little long, so I'll try my best to summarize!

1. Two simple steps to getting what you want

Let's get into it. To get a job in tech, and not just any job, but a high-paying job in places such as Amazon, Netflix, Google etc, you absolutely need to be able to do 2 very major things.

1. Know how to pass an interview / be competitive enough
2. Know how to get interviews

2. Knowing how to actually pass an interview

Now you first of all need to be ready to pass an interview. It's obvious that right now, getting an interview in tech is hard (we'll talk about that in a second) but you can easily search online and see that getting an interview is hard. Now as someone neck-deep in the industry, I can tell you that a lot of people are still getting asked for interviews, me included. It's all about how you place yourself (again we'll talk about that in a second.)

That being said, you need to be able to actually be competitive enough to pass these tech interviews. A lot of teachers in university, online bootcamps and courses tell you to learn React, learn Go, learn Next.js, make more projects on GitHub, contribute to open source and so much random jargon. But none of that helps, because anyone who has worked a real job knows that most times you learn all of these on the job. The most important thing is actually learning the fundamentals. Every top company always asks for the same process:

1. Recruiter Screen (honestly very optional)
2. Online Assessment (OA) HackerRank, CodeSignal etc
3. An onsite consisting of
        3-4 DSA Problems (Data Structures and Algorithms)
        1 System Design
        1 Managerial Interview

Let's see what Claude has to say:

I left a link below to a YouTube video detailing my journey so I won't bore you with the details, but my entire life changed once I was able to truly master the interview process. Because it became extremely easy for me to get a top-paying job. As I said in the video, I used to be very confused and bad at interviews until I locked in and started FROM THE START. I spent YEARS and learnt all my basics again, learnt DSA from scratch and learnt system design from scratch. I then went on to solve over 300 LeetCode problems, you can literally see my account here.

3. What if there was a faster way?

I was able to pass interviews at top companies with very hard hiring bars after this. I'm confident that if I lose my job today, I'll have another within a month. It worked out for me, but in retrospect, everything was so scattered and hard to learn. The only thing that kept me going was my discipline. On my YouTube Channel so many people kept falling into the same issues I was falling into because of how scattered everything was. They remained confused about where to start, how to start, and what to learn.

That's why I created TraceDev (which is the site you're currently on!). I practically made the very thing that would have cut my learning from 3 years to just 4-6 months of dedicated time. I made a tool that takes a person and:

1. Helps them completely and absolutely master a programming language
2. Teaches them what they need to know about DSA (From the most basic to the hardest)
3. Teaches them algorithms used in interviews
4. Teaches them system design concepts all the way down to full-blown systems
5. Ties everything together with timed mocks that simulate the real thing.

And it ties it all together. At this point I need to make something clear...TraceDev is NOT a tool to just learn how to code. It's made specifically to give you the tools to learn to pass high-paying technical interviews. These interviews at Google, Amazon, Meta etc are very difficult, but if you can be the one that knows how to crack them, you will always stand out, because almost no one is ready to put in the work, contrary to what they say.

4. So what should I do now?

I suggest you learn using TraceDev. TraceDev is completely FREE for you to master a language, which by itself should take you to the next level. Even if you know the language, take some time to go through it again. You're able to truly understand the fundamentals of programming, learn Data Structures, learn Algorithms and eventually System Design. TraceDev is absolutely not a "get-rich-quick tool". You still need to put in the work. It only makes the work significantly easier and our users are already expressing how they feel about it.

5. What about getting an interview?

I don't want to drag this writeup out way too long, so here's a link to a video where I break down exactly how you can position yourself to get people begging you to come work for them.

The short version

• Pick one language on TraceDev and follow through with it.
• Afterwards jump into the custom DSA & Interview tactics for that language, also on TraceDev.
• Complete the System Design Module and start the TraceDev Mock Interviews.