A 2026 graduate from a tier-3 college recently turned to Reddit to share their career dilemma after landing an internship through campus placements. While the offer came with a 4.5 LPA CTC (effectively 3 LPA), the student said the role has provided no real learning opportunities.
According to the post, the intern spends most of their time doing bug fixing and low-code tasks without any mentorship or exposure to real development. “Everyone’s role in this company is just to fix bugs. No one is doing the real development, just copy-pasting entire code from generative AI and make me feel dumb. I haven’t written a single line of code since I joined (like nearly around 3 months),” the student wrote.
Weighing Internship vs Full-Time Prep
The student explained that long working hours and a six-day week leave them with just 2–3 hours daily for coding practice, making it difficult to prepare for better roles. While confident with basics in DSA, they admitted struggling with advanced concepts such as DP, trees, and graphs.
Faced with this challenge, the student is now considering quitting the internship to prepare full-time for 2–3 months by dedicating 5–6 hours daily to DSA and LLD, with the goal of securing a role in MNCs or product-based companies offering packages between 6–12 LPA.
They asked the community two pressing questions: whether 2–3 months of dedicated prep is enough to crack such roles, and what the current market looks like for freshers from tier-3 colleges.
Mixed Advice from Reddit Community
Responses from fellow Redditors reflected the uncertainty freshers face in today’s job market. One user offered encouragement, saying:
“2-3 months if done consistently is quite enough for 6-12 LPA jobs. I’m a fresher too but I know that much is enough. Only if you’re understanding the topics properly rather than just copy pasting. Now for the more complex part, right now as I’m seeing it’s bad if you’re from a tier 3 college. I’ve applied for hundreds of positions off campus but I still don’t even get a single interview. But again if you’re good enough you might crack one.”
Another user, however, emphasized the long-term value of professional experience over pure coding practice.“Better stick to internship and use those 2-3 hours and weekends. Experience is more important than DSA and Dev. Nobody will ask you for projects if you have done internships. I have interviewed plenty of FO and always the one who has done internship has the real knowledge that’s required for a job. Its not just code, anyone can do that, its about how you deal with people, manage delivery and learn along the way.”
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