22-Year-Old Tier 3 College Developer Earning More Than FAANG Engineer | Aaryan Kumar | Kartikhustles

Summary

Aaryan Kumar describes building a career outside the conventional campus-placement route: freelancing in college, shipping apps, and then joining a startup as a founding software engineer while building his own product, Infimium. His main argument is that practical engineering ability, product ownership, and evidence of shipped work can matter more than college tier or grades.

Business and Career Execution

• Choose a path through exploration: Aaryan recommends trying areas such as DSA, web development, and mobile development, then committing to the work that genuinely interests you. He moved toward mobile development and later explored AI after encountering problems he wanted to solve.
• Build for real users: He advises making products that people actually use, rather than relying on tutorial projects or clones. His own portfolio included more than five apps released on the Play Store or App Store.
• Develop engineering depth: Learn how tools and frameworks work under the hood—not just which commands to run. He gives Git as an example: understand how it tracks files and diffs, and investigate why a system behaves as it does.
• Show proof of work: A portfolio, public repositories, and meaningful commits can make a candidate’s skills easier to assess than résumé claims alone. Aaryan suggests aiming for substantial GitHub activity—he mentions roughly 400–500 commits—but emphasizes the quality and usefulness of projects over raw counts.
• Adopt an ownership mindset: A founding engineer is expected to take responsibility for the product, contribute ideas, and explain or fix failures—not simply implement assigned features. Aaryan says he discussed product and technical ideas during his interview, rather than only answering questions.
• Treat open source as a learning and visibility channel: Contributing to open-source projects can build familiarity with larger codebases and provide public evidence of engineering work.
• Use referrals and networking constructively: Aaryan’s first freelance opportunity came through a friend; later, freelance work and released apps helped him build credibility with prospective employers.

Playbooks and Operating Practices

• Learning loop: Explore a technology → build something functional → investigate how it works internally → ship it to users → use problems encountered in practice to choose what to learn next.
• Freelancing loop: Start with a small project and deliver reliably; successful work can generate word of mouth and larger opportunities. Aaryan describes an early project that ran for two to three months after a friend introduced him to a potential client.
• Startup hiring signals: The guest says founders look for evidence that candidates have built and shipped products, can reason through technical and product decisions, and can take responsibility—not just credentials or interview memorization.
• Product engineering process: He describes spending significant time on architecture and design before implementation, especially when a change could affect many parts of a codebase. Tests and checks help catch breakage, but careful design is still necessary.
• Early-stage operating cadence: In his startup role, working hours are flexible, and progress is assessed through delivered work, product performance, bugs, and periodic reporting. He stresses that flexibility does not necessarily mean a light workload or limited availability.

Examples and Product Ideas

• Aaryan built a transaction-tracking app after noticing that using multiple UPI apps made it difficult to understand total spending.
• He says a prospective employer valued both his shipped apps and the product suggestions he offered during the interview. He was selected after a short discussion; he says the company had considered around 100 candidates.
• He describes building Infimium to provide AI coding tools with better context about a codebase, reducing repeated explanations of how the project works. He claims a task that could take about an hour could be reduced to 10–15 minutes with the tool; this is his estimate, not an independently verified result.
• His current startup product was described as being in internal or beta testing with approximately 101 users at that point, with an early-access phase underway.

Metrics and Figures Mentioned

• Aaryan is 22 in the conversation.
• He reports 70% marks in both Class 10 and Class 12, and a college CGPA of 7.9.
• He says he had shipped five-plus apps before joining the startup.
• He mentions approximately 1,200 GitHub commits during the year.
• He describes freelance income as variable—roughly ₹5,000 to ₹80,000 in different months—illustrating the uncertainty of project-based work.
• He does not disclose a precise salary, revenue, or equity figure. The conversation claims that startup compensation and ownership can be attractive, but provides no numbers to substantiate comparisons with FAANG compensation.

Actionable Recommendations

1. In college, explore multiple technical paths before specializing.
2. Build and ship useful products; prioritize real users over résumé-only projects.
3. Learn the underlying systems behind frameworks and tools.
4. Keep a public portfolio of meaningful work and contributions.
5. In interviews, demonstrate ownership by explaining trade-offs and proposing solutions.
6. For AI-assisted development, review generated code carefully; the guest notes that weak codebase context can lead to incorrect or risky suggestions.
7. Judge startup work by responsibility and outcomes, not by how flexible the schedule appears.

Presenters and Sources

• Aaryan Kumar — guest; founding software engineer at a startup and builder of Infimium.
• Kartik Agarwal — host.