Chandigarh to Bangalore — my first year working at a startup after CGC

I graduated from CGC Landran in May 2025, turned down a TCS Digital offer, and joined a 40-person fintech startup in Koramangala, Bangalore through a referral from a senior. This is my year-1 retrospective.

The offer was 8.5 LPA, lower than what a few of my batchmates got at bigger companies. My dad spent two weeks trying to convince me to take the TCS offer. 'Stable company, big name, your future is secure.' I chose differently because I had done my research on the startup.

Month 1: completely lost. The codebase was Go (I had done Java and Python in college). The team deploys multiple times a day. In my first week I introduced a bug in production that caused 2 hours of downtime for a minor feature.

Month 3: I had shipped my first independent feature — a transaction retry mechanism for failed UPI transfers. Real users. Real transactions. That first 3-month silence from a feature in production is its own satisfaction.

The Bangalore adjustment: more expensive than I expected. A 1-room flat near Koramangala runs ₹18,000–22,000/month. On 8.5 LPA in-hand (~₹58,000/month after tax), I'm saving around ₹20,000/month.

What I would tell my graduating self: startups aren't for everyone. But if you want to write code that touches real users in your first month — a well-chosen small startup is that.