No Degree, Undiagnosed ADHD, 6 Failed BBA Semesters - How I Went from ₹10K Intern to 28.5 LPA

I was a decent student till 10th. Then things just changed.

I barely passed 12th standard. Dropped a year after that, and that year went nowhere. Then I randomly enrolled in a BBA because I didn't know what else to do. Failed six straight semesters.

The university had this weird policy where even if you failed, they'd still push you to the next semester so you could appear for both at the same time. Sounds confusing, and it was. But because of that, my parents had no clue. They thought I was getting promoted semester after semester because I was passing. I'd leave home every morning like I was heading to college. I wasn't. One day, after I had technically "finished" the course without actually finishing it, I told my parents the truth. They were pretty angry.

Years later when I read about ADHD I had one of those moments where a lot of things started making sense. But back then I just thought something was wrong with me.

What pulled me out of all this wasn't a plan or a mentor or some big moment. It was a C++ book.

The C++ Book

After the BBA mess I thought maybe I liked numbers, so I tried a BSc in Mathematics through correspondence. That also didn't work. It was a course where you just paid for exams and could attend classes on weekends, so there wasn't much structure. I kept avoiding exams.

But I'd always been into computers in some way. Since 9th standard I used to mess around with PCs, download stuff using torrents, install random software, help my mom convert her handwritten lists into Excel sheets. So while I was avoiding those BSc exams, I bought a C++ book and started working through it on my home PC.

Something about it just clicked. I stayed up reading it. I actually understood what was happening. That feeling of getting something, of it actually making sense, I hadn't really felt that in a classroom before.

I got through the book up to functions, and then it got too complex for me since I was learning programming for the first time. But I had figured out one thing about myself: if someone sat with me and explained things one-on-one, I'd get it. That's just how I learn. I looked up places that taught programming and found Coding Elements. Signed up for their Python course.

Small batch, maybe five people total. I asked questions constantly. For the first time I actually got the basics right.

₹1,500/Hour Teaching Python

About eight to ten months after Python, I went back to Coding Elements and did React and React Native, which was roughly a three-month course. Around this time, the co-founder helped me get a Python teaching gig somewhere in Delhi.

₹1,500 per hour. That was the first money I made from tech.

I remember feeling surprised more than anything. That something I had just been doing because I enjoyed it was actually worth money to someone. It didn't last long because the commute was a lot. But it told me I was on the right track.

Internship at Coding Elements (2019): ₹10,000/Month

The co-founder saw that I was eager and gave me a three-month internship at Coding Elements. ₹10,000/month. Full stack work.

No degree, no formal portfolio, nothing on paper. Most places wouldn't have even looked at my resume. This one did.

I showed up wanting to prove something. Because I did have something to prove.

First Full-Time Job: ₹30,000/Month

On 10 July 2019, I got a full-time offer at Coding Elements. ₹30,000 a month. I still remember that date.

Three times the internship money. First salary that felt like something real.

Over the next 11 months I got two raises: first to ₹35,000, then to ₹37,000. Not big jumps, but I was learning a lot and I knew it.

After 11 months though, I just wanted more. So I quit.

Learning Next.js, Then Freelance: ₹30,000 to ₹40,000/Month

After quitting I spent a couple of months just learning Next.js properly. Then I found a freelance contract and worked on that for about seven months. The pay was somewhere between 30K and 40K a month.

Working alone for that long was hard. My communication wasn't great at the time and it showed. I started working on my resume, applied to places, and eventually got a job.

NextGen Shopping: ₹50,000 to ₹80,000/Month

Joined NextGen Shopping at 50K. Three months later they bumped it to 80K.

This was the first place where I was actually making decisions about how things were built, not just writing whatever someone told me to. I stayed there for about a year.

Then salaries started coming in late. Once that became a pattern, I updated my resume and started looking again.

SiteRecon: 14 LPA + ₹1.4L Annual Bonus

Getting into SiteRecon changed how I saw myself.

The CEO was from IIT. The CTO was from IIT. Some of my teammates were IITians. I had no degree at all, and they still hired me.

I kept coming back to that during those six months. These were people with a lot of options. They chose me anyway.

14 LPA plus a ₹1.4L annual bonus, so roughly ₹1,16,667 a month in base salary.

I only stayed for six months before I moved to work with a friend. But honestly those six months did more for my confidence than most of my career up to that point.

A Friend's Company: 16 LPA + ₹3L Bonus

16 LPA and a ₹3L annual bonus. On paper better than SiteRecon.

In practice it was the toughest seven months of my career so far.

Long hours, and my focus issues didn't get better. I just had to grind through things and put in way more time than I would have liked. My mental health was not good during this period. I was also writing all my code without any AI help at the time, which added to the pressure.

The bigger lesson from this phase had nothing to do with code. I've found that at some point soft skills start mattering more than technical skills, and I wasn't there yet. I couldn't set proper boundaries with my friend, and that caused friction. We're still on good terms today, but working together just didn't work out.

I left with nothing lined up.

The Colleague's Startup: 20 LPA, Then 28.5 LPA

Spent about two months watching courses and applying. Then on 2 April 2023 I got an offer from a colleague who had started his own company and wanted me to head one of his products. 20 LPA.

Joined on April 2nd, moved to Bangalore in May, stayed for 2.5 years.

After the first year I got a 40% raise and my salary went up to 28.5 LPA.

Honestly the salary wasn't even the best part of this job. I got better at communicating. I built a team and then managed it. I handled multiple products at the same time. I finally understood what it actually takes to get something from development all the way to production, and what it means to make real calls when things are unclear. I only have good memories from those 2.5 years in Bangalore.

Where I Am Now: 12 LPA + 7% Equity

About six months ago I had some family stuff come up and had to come back from Bangalore. Started looking for work again.

One of my friends' fathers owns a company and they offered me a Head of Technology role. I took it, and then I asked them to change my status to a contract so I could work on multiple things at the same time.

12 LPA plus 7% stake in everything on the software side.

Yes, that's a big drop from 28.5 LPA. But honestly something has shifted in what I'm after. I'm less interested in just getting a bigger number and more interested in building things that matter.

Right now I'm working on four products. I get paid for one of them. The other three are in the pipeline. One is for a family member, two are personal projects I've been wanting to build for a long time. One is around mental health. The other one is about finding jobs using AI agents.

The 7% is a bet I'm making on myself. If it pays off, none of the salary stuff feels relevant anymore.

About the ADHD Thing

I want to write about this because I think it's important and most people skip over it.

ADHD is not an excuse. But it is a real thing that explains a lot.

When I was into something, whether it was code or building a product or just figuring out how something worked, I could go for hours without any issue. When I wasn't interested, I literally could not start. Not "didn't feel like it." Could not. That difference matters. It's not laziness. But no one around me knew that, and I didn't know it either when I was failing BBA semesters and leaving home every morning pretending to go to college.

Every job that went well for me had one thing in common: I actually cared about the work. I can't pretend to care. I've tried. It never ends well.

If you're reading this and you recognise that pattern in yourself: find the thing that holds your attention the way that C++ book held mine. Not the "sensible" option. Not what your parents think is a good career. The thing you stay up late thinking about because you actually want to, not because you have to.

Start there.

The Complete Salary Timeline

What I'd Tell My Younger Self

You're not broken. You just learn differently, and the systems around you weren't built for that.

The failures were real. The wasted years were real. The mornings you left home and went nowhere were real. I'm not going to pretend that was fine.

But none of it stopped the actual things from happening. The IIT people hired you. The 28.5 LPA happened. The 7% is there now.

Keep following the stuff that actually keeps you interested. That's the only thing that's worked.