I've been talking to a lot of people recently and a lot of them ask me for advice on jobs so I thought I should explain that I'm the worst person to ask for advice on jobs. I never applied to any of the places I've worked at. My first internship happened because a friend was going there and he didn't want to do it alone so he got me in as well. The same thing for the second internship but with a different friend. After I graduated, I just watched anime for 3 months. Then I randomly got calls from 3 places (I think two of the companies got my resume from the university while the third found me through a publication in a defence research journal) and I took the least paying one which was for a company near Port Qasim which had like a 90 minute drive both ways because I liked that I could just do things there and there was no bureaucracy. I didn't even consider the one from Getz Pharma even though it was like a 10 minute drive from my home because corporate seemed like a Kafka novel. Though I did spend some time looking into the third one because it was just so weird. The guy said it was a fuel refinery but I couldn't find anything online. Took me a while to find someone who knew about it and it turned out to be a rocket fuel refinery that was run by the Ministry of Defence. Safe to say I didn't take that offer because if corporate is Kafka, government is (Kafka)². I liked working at my first job because I could take dumb shit directly to the director and if I could convince him, he'd sign off on it almost instantly. But it turned out that even with the director pushing for something, if the company has too many employees, changing anything is still an impossible task. I left after a year. It was still fun though, I initially didn't know, but the director, who I had gotten into a habit of getting into arguments with on the factory floor, was actually the son of the then Governor of Sindh. I only found out later when one of the clients I was managing exceeded the max payment timeline of 4 months and I went to ask the accounts guy what the next step would be and he just said "I'm gonna send a police mobile vehicle to their office" like it was just a normal step in an SOP, and send he did. About two weeks after I had resigned and had gone back to watching anime I got a call from the staff of a 1-star Admiral. He wanted me to come in to discuss a project I'd worked on and it had gotten published in a defence applications research journal, and the Navy HQ now wanted it to be used in production. Now normally, I obviously wouldn't agree to work for a government organization but this project came from so high up that I could bypass literally every rule in the book. I could just walk into a base and ask the CO for something and actually get it the same day. Unfortunately a civilian director of research got brought into the project later on and he was just dumb. Credentials wise he had a PhD from a top university in Canada and had a Springer published book on the topic. But when it came to actually understanding physics, he wasn't very good. For me physics was my first love, I'd go to sleep thinking about physics, I'd day dream about physics and I wasn't about to waste my time trying to explain and convince someone of the most fundamental things about physics. Felt like sacrilege. So I excused myself from the project. I dived into doing things of my own and after a short while ended up being offered to join Markaz after I talked to the one of the cofounders about doing a startup in Pakistan. Two years later I left Markaz again to work on my own things. Even before I had officially announced that I was leaving, I had a few offers through friends who knew I might be leaving and half of them weren't even related to my previous experience and still offered to pay more but because I don't plan on working a traditional job, I did not take on any of the offers. I again spent one month watching anime and then built 7 products in 7 months as an indie solo developer and then I got referred to the Antler programme by someone I was talking to on the internet. So I also didn't apply there myself but ended up spending the next 2 months in the programme. I left again because the model didn't fit my idea of work. In terms of being employable I've never had much of a problem. In fact, one funny story I have is that while I was in Islamabad I had a very good friend and his biggest problem with me was that I was single. So he forced me to go on a date with a random girl. But I ended up talking mostly about work and so it makes perfect sense that I got a job offer from her because she probably thought "romance tou hoga nahi iss se but job achi karlega". My friend obviously was not happy about it. Thanks to Taha Ashraf and Tamseel Ahmad for reading drafts of this.