Ehmad Zubair

Education

Zubair completed a bachelor's degree in Information and Communication Systems Engineering at NUST in 2014. His degree was not in software engineering. He has said he had a job when he graduated. [1]

He has said that when he was studying around 2010, internet bandwidth was limited and YouTube had not yet taken off. He did not connect with his linear algebra teacher and found nothing useful to learn from. At university, he had no one to tell him what would come after graduation. [1][4]

Career

Zubair moved to Lahore for his first job. He says it did not work out after three months. He then joined a company he describes as one of the top tech companies in Pakistan, where he worked for about five years. He is no longer working there. He says leaving was very hard for him, and he describes the company as a second home where he had very good mentors. [1]

He has said he stumbled upon software engineering, which changed the trajectory of his life, and that he started his career as a programmer. He has described starting out as an iOS engineer, and he also says he began with Android before doing iOS work for a while. He found iOS app work to have a limited scope, and web backend work became the area he liked most. He worked on the backend first and then began learning frontend, and he has worked in web development since 2016. [1][4]

Cogent Labs

Zubair recently started his own software company, called Cogent Labs. He says the name Cogent means anything convincing and very clear, and that Labs refers to experimenting with the latest technology. The company works on web, data engineering and mobile, and he says it does the software development work he has done all his life. One of his partners, an expert in data engineering, suggested adding that work to the company. [1]

He says he began the company's work about a year earlier on a part-time basis and now plans to work on it full-time. He has said the company has clients in Canada and the US, and one or two in Pakistan, and also that its work centres on customers in the US and Europe. He has said people who want to work with him can apply through a link to the company's careers page, and that the company is hiring for at least nine roles. [1][3][4][5]

He has said the company won three or four contracts in its first year. He and his team lived very frugally, like people with little money, in the first two years, and the office was 250 square feet until the team reached 12 people. He has said that no one in his family had run a business before. [5]

He says a client asked his team to build technology for home sample collection, and that the work began in February, as Covid was just arriving. He was working with a logistics and food-delivery company at that time. He says that client now does at least 30 times the work it did back then. He has also said he has launched three products and that they failed, and that he runs an e-commerce business. [1]

Content and teaching

Zubair started freelancing while at university and got a couple of customers. He posted on his profile that he was running a free Python bootcamp. Within days, about 800 people had signed up, and about 250 of those sign-ups signed up further. He ran the bootcamp as a live stream, and the course ran for about four weeks. [1]

He says he realised he was the person he had wanted at university, and decided to make the content. He waited a year for someone else to make such content before deciding to do it himself. He recorded the first videos at his study table with a camera set up in front of it. People began asking him very specific questions on Instagram, and he says he makes a video whenever a question comes up most often. [1]

He plans to make short videos explaining tech roles, such as QA engineer. He expects a pool of information will let him map a path from zero to one, and he thinks his playlist catalogue is where the channel will create real value. He is considering starting a community but does not have one yet, and he is careful about online communities because the message gets lost. [1]

Views on technology

He describes data engineering as ETL, meaning extract, transform, load. He says data has grown so large that full-blown servers are needed. [1]

He says the most valuable companies in the world are tech-first companies, and that decision-makers still think technology is a fad. He says once software is in place, people cannot take shortcuts. He says some people resist new tools because they fear what they will do with the time saved. He says jobs will not disappear but their nature will change, and that when spreadsheets arrived, the need for spreadsheet operators followed. [1]

He says the design standards of the US and Europe are well ahead of what Pakistan builds, and that design know-how is publicly available, with people teaching it on Twitch. He has seen design fidelity as a challenge even in large Pakistani teams. [1]

Views on careers and education

Zubair advises graduates to avoid freelancing for three to four years after graduating. He says he tells people not to do freelancing, and that people should increase their lifetime value rather than this year's value. He says the first team lead or boss is very important for a new graduate, advises choosing a first boss carefully, and tells people that money will follow. He says working for two years with a strong person may take someone to where that person already is, and he estimates that 9 or 9.5 times out of 10, people investing in themselves now will go far ahead. [1]

He advises joining a software company to get from zero to one, and taking a job where software engineering is the core business. He says a bank's core business is banking, not software. He says people who cannot afford risk or unpaid work should still start, and that a degree counts for little when applying for the next job. He offers a test: whether you are a small cog in a big machine or an important part of it. He says people are not yet in a gig economy and will not be for the foreseeable future. [1]

He says many people reach the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve and think they are finished. He wants to help people get off the first cliff of that curve. He says people tend to do nothing until they are held accountable. [1]

On universities, he says they offer more than skills and are undersold, and that a four-year university course can also teach entrepreneurship, user design and communication. He says the skills route depends on self-discipline, with nothing enforced. The university path builds accountability, he says, since students who skip attendance are barred from exams. He says pushing people into routes with no accountability is a little dangerous, and he thinks 100 students on the university path would probably be better off after four years. [1]

He says views on universities depend on people's own outcomes, and that universities give students a network. He says Harvard and Stanford degrees are expensive because they provide a network. [1]

Zubair has said that today a free course can be found with four or five Google searches, and that a GitHub repository is kept up to date and sets out a full computer software engineering degree. He has advised students to ask people in senior batches who are strong in a particular subject, and to reach out to people whom others have not contacted, not only to the CEO. He has said that people want to learn from people who look like them and talk like them. [4]

He thinks about 7,000 computer science and software engineering graduates finish each year, and that industry says 10 to 12 percent of them are employable. He has said graduates who know object-oriented programming, data structures, databases and algorithms would be worth hiring. He has said people should focus on the end result rather than the tools, that one or two good teachers in a subject can build a student's passion for it, and that Riyadh is investing massively in human capital and bringing in experts from around the world. He tells people that nobody is coming to save them, and that people are responsible for playing the cards in their hand as well as they can. [4]

Views on running a company

Zubair has said that most founders have no work at the start, and that clients can run out of money or change their priorities. He says the best way to handle such surprises is to build a sales team while business is good. When a company is fully booked, he says, it can raise its rates because it does not need every project. He thinks firms that serve SMBs probably make roughly 30 to 35 percent net profit. [5][6]

He has said running a tech company is very hard because it spans sales, operations, delivery, admin and HR. He has seen many founders upgrade their cars and offices. He says a founder is not the king of the company and must consult co-founders and the core team, and that a founder's decisions can be wrong and others will question them. [5]

He says partners should be able to disagree respectfully, and that when they cannot, the dispute turns into one of egos. He says mutual respect is very important between partners. He has said money does not change people, it exposes them, and that founders need accountability partners in their life who can hold them back. [5]

He has said he frequently tells people at Cogent Labs that there are no stupid ideas or stupid questions, and that an idea should be heard and objectively analysed, even if it is not acted on. He has said buyer intent already exists before the sales conversation, and that the sales process stays the same once a customer's need is established. [5][6]

Personal life

Zubair has said his family, including his wife, has been instrumental in helping him stay grounded. He has said people who knew him before he had money can tell him objectively when he is changing. [5]

Timeline

2010

Was studying; internet bandwidth was limited and YouTube had not yet taken off.[4]

2016

Began working in web development.[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. How to get a job as a web developer, with Ehmad Zubair . Thought Behind Things , 2021-04-21.
2. Irfan Malik: How to Get Projects on Upwork, Client Communication | The Ehmad Zubair Show . Ehmad Zubair .
3. Adeel Hashmi: Communication Skills for Software Engineers, Growth Mindset | The Ehmad Zubair Show . Ehmad Zubair , 2024-05-07.
4. Why Computer Science Students Can't Get Jobs? | The Ehmad Zubair Show ft. Dr Nauman (Recluze) . Ehmad Zubair .
5. How to Start a Software Company in Pakistan | The Ehmad Zubair Show ft. Tahir Fazal . Ehmad Zubair .
6. Lead Generation - How to Get Clients through Email Marketing | The Ehmad Zubair Show ft. Waqar Hasan . Ehmad Zubair .