How to get a job as a web developer, with Ehmad Zubair

The conversation and who is in it

The episode opens with Muzamil reconnecting with Ehmad Zubair, a friend he describes as someone he had not seen in roughly eleven years. Ehmad is the CEO of Cogent Labs in Lahore and runs a YouTube channel focused on technical education. The stated subject is straightforward: how does someone actually get a job as a web developer in Pakistan? What follows is a wide-ranging conversation that moves from the basics of the stack, through the economics of freelancing, into the deeper question of what universities are actually for.

What web development is - and what it is not

Early in the discussion, Ehmad draws a clear line between WordPress-style work and real web development. WordPress, he argues, is something any non-technical person can learn; it is a low-value, commoditised layer. The technical work begins when you move into the languages and frameworks underneath - Python, JavaScript, and the frontend frameworks that Google and Facebook released as open source.

He explains that around 2017 and 2018 a meaningful shift happened. Before that, clicking a link on a website caused the entire page to reload in the browser. After the widespread adoption of modern frontend frameworks, that behaviour changed: the page loads once, and subsequent interactions update only the relevant parts, the way a mobile app feels. “This happened because of the advent of new frameworks from Google and Facebook,” Ehmad says, “and people started using them to build modern websites.” For anyone entering the field today, understanding that shift - and the frameworks behind it - is the baseline.

On the backend, the conversation touches on custom software as the layer where real business value lives. Ehmad uses the example of a content creator who wants to track which subscribers engage most and then target them with specific advertising. A WordPress plugin can approximate this, but the moment the requirements become specific - segmenting users, running analytics, triggering actions - a custom software solution becomes necessary. That is where developers who understand the full stack become indispensable.

The freelancing question

Muzamil pushes back on the common advice given to Pakistani students: start freelancing as soon as possible, earn dollars, avoid the local job market. Ehmad is direct in his disagreement. “I am a very strong advocate of not freelancing for the first three to four years after graduating,” he says. “Find a company that can teach you.”

His reasoning is about compounding. When you freelance early, you earn money but you learn in isolation. You make mistakes and you correct them yourself, slowly. When you work inside a company with a good mentor, you make mistakes and someone who has already spent ten years in the industry corrects you the same week. The learning velocity is incomparable. The money, he argues, will come - but only if the foundation is solid.

He is also candid about the longer arc. A twenty-two-year-old can survive on freelance income of twenty thousand rupees a month. At thirty-five, with a family, that same income structure becomes a trap. The question is not what you can earn today but what position you will be in a decade from now.

The first boss

One of the more specific pieces of advice in the conversation concerns the choice of first employer. Ehmad argues that the first boss is disproportionately important - more important than the company name, more important than the starting salary. “Your first boss is very important,” he says. “Choose someone who can teach you.”

The logic connects to the freelancing argument. A good first boss compresses years of trial-and-error into months. A bad first boss - or no boss at all, in the case of solo freelancing - leaves the developer to rediscover lessons that the industry already knows. Muzamil notes that this framing inverts the way most students think about job hunting, where salary and brand tend to dominate the decision.

Pakistan’s design literacy gap

Later in the discussion, the conversation shifts to a structural problem that Ehmad identifies in the Pakistani tech market: a gap in design sensibility. He argues that Pakistani developers are technically capable - they can build the product - but they struggle to compete on design quality at a global level. His explanation is cultural and environmental. Children who grow up surrounded by a particular visual culture develop an intuitive sense of proportion, colour, and layout. That intuition is harder to acquire in adulthood.

“Our design concept is not there,” Ehmad says, describing the gap between what Pakistani developers produce and what global standards require. He is not dismissive - he points out that there are designers working inside Pakistan who are producing work for major international clients, including large design agencies. But he frames this as an area where the industry needs deliberate investment, not just technical training.

What universities are actually for

The final substantial thread in the conversation concerns universities. Ehmad’s position is that Pakistan has misunderstood the purpose of a university degree. Parents send children to university so they can get a job. Universities have responded by positioning themselves as vocational training centres. The result, he argues, is that neither the research function nor the vocational function is done well.

“We have made the university a factory,” he says. “We said our child will graduate from university so they can get a job.” Historically, he notes, universities were places of research - institutions where people combined ideas from different fields and produced new knowledge. Vocational training for specific jobs was a separate, shorter-format track. Conflating the two has produced graduates who are neither researchers nor job-ready practitioners.

Muzamil adds a personal note here: his own path combined a computer science degree with work in digital media, and the breadth of that education gave him flexibility that a narrowly vocational programme would not have. The point both speakers arrive at is that the university debate in Pakistan tends to produce two entrenched camps - those who defend degrees and those who dismiss them - when the more useful question is what each institution is actually optimised for, and whether that matches what the student needs.

Building in public and finding the audience

By the end of the conversation, Ehmad describes an experiment he ran to test whether there was demand for structured technical education content in Pakistan. He posted on his profile asking whether people wanted a course on a specific topic. Overnight, more than three hundred and fifty people signed up. Some companies shared the post. Within a few days, interview requests were coming in.

He sent eighty emails. Twenty-eight people signed up for the course. The course ran, a WhatsApp community formed, and the experiment confirmed what he had suspected: there is a large population of people in Pakistan who have technical questions and no clear path to answers. The gap is not in talent or interest - it is in structured, accessible guidance. That, in essence, is the problem both Ehmad and Muzamil are trying to address through their respective channels.