This story is being prepared
Ubaid was about eighteen when he asked his father for permission to tutor a friend’s cousin for ₹2,500 a month. His father asked him why he wanted to.
“I want to know how it is to earn,” Ubaid told him. “When a person earns his own money, how does he feel?”
He taught for a year and a half, and paid for his own phone, his own bike, his own lunch.
What the full story covers
The conversation that follows covers his journey from there to an engineering role at Cisco in Bangalore, by way of a B.Tech he admits he took on largely because everyone else was, a year lost, and nine months of deliberate, punishing study.
He talks about the Cisco interview day: a room of well over a hundred candidates, seven hours, and an interviewer who pushed him for fifteen minutes on a single protocol question before setting him a reading test on an RFC he had, by chance, already studied at Techboxx.
He talks about the phone call afterwards, taken in the office of his previous job, and about calling his mother.
And he returns, more than once, to the same piece of advice:
“I will say one sentence. Start early. Start early in your life. Don’t wait.”
While you wait
Ubaid’s full story will be published on this page. In the meantime, you can read Mubaid’s story, a conversation about rejection, direction, and what happens when somebody finally tells you the right thing at the right time.
