Software engineer rishta for developers, data and cloud professionals

What a software engineer rishta actually involves

Two councils, two accords, and one question that separates them

Pakistan runs engineering and computing through different bodies, and most families have no reason to know it until a plan depends on it. Engineering qualifications are accredited by the Pakistan Engineering Council, which has been a full signatory of the Washington Accord since 2017, so an accredited engineering degree is treated as substantially equivalent by the other signatories. Computing qualifications, which is to say software engineering, computer science, information technology, information systems and the networking degrees, are accredited by the National Computing Education Accreditation Council.

The computing world has its own equivalent of the Washington Accord, the Seoul Accord, whose members are accreditation agencies rather than countries: among them the bodies for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Mexico. Pakistan’s computing council is not among the signatories or the provisional signatories. The practical effect is not that a Pakistani computing degree is worth less, because in this industry what you have built matters more than almost anywhere else. The effect is narrower: there is no automatic mutual recognition to lean on, so each destination assesses the degree on its content instead, which takes longer and occasionally goes against the applicant.

So the question at the first meeting is which council accredited the programme. Two cousins, one with an accredited computer engineering degree and one with a computer science degree, can be in very different positions on the same ambition, and neither of them usually knows it.

The assessment, and the pathway a file lands in

Take Australia, which is the most commonly named destination after Canada and the clearest example because the assessment is run by the computing professional body rather than the immigration department. There are four routes. A recognised tertiary computing qualification plus a substantial number of years in the field goes down the general skills route. Someone without a formal computing qualification, which includes a great many entirely competent self taught developers, is assessed on experience instead, through recognition of prior learning, and has to produce two project reports plus evidence that the skills are current. Graduates of an Australian degree have their own route, needing either a year of Australian work experience or the professional year programme. There is a fourth, narrower route for Australian diplomas.

That is worth knowing because the route decides the timeline, and the timeline decides whether a couple spends their first two years together or apart. A self taught developer earning well is in a strong position professionally and a slower one administratively, and a family that understands the difference will not mistake the second for a weakness in the first.

Freelance income is checkable, and here is the paper that does it

This category contains more self employment than any other on the site, and families tend to either accept an income claim entirely or distrust it entirely. Neither is necessary. Three documents settle it. Registration with the Pakistan Software Export Board, which exists on a register. The remittance advices a bank issues against inward payments, which show the money arrived from abroad and in what currency. And a filed tax return.

There is a concrete reason a serious freelancer has all three. Export proceeds from computer software, IT services and IT enabled services are taxed at one quarter of one per cent where the person is registered with the Board and on the Active Taxpayers List, against one per cent where they are not, with both rates doubling for anyone off that list. A quarter of a per cent against one per cent is a strong reason to register and keep filing, so the absence of any registration in a reasonably sized freelance practice is a question rather than an accusation. The Active Taxpayers List is itself public, which means filing can be checked without asking anybody for anything.

Say the fair thing too: plenty of genuine income sits outside all of this, particularly at smaller scale, and it does not make a man dishonest. It does mean nobody can evidence it later for a visa application, a bank loan or a rental, and that limitation belongs in the conversation before the nikah rather than after it.

Remote for a foreign company is not employment by one

The sentence that causes most misreading in this category is some version of he works for a company in America. Occasionally that is employment, with a payroll and a contract under that country’s law. Far more often it is a contract between an individual in Pakistan and a client abroad. Both can pay very well. Only one of them involves an employer who could ever sponsor a relocation.

A contract creates no immigration status, no notice period worth the name, and no human resources department to telephone. It can also be excellent: more money than a local salary, flexible hours, and work that builds a portfolio. The error is not the arrangement, it is the assumption that a foreign client implies a foreign future. Ask whether it is employment or a contract, and whether the company has ever sponsored anybody from Pakistan. If the answer to the second is no, the move abroad is a separate project, and the question becomes which one of the assessment routes above it will travel on.

One client at eighty per cent is a salary with no notice

Client concentration is the risk nobody raises. A freelancer with eight clients and none above a fifth of income has a business. A freelancer with one client paying four fifths has a job without any of a job’s protections, and the family on the other side of the proposal usually cannot tell the two apart because the monthly figure looks identical.

It is a civil question to ask: how many clients, how long with the largest, and what happened the last time one left. A man who has been through that and rebuilt is a better prospect than one who has never been tested, and the answer tells you which you are looking at. The same applies to employment through an outsourcing or staff augmentation firm, where the real dependency is a contract between two companies that the engineer never sees.

Night hours, and the household they produce

A large share of this work runs on somebody else’s clock. American hours from Lahore or Karachi can mean starting in the evening and finishing after midnight, every working day, for years. European hours are gentler and Gulf hours are nearly normal. The point is that the time zone, not the job title, determines whether a husband is present at dinner, at breakfast, or at neither.

Couples manage this well all the time. What they do not manage well is discovering it. A bride who expected evenings and finds that the house must be quiet from six until two has a legitimate grievance that nobody intended to cause. So ask which time zone, how many nights a week, whether it shifts with the project, and whether it has ever changed. Then let both mothers hear the answer, because the sleeping arrangements of a joint household are the thing that actually has to absorb it.

What to put on the profile if this is you

Write the degree with its council and its year: BS Computer Science, 2020, with the institution named, or BE Computer Engineering if that is what it is. State the arrangement in one word, employed, contract or freelance, and name the employer or say how many clients. If you freelance and you are registered and filing, say so, because it quietly answers the income question that otherwise takes three weeks of circling.

Then state the hours and the time zone, and state the migration position as a fact rather than an intention. Skills assessment lodged, English done in February, waiting is a sentence that saves everybody a month. Vagueness in this category is read as evasion more often than in any other, because the sector is well understood by exactly the families you are hoping to hear from.