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Kairan Quazi may have landed a job at SpaceX as a software engineer – but he’s still going to need his mom to drive him to work.
The 14-year-old will start working at Elon Musk’s company in the Starlink division next month after he became the youngest graduate of Santa Clara University this week.
Quazi told Insider: “My mom’s going to have to drop me off until I can start driving.”
He added that he’s “really excited” to start his job after he moves from Pleasanton, California to Redmond, Washington with his mom in July.
He said he didn’t “feel any pressure” to continue being a high-achiever because his family “never really cared” about his grades – but that he was learning at a pace that felt right for him.
“I really enjoy the stuff I’m working on, I’m very passionate about it,” Quazi said. “I’ve never felt like I was forced into it. It’s something that I’m really excited about, especially with the work I’ll be doing at SpaceX.”
SpaceX appealed to him because it overlapped with his “utilitarian desire” to work on technology that can serve humanity for the greater good.
The Bangladeshi-American has already interned at Intel Labs as an artificial-intelligence research fellow and spent four months as a machine-learning intern at the cyber-intelligence firm Blackbird.AI.
He believed both companies and SpaceX had one thing in common: no disconnect between their leadership values, and their recruitment policies.
“I really hope that by telling my story it can help leaders, if only a few, reevaluate the different biases within their hiring processes, and hopefully open the door for more neurodiverse people like myself,” Quazi said.
The young graduate said many tech companies state values on their websites, but that they “doesn’t necessarily translate” to their policies.
Quazi’s LinkedIn account was restricted on Tuesday as the minimum age required to use the platform was 16 years old, the company told him in a message that he posted on Instagram. He said it was “very frustrating” and a “significant career detriment” as he found out about the SpaceX role through LinkedIn.
He also said that most social media companies required users to be 13 or older so they could sell targeted ads – something he thought was “very antiquated.”
Teenagers are allowed to work full-time, per federal labor laws.
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