Man, this hurt like a liver punch. I graduated about a year and a half ago.

Two years before graduation, I interned at a really big oilfield services company and they, engineers and managers, liked me despite a Van Wilder academic track (I spent 9 years in college for a 5 year degree. I failed to adapt to academia. I was just someone on which it is easy to apply those rules rarely applied on anyone).

I was to be hired if I applied after graduation. Right before I graduated, there was a law that was passed preventing people not from the cities where the oilfields are situated to be hired to work there. The local population (mostly without degrees) was protesting about why all the good jobs went to people from North of the country while they, in the South (where oilfields were), didn't have that chance.

There were also protests from people without degrees about why it takes a degree in the first place, or the ability to speak English, to be hired by those companies. Uhm, because NMR and Gamma rays are neat things?

This created tension at a critical time, and the Government pushed for a law requiring any new hire by the oil companies to be someone from the area (without consideration to qualifications). That's the Government standard operating procedure.

So I was jobless because the company who wanted to hire me couldn't hire me because I was born in the wrong area according to a law that was passed to reduce unemployment. I didn't fail to be amused by the irony of joblessness due to joblessness reducing measures.

Now, I reached out to some people to circumvent that. I needed a card to be able to work there. They set out to procure me that card. I waited, a lot, mainly because, to worsen the situation, the instance delivering the cards was investigated for "selling" 3,000 jobs.

You see, some people complained about not finding work or a lot of companies "giving" jobs for people they know.. So there was this idea to create a Government instance that would do arbitrage: Companies would send them job offers. People looking for work would register with the organization. Then the organization would play match-maker and send the companies applicants who correspond to their profile. This is how it was supposed to work to prevent HR people in those companies to sink in nepotism.

How it worked in real life though was that the organization hid the offers and sold them to job applicants willing to pay. Beautiful.

Again, my problem was that the company wanted to hire me, but I needed the card from the government organization of that specific place, which was investigated for selling jobs to people instead of simply connecting them.

I didn't fail to be amused by the irony of this, too. Jobless because the instance that should connect the unemployed to the employers is under investigation for trying to squeeze a profit from it.

And then, to make things worse, again, a law was passed to prevent people from being hired if they're not squared away as to their Military Service. We have compulsory conscription here. I tried to avoid it because I thought that the company I was going to work with had an age limit for the position (28 years old) and I was 27 years old. I thought that going to the Military for one year (it used to be 2.5 years) would make me too old, so I decided to apply for the job first. If you fail to show up after three letters, the Military can snatch you as you are (so if you went to buy stuff and, at a check-point, someone stops you and finds out you failed to show up, you are taken on the spot, in the clothes you have with you, to a Military base). I'm not really dodging the Military Service: if my country was at risk and they really needed more people to bear arms and actually kill terrorists, I would do it without question. But most people spend a year there doing nothing and sometimes are sent back for different reasons.

As I waited, I decided to work on a project to enable mobile subscribers to send airtime to other subscribers who are on a different network (say from Verizon to AT&T). I started the project to learn Python (github.com/jhadjar/uniflex). I abandoned it because there are limitations only carriers can lift and they lack the incentive to do so (that's why I didn't go the route of USSD commands or added value provider, because I'd eventually need their consent to enable the transfer). I put the code up as it was (it sucks because it was still a rough draft and that was the first thing (useful, real) I write).

Now, I'm still looking for work. The only companies worth working with, here, are in the oil business since the salaries other companies offer are petty (I made more in a part-time job with my buddy as a student). And these companies like to hire Engineers fresh out of college, provide expensive training, and then make a return on investment. The ROE is rapidly made since quotes are high and the Engineer's training is paid for rather quickly.

Other companies, though, tend to prefer people with experience. Or post ridiculous job offers for people without experience that only require a `mastery` of C, C++, Java, and a bunch of other things, even for a web design position.

Reading those offers, I get the impression that people actually do tech in my country. I lived here long enough to know better. It only means those who write those job offers are clueless as to what is required for a specific job, and clueless enough to accept someone fresh out of college saying he has `mastery` of C/C++ (most think it's the same for they only have C classes here) because he wrote a couple of programs in college. We went to the same classes and the people who put `mastery` are the same who capitalize `INCLUDE`.

It's also sad that I worked at a school that didn't require I provide a degree, teaching something I don't have a degree for, for a salary that was like 4 times what most those lame companies offer.

I'm also working on a project (in Python) that would appeal to companies who do a lot of banking operations (but again, since not all banks offer electronic forms, I need to make them change their forms and there need to be strong incentives so I started with those who already have electronic forms (XLSX)).

When I read job offers for Engineering on here or elsewhere, they feel like a dagger in the heart because I don't know anything deep enough. I started programming at 9 and for Electronics in college, but one here ends up worrying more about if his exam sheet is going to be graded by te teacher who doesn't like him, than technical proficiency (just an example: A teacher of mine gave me a failing grade because I didn't write in x86 assembly language "the way she does". We used the A86 compiler for a class, I read the whole doc. She used MASM's style and directives to write stuff for A86. In the exam, I wrote correct code, with comments explaining why I wrote what I wrote the way I wrote it, even citing page numbers of the doc). She gave me 5/20). The system is also rigged: for example, they don't display grades until the period for any possible plea to regrade your paper is expired. Many don't even bother to grade papers and give you an estimation of what they think you could get (many get the same grade they did the semester before, if one gets a high grade when he had a low grade in first semester, it's considered cheating). Of course, you can't complain to anyone since these teachers have been there for 30 years, are buddy of the dean or the Minister (they're not going to jeopardize their relationship for a student who won't be there in a few years), and you're the kind of students who's frequently absent (6 hours daily in transportation to get to and come back from college where most teachers suck and density of information/unit time is tiny is no fun). Just a few examples as to the ways you can waste time dealing with issues instead of focusing.

Sometimes I wonder why I haven't studied abroad where you only have to worry about things like exams and papers, you know, normal stuff.

Then again, it could be worse and I'm not dead yet. Sorry for the rant but I needed to laugh a little bit. Writing this helped.