SpaceX's 14-year-old engineer's LinkedIn profile gets blocked. Here's why
2 min read 15 Jun 2023, 10:02 PM ISTLinkedIn said that a user to look for jobs on the social media platform needs to be at least 16 years of age. This comes in sharp contradiction to Elon Musk's SpaceX, which did not bare for Quazi's age while hiring him
PremiumElon Musk's new recruit for SpaceX, a 14-year-old Kairan Quazi's LinkedIn profile was blocked after the latter posted that he had secured a job with Space Exploration Technologies Corporation as a software engineer. LinkedIn has cited their minimum age stipulations for using the platform to look for jobs.
LinkedIn said that a user to look for jobs on the social media platform needs to be at least 16 years of age. This comes in sharp contradiction to Elon Musk's SpaceX, which did not bare for Quazi's age while hiring him.
Quazi took to Instagram to share the update, after his LinkedIn update landed him in a restricted profile.
Quazi, a software engineer with SpaceX took to Instagram to share a screen grab of his communication with LinkedIn and said, "LinkedIn just sent me this notice that they are deleting my account because I'm not 16. This is the illogical, primitive nonsense that I face constantly. I can be qualified enough to land one of the most coveted engineering jobs in the world but not qualified enough to have access to a professional social media platform? @LinkedIn showing everyone how regressive some tech company policies are. Can people please share this screenshot on their LinkedIn for me and ask people to connect with me on Instagram?"
The 14-year-old called LinkedIn's policy 'illogical, primitive nonsense'. He also stated that this kind of bias he faces constantly.
Kairan has recently graduated from 14-year-old Santa Clara University.
He had called SpaceX as ‘one of the rare companies that did not use his age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability’.
Quazi’s LinkedIn post read, "I guess this will be my LinkedIn "I'm excited to announce..." post! I am graduating from Santa Clara University's School of Engineering where I learned that "engineering with a mission" is not a gimmicky tagline. Where a culture of rigor, collaboration, accountability, and impact deeply resonated with the needs of a radically accelerated learner."
Adding that he is joining SpaceX, Quazi wrote, “Next stop: SpaceX! I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a Software Engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability."
Talking about how he got introduced to transformational leadership at the age of 9, Quazi wrote further in his LinkedIn post, "My early access to transformational leadership began as a 9-year-old. First, when the administrators of a local community college Las Positas College enrolled a third-grade graduate with no prior acceleration into a fulltime mathematics A.S. degree program."
He then went on to share how he worked at Intel Labs as an intern, a move that ‘changed his career trajectory’.
A Los Angeles Times reported that Quazi’s journey began when he was just 2 years old, when he learnt how to speak in complete sentences.