Palestinian IT Engineers: From the Occupied Palestine to the Top Global Companies

Palestinian IT Engineers’ minds continue to prove its cleverness and worth, disregarding all the obstacles and difficulties it face and the successive crises that the region is witnessing, whether internal or external. Palestinians were not satisfied with proving this locally, so they insisted that they have their mark by which they are known outside the borders of their stolen homeland.

Six Years of Adham’s Hard Work to Reach Google

Adham Sahib’s journey of success and hard work began in 2016 when he started studying at Birzeit University. The university witnessed his permanent presence on the honor list, except once, in his third year, when he travelled on a student exchange scholarship, during which Adham studied at the University of Glasgow in Britain for one semester. When he returned to his country, Palestine, he worked on his graduation project with two of his friends. His graduation project was about designing an artificial intelligence system that could help blinds distinguish things around them through audible information. He finished his computer engineering journey by graduating with distinction.

At the beginning of his career journey, Adham also worked in ASAL Company. It didn’t take long for him to start planning his next step, and he was never satisfied with his success; that step took him to Google in London.

Read more : The Power Of Freelancing Work In Gaza

From a High School Robotic Competition…. To Google

Dalia Awad is a 21-year-old computer engineering student at the Islamic University of Gaza. She first started coding in high school; there was a robotic competition that her teacher thought she should enter as Dalia has programming skills.

In 2019, she had a scholarship to attend a boot camp in Jordan with ANERA and RBK, during which she spent 4 months of intensive training about software engineering. Then, the training program was implemented in Gaza in 2020, and she was selected to work with the two institutions as a Software Trainee. She also worked in many international companies, such as:

• Google: Software Engineer Intern (STEP)-
• Datadog: Software Engineer Intern –
• PLUS (Anera & RBK): Software Trainer-

She was able to find a Google job through the Manara.tech program in 2020. This program teaches engineers how to land their dream job by training them for the interviewers for the Big Tech Companies. Later that year, she had her first real internship interview, and it was for one of the most well-known companies in the world. Working for Google was a dream come true.

“I don’t follow Trends; I create Trends”

Engineer Hazem Kamel Madi, a Technical Advisor at Springboard (the second largest global IT service provider and academe), was awarded last month as one of the Top 40 Technical Advisors around the world with a Global Platform called ADPList. He was granted the accreditation badge as a technical advisor and mentor with another global platform called “The Mentoring Club” in Software Product Innovation and User Experience Design. He began to delve into the field before university, so when he joined the university, he only studied 26 hours, then completely stopped studying without returning.

Hazem completed his career, which he started at the age of 15 by self-learning. As a result, he quickly began to integrate into the online work in addition to working in local companies, which strengthen his personality and earned him abundant realistic experience built on the strong scientific foundation he obtained during his journey in the field.

Until he reached a certain extent, Hazem began to feel the need from people around him for an initiative that would gain them advanced techniques different from the common in the field around them. So, he set out to provide interactive educational opportunities for them by organizing events for introducing the field in its true way and addressing general topics in order to raise the level of these activities and build an integrated training program specialized in the field for free and personally.

This online program had two versions for two consecutive years. The first version targeted 25 people and the second targeted 125. He continued to spread the culture of the field until it became one of the necessities in his life. Although, the biggest challenge he faced was the failure of the competent places and institutions in the country to embrace his ideas, the global advanced and specialized technical platforms and societies in the field were his incubators. That point was the start towards excellence and creativity more and more until it became present and effective with the following global platforms:

• ADPList Org
• The Mentoring Club Platform
• Re-create Platform
• Product Classroom USA
• Orpetron Web Design Awards

Recently, Hazem has been awarded as one of the best 1% mentors whole around the globe. He always ends his words with his usual sentence at the top of his website:

(I don’t follow trends; I create trends).