Do All Devs End Up Being Content Creators?

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey what's going on guys so in this video i want to talk a little bit about being self-taught watching youtube videos and courses and being on twitter and having it seem like every developer just ends up being a content creator because i think that's that's something that a lot of people feel and this is actually a direct response to a specific comment from someone that that left this comment on a video on my channel that kind of hit me hard so i wanted to make a video kind of addressing it so i'll put the comment on the screen i'm going to blur the the user's name out but they said these kinds of videos make me feel like there's no money or jobs in the industry anymore and everyone should start teaching and doing instagram or youtube which is the exact opposite of why i'm learning web app development everyone seems to have the same story as you got good at what they do paid well many job offers and then left that and became began content creation my question is then why stop working if everything was great i really hope that's not the case for the industry because that means i wasted my time here not everyone can and wants to to make online content i want a normal paying job so like i said that comment really hit me hard because i don't like the idea and nothing against this person at all i mean i can completely see where they're coming from um it's just that i don't like the idea that someone watched a video on my channel or anybody's channel for that matter and felt like maybe this is a waste of time and the the biggest i'm going to talk a little bit about me and why i chose this route but before i do that the biggest point that i want to make is if you think of all of the the youtubers that create tutorials any kind of programming tutorials and you put them all together it's such a small sliver of the industry it's such a small sliver of people that know how to code it's it's definitely not the most popular route the most popular route seems to be getting a job at a company as a developer and then freelancing or being a consultant things like that or even just creating your own projects and selling those so there's a lot of different avenues to take when you learn how to code and that's why i just want to i want to stress that it's not a waste of time it's never a waste of time now i think that if you're someone that is self-taught and you don't know anybody in the industry you don't you've never worked in the industry then all you're seeing is content creators right every developer that you see is a youtuber or a course creator or someone that wrote an ebook they're all content creators and that's what it seems like is happening is that every developer ends up in the end doing content but that's not the case at all that's just what you see because that's what's online like i said the the content creators are a very very small portion of the the you know all the developers in the world or the country or the state whatever it might be it just seems like that because that's what you're seeing online so i don't want anybody to think that that doing youtube is like the end result of learning how to code it's just one avenue to take and it's definitely not for everybody it's not for most people now as far as myself i can't explain i can't talk about other content creators and why they do what they do or how they ended up there but for me a lot of you do know my story but i started out freelancing working for peanuts like most people do i had a lot of bad experience with clients but i kept at it and i ended up you know being pretty good at what i what i did and got a bunch of really good projects real client projects that i could put on a portfolio and i went the job route i worked at a you know as a developer at a company for a while and it was a good experience i mean i learned a lot when it came to working with other developers on a team because that's something that i had no experience with something that i that i found very hard to adapt to so i learned a lot in that aspect but i knew i wasn't going to stay there like forever because that's just not what i personally wanted to do i know a lot of people do they strive to work as a high-paying developer at a company and that's a great goal it's just not my goal i always knew i wanted to do my own thing so i was still freelancing a little bit on the side i still had you know my my client base while i was working and my website that i had at the time ended up doing really well on google for some really key search terms and i was getting submissions all the time for new projects so i made a choice to leave the job and go back to my business and you know it i was doing even better i ended up getting a storefront i hired two people i was outsourcing i started on upwork which was then odesk doing work and then i ended up hiring people from from upwork so it was doing really well but at the same time i was doing youtube as you know on the side uh it was working an unhealthy amount of hours back then if you combine everything but i was doing youtube it was very very slow to start and that's the thing when you do content is you work for nothing for a long time before you can actually make any money or you know become popular especially nowadays but i just love doing it i loved creating tutorials i wasn't doing it to be a youtuber or to be a content creator i just enjoyed making tutorials i like teaching i liked people telling me that i helped them out that was really fulfilling so i kept doing that and you know grew my subscriber base a little bit and i had a company eduonyx contact me to do some courses some you know full-length courses so i got into that i was making a fixed price per course and i was making money both with my business and content creation i was making more of my business but i liked content creation better so i had another choice to make between those two and i chose to go the content route which was a risk because i was making a lot more with my business but i was it just made me a lot happier i didn't feel like work to to do um content you know so i decided to do that because i could do different projects every day i could study whatever i wanted i had a i still have a passion for learning but it was you know a burning passion back then i just i loved learning any language or framework that was thrown at me and i would just t re-teach everything that i learned um so that's kind of how i just built up my my you know backlog of videos and my content and eventually i started making my own courses on udemy and started to do really well even better than i did with my job with my freelancing with anything else and it just worked out you know and it could have went the other way could have went to [ __ ] and i could have had to go back to freelancing and start over but i took a risk because that's what i really love to do i love helping people when someone tells you that you help them get a job it's like it's the most fulfilling thing in the world more than any paycheck so if i can do that and make money and code and do my own projects pick whatever i want to learn i mean that's that's my ultimate job so that's just me personally it's not for everybody so i just wanted to explain that that everybody has you know their passions in what they want to do in life some people just want to work for a company and that's completely respectable especially if you just love to code and you don't want to deal with videos and and you know editing and responding to comments and tweeting and all that crap then you know it's content isn't for you and that's fine so i just wanted to kind of make this video to address that that comment because like i said it just hit me hard i don't want people thinking they're wasting their time i mean there's plenty out there in all different avenues of tech and and coding um but that's it guys and i'm gonna cut this short i just wanted to address that like i said and uh thanks for watching and i'll see you next time