My Software Engineering Journey & Salaries ($$$)

Key Takeaways

foreign so I know it can be easy to look at LinkedIn articles and YouTube videos and posts about people that landed a job at Google or Facebook or Microsoft after just learning how to code six months ago now the reality is these people are anomalies this is extremely rare and really just not a reasonable expectation for any of you to have so in this video I want to bring you back to reality and share with you my career development and journey over really the past 10 years to get to the place where I'm at today now I am relatively young I'm only 22 years old however I started learning how to code when I was 12. I've been working all kinds of jobs as you're going to hear in this video since I was about 14. many of them not related to software engineering many of them related to software engineering anyways stick with me for this video I'm gonna bring you on the journey and talk to you about how I got to the place I'm at today so just as a bit of added context here in case you're new to the channel my name is Tim I currently work as the lead software engineer for a tech startup that I am a co-founder in now I am not the majority shareholder I was brought on about a year ago to kind of run the whole engineering department we have a few other developers that work with me I kind of manage a team of them right now and that's what I'm up to for most of my day other than filming YouTube videos regardless let me give you the whole kind of Journey until how I got to this point so let's go all the way back to 2014 where I landed my first job ever and this was working as an assistant for the company that my dad worked for which did high-end home automation and when I say high-end home automation this means that they're doing Lighting systems AV systems security systems automatic Shades pretty much anything that you could imagine kind of being required when you get into really big homes all kinds of crazy stuff worked in all kinds of mansions and for very very wealthy people regardless what I did there was pretty much just work as kind of like a grunt person I helped out on job sites and then I programmed Lighting systems which meant that if you press the keypad it would like turn this light on or make the shade go up or down super super basic stuff it was just pretty much the only job I could get because my dad got it for me when I was 14 years old then I was making about 15 an hour whatever the minimum wage would have been in 2014 in Canada and that was the first job that I had when I was 14. continuing in 2015 I started working at a summer camp now this summer camp was one I had been to many times I knew a lot of people that worked there already and it was very easy for me to get that job since I had been going to the summer camp for like years before that regardless I worked as a counselor and I made three hundred dollars a week yes 300 a week which was much lower than minimum wage somehow they can actually pay you less when you work for a camp regardless I wasn't complaining with no expenses that was still good money for me back when I was 15 years old now I continued working at the summer camp from 2015 to 2017 each year making a little bit more money but pretty much doing the same thing as a summer camp counselor so I think I made 300 and then I made maybe 400 a week and then by the time I was in my third year of being a counselor I probably made like 475 dollars a week or something along those lines then in 2017 at this point I'm 17 years old and in high school while I wasn't working in the summer I decided to pick up a job at McDonald's I just worked as a normal crew member I wasn't like a manager or anything like that and I made minimum wage worked about 15 or 20 hours per week and I did this just to make a bit of extra money while I was in school now keep in mind at this point in time I've just started my YouTube channel it's very much a hobby I have less than a thousand subscribers I'm making pretty much no money from it and it's just something I'm kind of doing for fun obviously I need to do other jobs if I want to make any kind of money and I've always been interested in making money so I was pretty much always doing any kind of job I could just to make a bit of extra cash while still focusing on school fun Etc alright so now in 2018 this is when I decided to go back to the summer camp again this year however I was promoted to a stem program coordinator which meant that I was going to run a coding specialty as well as take care of all the STEM related programming at the camp so that meant that I was doing things like overseeing robotic Specialties 3D printing uh handling kind of third-party people or Freelancers that would come in and work for the camp and that's kind of what I did it was a more management role but I also taught kids how to program and that's what continued to kind of encourage me to work on the YouTube channel so I had videos that kids could watch after Camp um kind of at home and to learn more at this point my YouTube channel had picked up a little bit I had a few thousand subscribers I was making a little bit of money from that and I think uh the pay that I was making from being a stem program coordinator was like 575 dollars a week so I was making let's say three grand a month if you take you know the YouTube channel and you add my salary as a program coordinator now in 2019 I decided to do this again so this is when I was in first year university the YouTube channel had picked up even more I was probably making a few thousand dollars a month now from YouTube as well as working again in the summer as a stem program coordinator and this time I think I managed to get 750 a week after negotiating that salary and all of a sudden I was starting to make you know what felt like a lot of money for a 19 year old with pretty much no expenses that had just entered first year university now at this point uh this is kind of where the career trajectory changes a bit and I go from kind of all these random part-time jobs to doing some more serious software engineering related work or at least coding kind of focused work us let me get into that now so in 2019 there was a portion of the Summer where I wasn't working for the summer camp and during that portion I worked as a junior system administrator again for the company that my dad worked for this time I was doing much more serious programming work where I was actually writing legitimate code I was writing a bit of code in Python I was writing some code in Visual Basic and I was doing some very kind of simple programming tasks and getting some systems to kind of integrate with each other just doing a little bit of networking stuff kind of just working in the tech department and had a little bit more you know like say trust I wouldn't say necessarily responsible ability but they were giving me more adult type tasks to be doing and that was the first kind of real let's say programming job that I had had so continuing from there in 2020 this is when my YouTube channel really started picking up I probably had about a hundred thousand subscribers and I started to make what was pretty much a full-time income from YouTube at that point in time was probably 40 or 50 Grand a year that I was generating from YouTube now through having the YouTube channel I managed to get an interview at Microsoft this is in 2020 and I landed a job as a Microsoft software engineering intern so throughout the summer of 2020 I worked as a Microsoft intern while I was working as an intern at Microsoft I made 10 290 dollars per month plus a stipend of 4 900 uh Canadian dollars so I made effectively let's say 35 000 Canadian dollars within three months of my Microsoft internship obviously that was insane and that was the highest income earning year I had so I had all the money from you YouTube channel which was like 45 50 Grand something like that plus all of the money from my Microsoft internship so I made let's say 75 000 in 2020. then comes 2021 in 2021 I stopped working at Microsoft because my YouTube channel was kind of just blowing up I continued working quite a bit on YouTube ended up making six figures on YouTube and then I started working as an algorithms instructor at algo Expo so at this point in time I had already landed a legitimate software engineering role I had some experience teaching through my uh kind of work at the summer camp and obviously I have my YouTube channel now which was a bit more credible I had a bit more um let's say substance to the videos and knowledge that I was sharing and I ended up working for algo expert when I worked for algo expert I explained data structures and algorithm style interview questions all of those are still available on the website you guys can check it out and after working as an algorithms instructor I actually created my own course with algo expert called programming expert so I did this course in 2021 so to kind of backtrack a bit here 2020 I worked for Microsoft I became an algorithms instructor for algo expert obviously this whole time I was running the YouTube channel then in 2021 we created the programming expert course which you guys can check out from the link in the description and then in 2022 with algo expert again we created the blockchain expert course which is for anyone looking to get into web 3 or blockchain development again you can check that out from the link in the description now just to give you a bit more information here because I know this is kind of all over the place and not very structured from the years of 2019 until kind of the middle of 2021 I was actually a full-time student in a computer science degree program I completed five out of eight of the semesters of that program before I decided to drop out just due to the other opportunities that I had but that is why I was working kind of summer jobs and I never had any full-time position it was because I was constantly being a student while running this YouTube channel which was pretty much a full-time job at that point and then doing any kind of Summer gig that I would take on so it wasn't until 2021 that I was able to really fully commit to doing things like being an algorithms instructor creating this programming expert in blockchain expert course and then of course running the YouTube channel which obviously at this point is doing quite well and that I'm going to continue to do for the foreseeable future now though I'll also mention that in 2022 is when I became the lead software engineer for this Tech startup so about a year and two months ago from filming this video I was approached by the current founder of our company who asked me if I wanted to come on and leave the engineering team obviously this was the biggest kind of engineering role I could possibly take on this was going to be the most amount of responsibility the most amount of stuff that I needed to learn and just something that I hadn't done before to be honest I probably wasn't qualified to be a senior software engineer here at this company but I took on the role I said you know what I'm gonna figure it out I'm gonna deal with it and that's what I've done today now after taking on that and working for about a year programming pretty much every single day on a really large scale project I feel way more confident and way better in my programming skills and I'm going to continue to do that so I'm super super happy I took that position obviously it was very intimidating when I first kind of got brought on and was just expected to run all of this stuff but I figured it out and yeah there you go so I know that this video is kind of all over the place but what I wanted to show with this video is that everyone has a different Journey when it comes to being a developer or Landing some kind of software engineering job for me mine was kind of all over the place I've been programming for 10 years yet I've only really been working as a software engineer for say the past four years a lot of my experience as a software engineer is simply self-taught it's through making YouTube videos it's through teaching you guys it's through making courses and experimenting and kind of teaming up with other programmers around the internet I haven't had a ton of formal software engineering experience yet I'd still say I'm a pretty competent programmer and obviously you guys can judge that for yourself when you watch my YouTube videos go through my courses and see the kind of apps that I'm building and that I'll release and share with you guys later in the year uh and kind of you know give you updates as we go along in terms of what the future holds I have no idea I'm going to continue working for this Tech startup I'm going to be making a few other really awesome courses and teaming up with some company so look forward to that and with that said I think I'm going to wrap up the video here a reminder if you want to become a software engineer check out programmingexpert.io from the link in the description you can also check out blockchain expert if you're into web 3 and blockchain development with that said I'll wrap it up I hope you guys enjoyed if you did leave a like subscribe and I will see you in the next one foreign [Music]