How to get a Developer Job – even in this economy – with James Q Quick [Podcast #153]

do things that make you uncomfortable and I think that's really stupid what I think is like you should do things that make you uncomfortable because you know they provide value for the thing that you want to accomplish and having like reaching out coldly asking to talk to people that may be awkward let's not pretend it's not it may be a challenge let's not pretend it's not let's acknowledge that but also just know those are the types of things especially in where we are right now that you're going to have to do to give yourself the

best opportunity to get to that milestone which is a next role it's a first role as a developer it's a first role in Tech it's a salary that you've never had before it's time off in vacation that you've never had before it's the ability to prioritize work life balance that you've had before like welcome back to the freec Cod Camp podcast your source for raw unedited interviews with devs this week's episode how to get a developer job even in this economy with James qqu this week's musical intro with your truly on the guitar drums bass

and keys the 1987 arcade classic Shinobi [Music] n [Music] welcome back to the fre Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larson teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org each week we're bring you Insight from developers Founders and ambitious people in Tech this week we're talking with James qqu he's a developer speaker and teacher James grew up in Memphis he was an athlete who played violin and knew nothing about computer science but chose it as his college major since then he's not only worked as a Dev at Microsoft and FedEx and a whole lot of other startups but he's

also given more than 100 talks at conferences about technical topics uh James it's great to have you here man and hey hey super excited to be here longtime fan yeah and uh support for this podcast comes from a grant from Wix Studio Wick Studio provides developers tools to rapidly build websites with everything out of the box that EXT extend replace and break boundaries with code learn more at Wix studio.com Support also comes from the 11,043 kind folks who support free C Camp through a monthly donation join these kind folks and help our mission at donate.

Freo camp.org right it's it's a thrill to have you here man uh I'm a longtime fan of yours and I think we published one of your talks on freeo Camp and it was like very popular it was like I have no idea what I'm doing I think it it showed your confused confused face in the uh thumbnail so so a lot of people may recognize you from that or they may recognize you from compressed FM which is an excellent podcast that you've done like 170 plus episodes I think uh but but you're and if they've

attended any technical conference there's a good chance they' probably seen one of your talks yeah yeah there's it's kind of funny listing all the different activities I don't know I this is something we'll definitely be able to dive into but there's so many different ways to be involved in the community so many ways to give back and then also there's selfish reasons for those that can help benefit you in your career which I think is going to be one of our talking points as well absolutely yeah and uh I think that one of the main

things I hope that people get out uh of this other than an appreciation for everything that James is doing for the developer Community is that there are lots of paths and there are still lots of opportunities it may be harder to get a job as a developer now that a lot of developers have been laid off and are like more midcareer people are competing for a lot of the roles that uh people fresh into the field are competing for like there's just more like a higher level of competition but uh it's certainly possible and there

are you know the jobs have largely come back uh it's just that it's it's going to be a challenge and then combine that with the rising tide of like sentiment I'll say about like AI being able to partially replace what developers do and things like that tools are always improving and there's always that water line that's climbing and you always have to climb a little higher so maybe we can start by just talking a little bit about what how you perceive the job market currently here as we're recording this November 13th 2024 yeah I I

feel like it's it's harder than it's been in a long time to be honest there was kind of like I guess maybe early covid there was like kind of the golden age of of boot camps where it's like people were spending more time at home they they kind of wanted something to dive into and people I think were just looking more into career changes and boot camps really exploded I think and you you saw so many success stories of people completely changing the trajectory of their career and I taught um one in-person round and one

virtual round of a boot camp in uh 2019 and then 2021 I think and I think there's no better place to be I think like being a developer being in Tech in general like the the benefits the salary the time off the culture especially as you work towards like younger companies I think it's all really amazing but I think right now it's it's tougher than it ever or it's tougher than it has been in in several years at least like as far as I've seen and so I think we're seeing people graduating from boot camps

and they're having a harder time finding a job we're seeing people self- teaching and having a harder time finding a job we're seeing people either get laid off or looking for their next role and having a harder time finding that next job and the one the one thing I do know is like just like blindly applying just like going to LinkedIn and seeing a job and clicking apply that it just doesn't work anymore like if if you find a job and get hired that way I would consider yourself extremely lucky I think so much of

it comes from a couple of different aspects it's like having things out there that are um validators of who you are and what you know and I'm biased but like content and speaking is a is a big validator for me you think about like words on a resume hey if I say I can communicate well that's just a word that everybody puts like good communicator right like that's just a it's just a random word you put on a resume but if you can actually see me speak and especially speak on technical topics like I think

that is a validator to what that thing actually means so I think the like building up your validators of like who you are and what you know and and what you can provide to a company and then also I hate I hate the word but it's the it's the best thing we have networking like I think it's cliche and I think networking is often used to be like cold and sterile so I like to say networking is just investing in your community it's showing up in your community it's participating in the community it's showing up

to conferences it's watching People's content it's commenting on people's content it's helping answer people's questions on Twitter X or whatever you want to call it I think just show showing up and being a part of the community is huge because every job that I've gotten basically has had some some impact with me knowing somebody at that company has been a significant indicator for me in my career and for everyone that I work with and and see those are the types of connections that make the difference between finding that next role and really really struggling too

yeah and would you say the importance of who you know has increased uh after the layoffs like do you think that it's more about uh having a strong Network as you said uh networking like having invested a whole lot in your community mhm 100% I like I I I hear stories just over and over again of like you know I've apply to 100 jobs and never hear anything back I apply to jobs and get ghosted and I actually shared I spoke at render ATL this summer and shared kind of a a similar story of uh

just kind of talking about careers and how to be more prepared to get highed and I talked about even for me like I've got tons of connections and I've gotten ghosted on job opportunities and I've had an interview and never heard back like these are things that just happen every day and it really really sucks so I think those sort of connections like it it's just hard to get in at all if you don't have at least something and for people who like don't have the background of like I've been to you know a 100

conferences or whatever for people who don't have that background you can also just start creating those relationships you can do you can message people on LinkedIn and say hey like I see you have a cool job would you would you do a coffee chat with me and just tell me about what you do and the company you work for and and if you then applied for a job at that company and you told that person hey like I really enjoy the conversation what you said about what you do and the culture at your company that

sounded really interesting and that resonated with me if you tell them that and then tell them that you applied there's a chance that they go and say like oh like I got to talk to this person on the phone and it was a reasonable person who seemed like they may be a good fit for a team like they could pass it on to a hiring manager and it's not like that in that five 10 15 minute conversation they're going to really go to bat for you but you may be somebody who gets an interview because

of having had that conversation because they can they can at least say you were competent enough to have the conversation and I think that that just goes so much farther than you imagine because otherwise they're just looking at a bunch of rums and filtering out people automatically and then it's just overwhelming to have so many resumés even after being filtered too to to decide on like who's worth talking to so yes I would say like in my career it's more important now more than ever uh your connections and your network yeah and uh what would

you say to somebody who is in the process of learning to code their their self teaching and they're just doing like you know an hour a day in the morning before they go to their day job you know driving a truck or um you know working at a hotel or something like that or or maybe they are have a a a job that they can actually apply their degree if they have a degree maybe they're working as an accountant or something like that but they aspire to become a developer but they consider themselves to be

more introverted like what would you say to somebody like that who is uh kind of like not relishing the notion of reaching out to people blindly not not blind but cold cold Reach Out Outreach on LinkedIn like how would you hype that person up and and reassure them that uh it will be worth the uh discomfort yeah yeah that's that's a really good question and and for what it's worth I consider myself to be extroverted but it's really interesting how many people in similar careers as mine and I I mean people that are speaking on

stage people that are running communities people that are reaching out blindly people that sit down at a table full of strangers and introduce themselves at conferences it's really interesting to me how many people I've seen in those situations that consider themselves to be introverts and there's one that stands out out to or a couple that stand out to me specifically Taylor Dusen is a recruiter he's not technical but goes to technical conferences because he's a recruiter for developers and and I remember the first time meeting him he like he was social all day long and

then at like 430 he was like okay I'm going to bed I'm not going to dinner I'm not going to after party I'm not going anywhere else like this is it and I was like dude you've been like you're the most social person I know how are you doing how are you like missing out on all this time and he was like no I'm actually very introverted and that just EX exhausted me and I need to go and be by myself and I think the the point of that was like he he's able to get

out of it like he enjoys spending time with people enjoys talking to people still introverted but he he recognizes the impact that's going to have and he puts in that work to do that but then also has to recognize his limits of like what he's capable of and what's going to like push him to the point of exhaustion and to protect himself as well another example that I've always thought about is when I was at Microsoft we had like a big training for our organization of 100 people or something and this guy was kind of

leading this Workshop a dayong workshop where he was on stage and he was leading us through activities and he was telling jokes and blah blah blah and he was one of the best speakers I've ever seen and he went through this whole thing of like like no I'm I'm super introverted when I get on stage I take on a Persona that is not me and I'm able to flip that switch and kind of disassociate who I really am with who I am on stage so that I can do this job and so there's a couple

different perspectives I can share with people I think one is kind of the tough love perspective like I understand the things I'm saying may be more difficult for you than they are for me totally understand that you're a different person different personality different things drain you in different ways totally understand let's accept that let's acknowledge that but let's also acknowledge that like hey if this is something you're serious about there are some things that you have to do that are going to make you uncomfortable and there's a a really cliche saying of like do things

that make you uncomfortable and I think that's really stupid what I think is like you should do things that make you uncomfortable because you know they provide value for the thing that you want to accomplish and having like reaching out coldly asking to talk to people that may be awkward let's not pretend it's not it may be a challenge let's not pretend it's not let's acknowledge that but also just know those are the types of things especially in where we are right now that you're going to have to do to give yourself the best opportunity

to get to that Milestone which is a next role it's a first role as a developer it's a first role in Tech it's a salary that you've never had before it's time off in vacation that you've never had before it's the ability to prioritize work life balance that you've had before like remember what the long-term goal is and realize like even though doing some of the things that I'm talking about that other people will tell you they may be a challenge but they are a challenge that's worth it if you can get to that end

goal that you're looking for 100% I'm like taking so many notes here because I I think that you really just encapsulated why it's a struggle and like why so many people do persist in learning the code like I always tell people if you want a career where you can potentially you know have some degree of control in your life the boss is not calling you in to work the drive-thru at 2 am. like I used to get called in Taco Bell where it's like till 4:00 a.m. so sometimes like somebody gets sick and you're like

all right I'm going to go deal with all the Stoners in the drivethru for like two hours right for like five five bucks an hour which is what I was paid back then uh in the in the late '90s when I was doing that uh you know like if you want to actually have agency in your life and if you want to be able to go in and have like negotiating power when you're talking with a hiring manager or the ability to switch companies fluidly and not feel all that fear there is a great deal

of investment upfront and it's investment in your career and in your skills that doesn't immediately have any payoff like what is the benefit of getting halfway to being a professional developer well you have a lot of cool stuff that you can do and you have like cool Hobby and you probably expanded your mind in all kinds of ways that you wouldn't have had you not tried to learn to code and learn data structures algorithms computer science Concepts things like that but the real prize at the end of the rainbow the real pot of gold maybe

that's a bad analogy because I think in theory like there's not actually a a pot of gold at the end of rainbows like I haven't ever like followed a rainbow all the way to the end of it no I'm just joking I'm pretty sure that's not physically possible that but um but like for a lot of people that pot of gold is you know why they even got into it right like they don't really care that much about programming a technology they may not even care that much about rebuilding their mind to be able to

mimic that of a computer because you have to kind of mimic a computer because you're communicating with computers that's what programming is it's telling a computer what to do in terms that it can understand there are a lot of people out there who just want to go out and get a high-paying job and be able to um you know switch jobs if their if their boss is harassing them or switch jobs if they uh their boss suddenly is like hey you've got to come back into the office you got to move halfway across the country

you know to our to our HQ uh because we SP spent a bunch of money on this real estate and we're not using it for anything right um you know you you want to be able to have some degree of control and agency in your life right and and like frankly money gives you a lot of optionality because you're not necessarily like living paycheck to paycheck and you're like a car breakdown away from going into credit card debt right um what would you say to people who don't really care that much about the technology but

do want to have that lifestyle that that freedom associated with working as a developer yeah I think I think that's a great question um I think there's there's been this conversation in the community and kind of a debate about the idea of passion like should you should you be passionate um or should you be required to be passionate and I think a lot of people say no because they interpret somebody looking to hire someone that's passionate as someone that's going to work 60 70 80 hours a week like they're going to put in extra work

because they're passionate and that aside like if that's a perspective that's something I would want to shy away from I wouldn't want someone to hire me because they want me to work 80 hours a week work life balance is incredibly important for me but I think I think passion and excitement about what I'm doing is very important for me in my life and that is not at a sacrifice of money because I also want to make good money and I also want to have vacation and work life balance and those sort of things I think

it's just something that goes along with that and so the idea of like someone getting into Tech because they want to make good money like there's other reasons too like overall comp and and all the things that you said but if we just look at um good money there's nothing inherently wrong with that just for me to fill the most fulf build I want that to also be associated with something I'm excited about and the cool thing about I I would say not just programming but like being in Tech is I think it's it's more

and more reasonable to combine those things like there's more and more opportunities to find something specific that you actually enjoy and get excited about that also makes really good money and that's just for me like I don't want to wake up every day it's not worth the sacrifice to make more money and do something that I hate I want to make still good money and maybe a little bit less but still really good money to do something that I also enjoy because I I think the overall balance of those two is what I'm looking for

but getting into like again just broadly Tech is such a game Cher for people especially like if if you haven't been able to make near the amount of money if you haven't seen a modern work culture if you haven't seen like respected time off just uh you know like money I think is the easy thing I think for me uh kind of the respect the career opportunities like after you get your foot in the door there's kind of No Limit to what you can do and where you can go um again work life talents vacation

all the things that come along with it I think especially if you find the right place are uh just just amazing and I I share this story a lot my wife had worked in Hospitality for years and I think she she was always really good at what she did she was always respected for what she did but it's just very different culturally and uh so she ended up moving to oiro which is we over laughed at Alero for two months and she's still there doing events and sponsorships but um she now I mean makes two

or three times what she ever made in her career in the past and has a limited vacation gets to travel across the world has a team that she loves working with and it's just amazing I think she's the perfect example for someone who like was super talented did a really good job was respected like reasonably for the culture and environment she was in but that level of of respect and and what that means for her now is just completely different and that nothing makes me happier than for her to be in a position where she

feels proud of what she does respected for what she does well compensated for what she does and I think that's the kind of opportunity that's out there for anyone that's looking to get into yeah and and I will say like there are a lot of kind of like Hills that you can climb and there's this thing this notion of like a hill climbing algorithm and you may have reached like a local Maxima right where you're like on top of a hill but if you can look at and you can see higher Hills it's a lot

of work to go down the hill and climb new Hill like I'm sure it wasn't easy for your wife to transition from working in just like more broad Hospitality to working doing events at a tech company but uh you know it sounds like she did go down the hill and she figured out a way to climb up a much higher Hill and now she's up there and I think that a lot of people uh certainly some people who are listening to this who feel like they're doing all right you can always do better but a

lot of times it takes going down and it takes the notion of like becoming a beginner again in some aspect or or you know rebuilding your network in a different industry or something like that and that can be daunting uh but from what like all the people I've talked to it's almost always worth it like very worst case scenario like when I when I was getting when I was learning the code I was already working as a School director so and you know i' been to grad school and like I was coming from a position

of relative privilege in terms of just having a broad array of knowledge worker type jobs I could do and I knew that I knew I could always kind of go back to directing schools if I scrubbed out if I just wasn't like good enough at coding uh and to some extent that kind of handicapped me a little bit uh early on because I was like you know I'm already good at this I would tell myself oh I'm really good at speaking Chinese I'm really good at like you know running running a school I'm really good

at doing paperwork and like managing a team of teachers and stuff like that like I can always go back to that uh and to some extent that like that did make me feel like I was um you know that it wasn't necessary for me to really perform with this and and that this was just like some kind of like crazy uh ideal like this this was a was was a good term for it this was kind of like a romp this was like uh a spous journey into code and I was going to come around

and all all my family would be relieved that I went back into the respectful job of you know running a school but uh you're if you're listening to this you may have some skill set you may already be thinking like well I'm doing all right here uh but you know I think I think your wife is a good example of of there's always a higher Hill that you can climb if you look around and if you're willing to put in the time and energy uh so I I hope you all take to heart what James

is saying here because for me like it totally Rings true like I think there there are always plateaus everybody has plateaus in their life I could have in theory just stay Taco Bell there was a guy that worked at Taco Bell named Duke who was like really old and and Haggard and he's probably about the same age that I am now but he looked like he was like 70 or something and he just building burritos for like 20 plus years and uh and dealing with like you know Stone customers and stuff like that and you

know like that is a local Maxima like like I might have been a promoted the store manager or something eventually right like he was he was like a you know store manager and stuff but just I encourage you all however uh comfortable you may be in your position assuming you're comfortable a lot of people listening to this probably aren't comfortable at all a lot of people maybe trying to figure out how they're going to pay rent next month you know know or or a lot of people you know may be sleeping in their cars I

slept in my car for like a year when I left when I dropped out of high school and just like you know was spent all my days at the library and stuff like that and and I wasn't sure what the future held I wasn't even sure if I had a future but uh there is always a hill somewhere that is probably within V visual range that you can see like hey if I climbed up to that Hill I would be higher like let's go try to climb that hill and then when you get to higher

you see the other high points and and it's just Hills all the way out right there's always a higher point that you can reach right absolutely and I think the the this is one of the number one pieces of career advice I have for people is to do your research and so if you if you kind of think about what you just said of like oh maybe there is a hill that people have seen or not the reality is like you're probably not going to see that Hill if you don't put some intentional effort into

finding it and and what that means in this scenario is having those conversations with people like if I'm throwing out random numbers this is doesn't mean anything but if if you make $40,000 a year and you feel pretty comfortable and then all of a sudden at a dinner party you meet somebody who's a developer and they make $150,000 a year you may now be interested in what it's like to be a developer versus the job that you're in whatever that is and then and then the way that escalates is then you have the deeper conversation

to find out like well how long have you been in your career um what did you do to get there what did that look like what did a first job look like and as you start to do your research you can find out out what reasonable Hills there are to climb and what reasonable plateaus are at different stages and then how to potentially go from from one to the other but I think you have to you have to spend some time really kind of looking and asking questions having conversation doing your research and figuring out

what those opportunities are because you can and again I go back to my wife like super super talented did a great job but just in the industry she was in just had this this cap of what she was capable of of being compensated and and all these things and so I I've been really fortunate I think in my career and and life of being around people that are super super talented and super super smart and and super motivated and I I go back to like my best friend through high school still my best friend today

um this is annoying but he's one of the smartest people I've ever known he his backup school was my like dream school and he got accepted into every Ivy League school just the smartest person I've ever met and and that can be really frustrating for me at times but also I just see him do things that I never would have thought of as possible and when I worked at Microsoft especially fresh out of college and in my first job professional job I was working with startups and students from other universities and just developers in the

community and seeing the things they were doing I never imagined that those things were possible but after you start to see them as a reality as a possibility for someone else you start to kind of wonder what is that what does that potential look like for me and then more strategically what sort of research what sort of conversations what sort of questions can I ask to figure out how do I get there yeah 100% And one of the things that uh I think there's a lot of negativity out there a lot of people are going

to potentially be watching this and saying like oh so pull yourself up by your bootstraps is what you're saying like like just uh that's a frequent comment that uh people will leave on on these podcasts for example uh because a lot of people uh have it's easy for you and I to say from this position of relative success uh like you'll make it uh but I'm here to say you won't necessarily make it not everybody's going to make it a lot of people aren't going to make it they're going to scrub out uh and I

just as easily could have scrubbed out I quit programming several times uh right everybody probably quits at some point gets frustrated they can't get it and they just take a few days off and then eventually that like cooler heads prevail and maybe they come back maybe they don't maybe they're just like oh I'm going to go take this real estate you know realtor license or something and go that route or um one of the many other careers that you can do other than software development uh but um like there is a lot of negative it

out there and a lot of people are probably hearing uh things like it's doomed it's over you know there's like AI is just going to take all our jobs uh what would you say to somebody who is kind of like a a developer Doomer if you will and they they think that like now the industry is over and there's there's no way in yeah I mean I I definitely don't agree with the idea of the industry is over and there's nowh no way in I think the reality is it's more difficult to to break in

than it was 5 years ago I think we should all be honest about that and I again we go back to layoffs like when you hear about layoffs of big companies happening every month that means there's that many more people already in their careers that are looking for their next role as well so the competition gets tighter salaries go down like I I'm making less than I made in my full-time roll at Planet scale two years two and a half years ago a little bit less and that was an expectation that just doing my research

I had and I expected because that's just how it is it's like the the the idea of Doom no I don't I don't think we're out of jobs I don't think AI is taking jobs like we're using AI all the time there's this interesting I think it's called Devon's Paradox they give a talk about like the impact on um the AI is having on developers developer expi de AI being a tool that was you know deceptively good at uh doing basic quests right like like they raled that ultimately wasn't nearly as good as the marketing

uh said and they used a lot of trickery uh but but I just want to fill people in what Devon is Devon AI is was I don't know it was some effort to essentially replace uh sell this tool to a company like hey you don't need as many developers look this will this will be your Junior developer and all that stuff uh so please go on I just wanted to give people some context in what Devon is yeah that's that's actually great context I actually Mi misspoke because what I was referring to is jeevan's paradox

which is obviously sounds somewh but but the idea is like people people look at Ai and they say like okay if AI can do these basic things way faster than me the fear is like I get replaced right for those things but but jeevan's Paradox is the idea that like okay if AI can do these things for us well then then we're now capable of doing so much more maybe now we have time to tackle problems that we didn't have time to tackle before because we had to do some of the things that now ai

takes on for us so I think you can look at it in two ways you can be fearful of it taking my job and I really don't think that that's been the case I think it's been a tool that developers have adopted and adapted to using and I think they're growing more and more popular every day but I don't think they're replacing developers but there's the jevans Paradox which is like okay maybe we're just capable of doing more maybe we're capable of envisioning more because we have the time and capacity to do it because we're

not doing spending our time doing the things that that AI can take care of for us so I'm I'm definitely not like a I definitely don't think we're in a negative state of it's not worth considering getting into what I do think though is there is there is always tradeoffs of how much work does it take to break into the industry and again you find that out by doing as much research as you can having conversations with people to see what their Journeys are see what companies are hiring in your area see what requirements they

have for people that they're hiring building those relationships and then the thing that is probably most important in my light life is work life balance we have a one and a half year-old now my wife and I were were one of the cliche couples we literally do everything together we play soccer together multiple times a week we play golf we you mentioned you don't play golf but my wife and I play golf we do everything together and that's one of the that's one of the things that like is most important to me in my life

is the ability to prioritize life outside of work and with that you have to kind of figure out what you're willing to sacrifice to try to get to where you want to be and it's totally okay if you decide like it's not worth the sacrifice to get to that point of breaking into the industry or getting that next role like that that's totally understandable cuz it it's probably not going to be easy and I think you have to be realistic about that but I still Advocate that there's so much worth it that if you put

the time in and the effort they're there is your ability to get to uh a point in your career that's totally different than anything you've had in the past but you have to balance that with like what does it take to get there so I want to be honest It's probably hard I don't want to act like the success that that I've maybe had or you've had or other people that have been guested that like that they happen overnight or it's just been easy I mean I'm sure you've had tons of people Danny Thompson comes

to mind of sharing his journey of like waking up at 300 4 in the morning to get coding work done before his son got up and then take him to school and then do other things um I think you we have to be realistic about the work that it takes to that you have to put in to get there yeah anybody who tells you learning to code is easy is uh trying to sell you something right yeah yeah because it's not it's very hard and it's a lot of work it's a sustain it's a sustained

effort over years and even once you become a Dev like you've worked at Microsoft you worked at FedEx learn work tons of startups but you're still probably learning new things all the time right absolutely yep yeah yeah absolutely I think one one other thing just to put out there to I think you can you can kind of look at taking advantage of your time a little bit more a little bit better uh being more um I don't know more focused and intentional with time I mean it like If we're honest hands up for everybody that's

listening how many people spend 30 minutes a day scrolling Instagram Tik Tok Twitter I my hands like by far up I do that plenty how many people like spend a bunch of time watching Netflix right like TV shows or movies or whatever my hands up I do I do all those things yeah I watch One Piece with my kids they have the entire one piece on yeah 1100 episodes we're on episode 300 my kids love it I didn't mean to Der but I am guilty of watching One Piece with my kids you're good and and

like I don't I don't want to sit here and say like oh you should prioritize every single minute of your life like I still love to have a stressful day and then come home and just watch TV right like that's that's that's a thing that we enjoy doing but you can start to pay attention when you're when you're really picky about your time it's like oh did I did I really have 30 minutes I could have invested did I really have an hour I could have invested and instead I did something else and as you

look at that I think you start to find more capacity even when we have busy schedules of family kids or or just multiple jobs or whatever and one of my favorite things to do is just listen to podcast like you think about your commute to work or maybe you take a 10 or 15 minute walk in the afternoon if you listen to a podcast you're hearing about tech related stuff like this one you're hearing the conversations you're hearing about what's going on in the industry and I spent so many times hearing about technical buzzwords on

podcast that I didn't know at all but eventually I got to the point where they had context and I had had a little bit of previous context just from hearing about it in the past and I think that's that's a relatively easy way to be a part of the community and not take too much time away from anything else yeah yeah 100% like I think podcasts are one of the most obvious wins if you even if you're busy so uh I am well acquainted with the phenomenon of the Working Poor I watched lots of documentaries

about it uh I myself used to be you know Working Poor uh if you will um and uh despite having a middle class you know uh upbringing like I I basically like left home and left school and just lived in my car for a year and and so like even though I'm pretty far divorced from that now um we have a home here in in Plano we have uh you know the kids go to school at a nice public school here and everything like that and it's it's easy to forget like there was a time

when I was uh in just had no idea no plan for the future and uh you know I think if podcasts had been a thing 100% I would have been listening to as many podcasts as I could while I was you know assuming I was in the back room just you know putting boxes into the giant trash compactor or mopping the floors of the grocery store anything that anywhere where I could have potentially listened to headphones without somebody some manager ACC costing me I would have because I I find the podcast just immersing yourself in

conversations with people who've been successful in spite of setbacks like like yourself uh uh I think that that is a big uh motivational boost and also you just learn so much about you know Tech through osmosis almost just listening to people talk about their careers in Tech listening to people talk about like new emerging tools uh listening to people talk about like different experiences they had like solving bugs or um you know I just talked with uh Scott tulinsky uh about like he syntax FM has this like spooky Halloween episode that just came out recently

and uh they talk about some of the horror stories of like you know making a commit from Wi-Fi like from the forest and then suddenly like the internet goes out and something broke or you know like those kinds of stories those kinds of War Stories every industry like if you're a pilot you're talking with other Pilots all the time about like oh yeah and all of a sudden I went into this Spin and XO you know I don't know anything about flying a plane but but basically like uh my understanding is like uh I talked

to this pilot and he was like yeah it was crazy like I almost died but then I remembered some obscure conversation I had with another pilot and exactly how to address a specific situation and and I never would have uh thought of that I never read that in a book or anything like that but it was just some anecdote right so so by listening to a lot of podcasts you're kind of walking around just immersing yourself in anecdote from you know motivated people who put in the time put in the Reps at the keyboard uh

who uh do care about these topics and do engage in lifelong learning and if you want to say that you are an average of your five closest friends well you know when I was a kid my my five closest friends were all doing drugs and like you know committing crimes and and just being General RI Raff basically right like I didn't hang out with a good crowd and and uh you know if my five closest friends were the parasocial relationships I had with podcasters that were not like trying to radicalize me or something but just

help me improve my life and eventually you know achieve something and and and build a a life for myself like I think that would have been a very profoundly positive influence so uh don't do as I did do as I say right like like listen to a lot of these podcasts but anyway I I I'll quit waxing poetically about this I do want to get into one thing that you said here which was you know being laid off uh you yourself were laid off as a Dev and as a developer Advocate right um and you

were working at a job that paid better than your current job right now which is a phenomenon a lot of people are experiencing right now um oh by the way the one of the things I mentioned the Working Poor I just want to emphasize there are people who would struggle to find any time to code maybe they're working multiple jobs maybe they're raising kids maybe they have parents who are declining in health whom they have to take care of like my heart goes out to people who are in those circumstances and I realize that like

uh we may we're approaching this from a point of relative privilege in the sense that we do have like 40-hour weekish day jobs uh and we do have the luxury of having some additional time you're probably getting a good amount of sleep every night I slept like nine hours last night like like we have that we we're properly nourished you and I were talking about like our crazy you know protein Rich diets and stuff like that before we started the call so so we have a lot of benefits and there are lots of people so

I just want to be sure that you all know that we're not taking for granted that there are plenty of people out there who are The Working Poor who may be suffering from not enough food uh who may be suffering from like a horrible environment where they can't get a good night's sleep because there's like sirens all night um who might have any number of other considerations that are preventing them from really putting in a serious effort to expand their skills and learn to code um and uh there's not really anything I can say to

those people just just do your best and and uh know that like we empathize with your plight even if we can't directly understand what you're going through uh hang in there like what choice you have really just try your best to make the most of your circumstances and your situation so um I just want to make sure that you all don't think we're like callously speaking from this position of privilege and we don't acknowledge that there are people who are undergoing serious hardship and that's just here in the US right like I grew up in

Middle America lots of meth lots of craziness um and that's nothing compared to what a lot of my friends in Nigeria are going through right now right or Bangladesh where there's just like this massive uh upheaval you know and and people getting killed and stuff like that right like like or or obviously one of the many active War zones in the world today right like like just do your best with what you have and know that everybody's going to face varying levels of difficulty and it's not just some uniform learn to code experience and and

don't let anybody delude you into thinking like oh if you just work harder it'll be okay because it won't necessarily be okay but do what you can and know that we're here and that we're going to keep creating free learning resources James is going to keep creating his podcast compress FM he's going to keep creating tutorials on his excellent YouTube channel I'm going to keep creating uh these podcasts I'm going to keep working with the free C Camp Community to create open learning resources to help you so like our whole thing is trying our best

to remove as many obstacles as we can but there are fundamental obstacles that we can't touch um that that ultimately you will have to overcome yourself if you're in one of those circumstances I described so let's talk about some hardship that you you unless you wanted to expand upon that just just again like the continued acknowledgement of like the journey is very personal for everyone like you have to individual people have to gauge what you have going on in your life and there's periods of time where you don't have the capacity to take any time

at all or any mental focus and that's understandable um so yes that varies every individual every circumstance um whatever you can do that's the plus and especially if you're listening to the podcast now that feels like a win by itself so yeah 100% uh keep listening and not just to this podcast just go out and listen to as much as you can and take in as broad an array of voices and lived experiences as you can and figure out ways to learn like there are always Insight somewhere even somebody who you have like almost nothing

in common with you you may be able to derive some actionable um guidance from not necessarily what they're saying but like what what they're doing or what they're uh you there's always a lesson let's talk about something that happened to you recently James uh you were laid off and as you said said you lost access to pretty high income higher than your current income it it was probably a pretty good job from what I read about on LinkedIn and stuff like that and you know a lot of people have been laid off as devs lately

uh and and you were unfortunately one of them can you talk about that experience and how you got back yeah um so this was two and a half years ago um I've been at Planet scale for eight months as a developer Advocate and uh just kind of wild like got an invite for 15minute meeting with the CEO the morning of and I messaged him like Hey anything I need to prepare not thinking anything of it it's a relatively small company so like maybe he just wanted to talk to me about something really quickly and I

didn't get a response and I showed up to the meeting and HR was there and they said oh we should probably wait for the CEO to get here and at the time my wife and I were working in the same uh same room same office and I sent her a message I was like something's wrong and it I never thought about the scenario at all but I was like I think I'm going to get let go cuz HR and then waiting for CEO anyway he showed up he said I regret to inform you this is

your last day at Planet scale and as he said that like I heard ding ding ding and it was me being signed out of slack and whatever else applications that I had on my laptop and it happened immediately and that was kind of it like he he was gone and uh that was really it and so I like I talked to my wife and I didn't really know what would be next um I posted on Twitter and said hey I I got let go I don't know what's next for me if you're hiring in these

types of roles let me know and I got like this is one of those things where there's the balance of sharing the story and acknowledging like people don't have the background that I did at that point and I I acknowledge that but I do want to show I do want to share this story because of the impact of what I had done in my career had on my career at that point and what that was was as I shared this on Twitter I got flooded with messages of my company's hiring we have this role we'd

love to talk to you about this and it it was a lot of messages that weren't just like oh we have a role you can go apply it was like those deeper connections like oh we'd love for you to come work at our company and the reason I share that and again like with all understanding of like a lot of people that are in getting laid off situations are not in that situation is that was a testament to all the work that I had been putting in to the community it was a testament to all

the The credibility that I had established in the community all the value I had provided to the community all the all the genuiness that I poured into the community to the point where like people and companies and Brands trusted me from what I done and wanted to reach out to facilitate that conversation of potentially going and working with them and and when I when I share that again I acknowledge like most people don't have that background to lean on to but I think right now regardless of being let go or feeling comfortable in your role

right now is the time to start building those relationships and start building some of that credibility again pending availability and time and all the things but if you can start to do some of those things showing up at conferences reaching out for coffee chats creating content tutorial maybe giv a talk a lot of people would love to give one when they see other people do it but they think they're too scared and blah blah blah that's a whole conversation I could have I never thought I would be a speaker I never it was never something

I was interested in I got thrown into it in my career starting at Microsoft and that's just what I had to do and now I do it professionally so I I think there's never a better time to start thinking about building that credibility building those closer ties to the community because you don't you don't build your network when you need it you build your network for when you need it in the future so that it's there by the time it comes to it so I was I was very fortunate in that sense and I was

also fortunate enough to make the decision I've been doing content on the side I've been making good money doing it I'd always dreamed of doing it full time and that's what I ended up doing and I I talked to my wife like um we had an idea of like how much runway I had gave myself kind of six months of like kind of prove that I'll be able to continue to do this longer or not and during that time I did and ended up doing content uh fulltime for two years and uh just recently joined

makes Swift as head of developer experience a little over a month ago to get back into a full-time role full-time stability salary benefits all the things um and there's there's trade-offs with both of those I look back at like doing content full-time and that's one of the proudest things I've ever accomplished being able to look at like that two-year span and say like everything I did during that span that was me like I I earned all the things that I did during that time period I had complete ownership over all those things and that's a

really really cool story but there's also different aspects of getting back into a full-time role and working for a team and working with a team and a product and that sort of stuff that I think is also super super valuable and I'm super excited about that where I am now yeah man I'm so happy that you were able to first of all make it as a uh content creator which is a term you and I don't particularly care for but basically like a teacher on YouTube and a podcast Creator and things like that can you

talk about uh first of all like the economics of that like you gave yourself six months you had six months Runway which is a luxury that many people do not have when they're laid off uh but I take it you and your wife were saving your wife Pro did your wife still have income at that point she did yeah and this was this was a big part of this whole situation like she was already had a role at Alero making good money she also had Healthcare and that's a huge thing is like I didn't have

to have Healthcare cuz she could cover me yeah yeah and and for those of you outside the US it it's difficult to imagine how like such a prosperous country economically uh could have such a broken Health Care System but we do and you got to have healthare otherwise you're screwed like something happens you find out you have cancer you find out you have some other sort of serious ailment that has to be treated and next thing you know you're $100,000 in debt maybe maybe a million there are people with millions of dollars of medical debt

that they will never pay off but they will continue to be hounded until their death by creditors and uh it's a tragedy so you know having Insurance uh luckily we do have the ability to buy insurance on the market which is what my wife and I use uh we just do Obamacare but um it is like pretty scary to be without insurance just because there's that risk you're like you're basically rolling the dice every time you cross the street you're not going to H get hit by a bus or something right uh you're yeah um

so how did you make it work how did like let's talk about those six months where you're trying to prove out yourself because I I do think there are probably a lot of people listening in the audience who would like to create tutorials uh certainly like I think a vast majority of people would prefer to just work a job and have uh all those benefits you said earlier have stable income have a team have projects they can work on so they can continue to sharpen their skills while getting paid to learn uh but what did

you do during the six months and what was it like where you went from you know burning your Runway uh to actually like being you know Break Even or even potentially positive yeah so this was actually like a much smoother Journey for me than you would expect and and the thing I want to get across to people is I didn't I didn't take this leap of faith and say like I I know I'm going to be able to figure this out the reality was I'd already been making good money and so I knew at the

very least by making good money on the side and being able to invest more time into it I was turning down sponsor relationships for example I was turning down the potential to do some Consulting I was turning down those things because I didn't have time so I knew that I had the ability to generate income already and I knew I had the ability to generate more income if I dedicated more time to it and did that as my full-time job so I I think this is an important call out because I'm I'm pretty risk averse

I I am not one of those people who's going to bet that I'm just going to figure out how to make money that's not the case I had been creating content and growing that as a revenue stream for three four years at that point of really doing that consistently outside of a full-time role so I had that to lean on to yeah and and the other thing was go ahead yeah go ahead oh I'll ask you the question after you finish okay yeah the other thing for me was I didn't want to go full time

for myself and do that longer term and not make good money because I've talked about this before like my number one thing is work life balance but making good money is an important aspect of that my my wife and I are very aggressive and saving and and paying off extra towards the house and and doing 401k and thinking towards the future like we're very serious about that and I didn't want to sacrifice those things to do content creation I wanted to do content creation and do well financially to be able to continue all those goals

at the same time yeah and when we talk about content like these are programming tutorials on YouTube primarily is that how would you describe the James qqu yeah public Persona of teacher yeah that's the that's the the main thing um so I did a lot of lot of sponsored content and I think looking back the the thing I wish I done a better job of is diversifying income so the majority of my income was from from sponsor relation relationships I ended up kind of moving more to doing a long-term relationship with a few different companies

that I really enjoyed a lot more than doing kind of one-off videos with companies I think just there's so much overhead in kind of onboarding a partner and and sponsor of learning the product and meeting the team and all those things and then also there's just only so much you can do in a first initial video with a given product so um I kind of shifted towards doing more longer term relationships with a couple of companies and I think that worked out really well I also launched an astro course during during that time I wish

I had done another course or two honestly so that's one of the things I wish I'd done differently but had a a successful uh Astro course launch I did some Consulting on uh developer experience and uh content creation for a couple of companies so that was another Revenue source and then did a little bit of paid speaking as well so it's a combination of those things with the majority of it coming from uh sponsor content on YouTube okay awesome and maybe you can talk about how like obviously you've worked as a developer Advocate uh developerdeveloper

evangelist those terms I I consider them to be uh equivalent I don't use the Evangelist one because it has uh Phil like religious connotations uh but but basically absolutely your role was going out and it was um teaching people about technology and ultimately with the goal of getting them to adopt technology of the company like off zero for example is a tool that we use at freeo they have a very generous uh charity tier essentially we pay nothing Au through and we haven't for like I don't know like seven years or something but that we

get their first like their world class authentication um and that's huge because authentication is one of the main ways that you have like security breaches and stuff like that and and they somebody discovers some vulnerability and they're able to like do crazy stuff with your data and things like that we've never been breached that we know of uh and a huge part of that is thanks to auo where your wife works so uh for example let's just use that as an example like have you ever done any sponsor work with them or um maybe you

can give like something that you can talk about without like some NDA or something and talk about what a typical deal flow might look like yeah absolutely um so I didn't actually do anything sponsored with off zero I think there's especially early on my wife was facilitating some of the sponsor relationships with content creators and I think that would have been a little um conflict of interest yeah with going going from spouse to spouse is a great CL yeah yeah but it did it did matter that like I had an established reputation at at OC

2 and people knew me so I think like it wasn't just her trying to anyway uh but I didn't do anything with AER specifically but uh two of the brands that I worked with a lot were uh Zeta and centry and so Zeta is a database company uh they have like a um a dashboard where you can manage your data create tables do all these things they added features like branching and merging and eventually gave you direct access to postgress you could use it as like a regular postgress database and then also they had these

other features like they have search built in and they have file storage built in and it's just really an amazing product and the cool thing about that was it was just I like I you could use that for any demo right because almost any demo you do you're probably going to need a database and you can incorporate them into that and so I really enjoyed working with them that was probably the longest uh term relationship that I had and so what that would be I think for them had like a monthly rate and that would

include like kind of this like just building in public so do like a YouTube video on a specific topic and then also building this thing where I would live stream a couple times a month and then also other videos of Just teaching Core Concepts to developers would kind of reference the work that I had done on that project that I was building in public so in theory it was all kind of tied together and they got to show up in different ways on my channel a couple times a month and I think that sort of

like I think one that sort of longer term relationship works better for me because I'm not having to learn a new product not having to onboard a new company not having to meet new people all the time and then also it gives me the ability to just go deeper with a product and then provide feedback I think that's one of the things that gets missed in developer advoc advocacy is the ability to advocate for product feedback of like hey this is what people are doing or in this case like this is what I'm doing or

what I'm seeing I I think we need this or we need to change that and so by going deeper I had the ability to learn more about the product had the ability to share more feedback about the product had the ability to just get more comfortable with it and have that show up and there's this idea and I forget what the numbers are but for people to actually remember who you are and what you do it takes X number of contact points so if if you follow me as a Creator you might see a YouTube

video then maybe you see a tweet then maybe you see me in person at a conference then maybe you see another YouTube video after those four different contact points you maybe are like really paying attention to what I do now but if you just see one video and don't see anything you're prob not going out of your way to find the stuff that I do and so I think for the longer term relationships they got to show up organically through the stuff that I was building and sharing and you kind of hear that name show

up on my channel so if you're watching my videos you hear like oh here's the demo we're doing this and we're using Zeta oh here's another thing we're going to do remix and we're using Zeta and anyway I think that I think that that worked out really well really enjoyed that relationship with them I think it was like a year and a half that we um maintained that and still have that kind of open in the future if if I have the time and the ability to do something like that uh again so that was

what that was what uh that specific relationship uh looked like which was kind of U I guess like a year and a half of that two years yeah so it sounds like um building those relationships and then maintaining them by continuing to deliver value over time you were able to have like a long-term relationship would you say that you you had most of your Revenue was coming from a few long-term relationships with a few partn ERS mhm yeah early on it was different early on it was more kind of oneoff things and I think um

YouTube audience kind of respond to to that or notice that uh which I think is fair like for me personally if you sh if you sh share something on a YouTube video that's cool and like help solve a problem for you I don't care if it's sponsored or not I think a lot of people are skeptical of that so especially as they see like oh here's this product here's this product here's this product and the fact that I didn't have the longer term engagement to go deeper and to have that be a tool that I

would naturally use more often I think that kind of showed and I think that was part of the transition to doing more of the longer term relationship as well but that that ended up being especially for the last six months last year the majority of income was from the longer term relationships awesome yeah well I want to talk about the process of going out and getting a job uh you know you've been working uh essentially for yourself uh creating content and paying the bills through speaking engagements and things like like that uh when you let's

say hypothetically that heaven forbid like you were back on the job market today in November 2024 the era that everybody's complaining about being impossible to find a job and it's certainly harder than it used to be um what are the steps you would take let's say hypothetically you do have maybe six months of Runway again and you have the intention of going out and getting a job and let's talk about where you are currently in terms of what you have the resources you have at your disposal your network uh your skills things like that and

then uh I'd like to hear how you would do it if you were approaching this as like let's travel back in time let's uh travel back to when you just got your computer science degree and I realize a lot of people that uh don't that are listening to this don't have a computer science degree I don't have a computer science degree we have tons of interviews with people who don't have computer science degrees but since we have James here and he does have a computer science degree and there are invariably lots of people listening who

do have computer science degrees or or are finishing them I think it makes sense to just get your perspective knowing what we know about you so again the two-part question one with your current situation how would you approach a job search and two if you had a travel like let's say you just graduated this year into this job market what you would do yeah I don't I don't know if we'll do a longer piece on this or not but I do want to touch on like the the computer science degre in general um I very

simply I have learned infinitely more out side of my computer science degree just by building stuff than I ever did an inside of my computer science degree I think like I I treated my degree like school so I got good grades but when it came down to what I actually understood and and new and being able to answer technical questions and interviews when I graduated not very good um because I didn't I just treated it like I needed to answer questions on a test and and complete homework I've learned so much more from just building

things outside um and I and part of the reason I bring that up is like if I were going back in time and trying to prepare for a job one of the things that I would do is just build something find something that you're interested in that solves a use case for you or a friend or blah blah blah just try to build something and then have them give feedback and then have them make a request for a feature that you have no idea idea how to do and then go and figure out how to

do that thing like you will learn infinitely by building more so for me in my case than I ever did in a classroom and I think that is super super important so that's one of the things that I would do is take that seriously invest time in building trying to solve real world use case trying to add features trying to iterate on a product or like the thing that you built whatever that is the portfolio project like that should be a pretty intense thing that you invest some some serious time in yeah and let's put

those other questions I asked kind of like on ice we're going to get back to them let's talk about your Harry Potter quiz yeah this is an app they kind of took like the uh app store by storm created by somebody who was just doing a practice project essentially and got tens of thousands of downloads yeah so this this was in college I think by um summer going into the summer before junior year and I heard about like we had a mobile app developers group this is something i' never seen or heard of um and

and so I talked to the main guy who was really really knowledgeable and I I said like I'd like to learn Android and so he gave me a book and I I can't remember what it was but it was like a beginner starter Android thing and so I followed it and it was like building building list of like grocery store items and that sort of stuff like the basic stuff and I realized like I'm I'm just I'm kind of bored of following this I want to build a thing that I'm interested in and the thing

at the time was the Harry Potter trivia app and so I just started building it and had like very rudimentary programming skills didn't know anything about mobile didn't know anything about design didn't know anything about a database didn't know anything about how to save high scores didn't know anything almost anything that you could think of other than like working with a raise I didn't know how to do I mean like I just I didn't know very much at all but I I had an idea I had something I wanted to do and I just Googled

every single day how to do it and I learned so much from building that project and uh I talked about when I graduated with my degree I still didn't know I still didn't know the the the amount that I should have known I really didn't I just didn't understand it and some of it I think is just the difference between how things are taught in a classroom and what the real world is like I think I think we could do a better job with teaching not just teaching something because it's a concept you should understand

but really experiencing it there was things that I was exposed to at that point that I didn't really understand until four or five years later and it's not that it was super complicated I just didn't experience it to make it real for me and and that's I think you get the experience by building and you see the pain points by building and then when somebody shows you a different way you're like oh that makes sense because of this problem I had and so when I got uh when I get an interviews and Microsoft was recruiting

on campus I actually I had a uh software engineering interview and they asked me what I think is one of the stupidest questions I've ever had in my life in an interview and it was like what's the number of lines of code of the biggest project youve worked on and I just remember thinking like I I don't know how you like who is paying attention to that who is going through all the files and accumul all the lines of code that you've written and then and then that having some sort of impact like that that

actually has zero impact and so I I I didn't have a good answer for that and I remember having a question of like how good of a programmer do you think you are and I was like oh I would say like a six or seven like I there's some really really talented people um around me and I think they wanted like the nine or 10 answer like the cliche I'm the best and that just wasn't me and so anyway I got turned down for the first role I then had interviews for technical account manager got

flown out to DC had final interviews with 30 different people they were only hiring eight including uh the people who got rejected including myself got sent back to the hotel in a limo together which is super super awkward not want to be like a limo with in a limo with a whole bunch of other people that had been rejected yes so it's like there was like 10 of us at a time in a limo was there like champag in there or anything was it like like the stretch like kind of like everybody sitting looking at

each other awkwardly oh it was awkward super awkward I I don't know if they were champagne or not but it it was definitely super awkward yeah definitely super awkward and so then talking about relationships the recruiter that had recruited on campus thought that I would be a good fit for the company and so Microsoft does one of three things they either when you interview they say no they say yes or they say like not for this role but good fit for the company and so my my recruiter going back to personal connections and relationships the

guy that I had met in person advocated for me and you talked about this name earlier asked me what I thought about a technical evangelist role what or if I would be interested and I was like well that sounds ridiculous and made up but it's Microsoft so I I'll definitely have the conversation and in those interviews I didn't get technical traditional technical questions I got like tell me about a thing that you built and so in 90% of my conversations I talked about how I built this Harry Potter trivia app and I talked about how

I learned how to do a database like embedded in the application to St to save high scores and how I didn't know how to do a thing and I did the research and at the time I didn't realize this but I was communicating Semite technical Concepts to people on playing English in a way that was strong enough I was also then showing my excitement right I was showing them something I did outside of the classroom because if you look at computer science degrees everybody takes roughly the same classes so that's not really special it's what

you do outside of that so I was showing excitement I was showing the ability to learn the ability to communicate and little did I know know that that role became the thing that like got me into public speaking got me into creating content got me into doing all these things but that Harry Potter trivia app was one of the biggest learning experiences I've had it was one of the biggest talking points I had in my interviews and it was one of the biggest going back to validators like that was a big validator to me for

all those reasons that I mentioned for what was then a technical evangelist role at one of the biggest tech companies in the world in Microsoft and so I at the time I also had an offer from FedEx and I had told FedEx that I was interviewing with Microsoft and I I told them like I'm going to turn this down because I want to know what's going to happen with Microsoft and to my I I interned with him to my former manager's credit she told me you don't know what's going to happen accept this job now

and if something changes take that and let us know and most people you'll be hard pressed to find somebody that would have your interest best interest at heart and like be honest with you like she was with me and that's what I did and I ended up getting the Microsoft job and had to had to call them and tell them that I resented the offer and was going with Microsoft and that is one of that is one of the things in my career that's had by far the greatest impact the people that I was around

at Microsoft the startups that I was around externally that I worked with the students and and just community members learning about Community Learning about speaking learning like the power of my voice all those things have had I mean these are all still things that I do today and I think my career would have been totally different and I could rant about like kind of the lack of positive culture it's just old at FedEx versus working at Microsoft and Oco and all these places I've worked my career just would have been absolutely different had I not

been exposed to what I was exposed to at Microsoft and I'm incredibly thankful for that and I'm incredibly appreciative of that but that really stemmed from me creating that Harry Potter trivia app wow wow build apps people build build things put them on the Internet that's so uh I want to read a quick quote because uh I agree that the question that the uh Microsoft interviewer asked was someone naive this is comes from Bill Gates founder of Microsoft quote measuring programming process by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight you don't

want your aircraft to be heavy you don't want your code base to be gajillions of lines of code because it's impossible to like make changes right you want you want to keep it lean right so um yeah but I think that's that's really powerful that uh you were able to ultimately go work at FedEx and kind of uh fulfill that that goal but that you got this huge learning experience at Microsoft and I've talked with a lot of people that worked at Microsoft Joel spolski uh for example uh uh founder of St overflow he worked

at Microsoft for a while and he talks about like a lot of the things that he learned while he was there and it sounds like it was an incredibly um formative experience uh and and we've got lots of free camp alom that work there uh whom I get to learn a lot about so they still do have like a really serious engineering culture and it sounds like they've got a really good developer advocacy culture as well um so let's talk about if you were going out to find a job today like you're back where you

started maybe you do have that har Harry Potter app uh we'll put that in your uh cap uh even though people may be less interested in Harry Potter now than they were when you graduated but let's say hypothetically you had a successful app in the app store that people were using you were learning through building feature requests and things like that and you getting onto the job market uh maybe you're applying I don't know when when people apply when they're like a senior or something like they start applying for for jobs but like how would

you approach that today knowing what you know about the job market how technology has progressed how um there have been like these massive layoffs and there are a lot of mid-career people buying for more entry-level type jobs and it is a little harder than it used to be yeah um the building part in the portfolio part super super important think you have have to have something legitimate that you can talk to if it has any sort of usage like my app was downloaded thousands of times at a time that's that's a immense validator and one

of my favorite examples of this is uh read me.so and it's a it's a readme builder like inside of the browser and it was created as like a hobby project by Catherine olner hopefully I'm saying that right and interviewed her several years ago and by creating that project ended up like getting exposure from GitHub and then ended up going to work for GitHub which is just such an incredible journey so that's just another example of like the thing you build can have serious impact and especially if people are using it that's a significant validator for

any conversations that you might have the other thing that that I would start to doing start to do and I I I sound like a broken record because I talk about it all the time it's just be doing community stuff I remember when I was in college they they shared with computer science students that there was a hackathon going on over the weekend and like some of the people were really excited and I wasn't CU I was like I don't I don't know how to hack anything I've never hacked into a computer before and so

I didn't go and knowing now what a hackathon is and if people don't know it's like you get together usually over a weekend and you create a team and you build a project you hack a project like you hack together a project and having been around those as a mentor a lot in my career and seeing the learning that you can take from that like I talk about being a part of the community and hearing what's going on and hearing the story and learning from people around you there's no better learning experience especially in a

concentrated amount of time two three day period than a hackathon I think that would be a huge way to get some exposure if you win to get some learning from the people around you to get some ideas for other things out there that you didn't know about I think that would be huge I think looking into local meetups would be huge especially like there's a lot of remote jobs but there's also a lot of jobs that are not remote and the more you're t into your local community to understand who the companies are what the

languages are what the Frameworks are that they use and kind of backtracking from there everything I everything I think about is is like going back to doing your research like who are the companies what are they hiring for what are the backgrounds of the people that work there what experience level are they looking for what do you not have that they need for you to have to be able to get uh for you to be able to apply Etc and I think a big way that you do that is just going to meetups and especially

if you're in an area that has conferences even better um a hack for going to conferences if you if you don't have the money to pay for it totally understandable go volunteer be a volunteer and you can work kind of like halime and then like attend the conference the rest of the half is usually like some some sort of balance like that so that you get something out of it and you get to give back and just again be around the conversations I think that networking showing up in your community building stuff con continuing to

be immersed in the conversation that's happening whether it's whether it's X whether it's Discord whether it's podcast whatever that is just continuing to stay engaged um are all the things that that come to mind if I was kind of either coming out of college or just looking for a first roll or even if I was looking for an next roll and I think the only thing that was really different for me when I was looking um one I was still in a good spot of like doing content full-time I wasn't I wasn't rushing away from

doing that I was just kind of thinking I'm probably ready for something different at this stage and so I got to be really selective I got to share with people at particular companies I got to have ideas of companies that I would be interested in working in I got to talk to people at those companies I got to mention to them like hey if anything comes up let me know type thing and because I had the ability to be patient and had the ability to kind of be picky and um and just kind of take

my time I think I was able to make a really good informed decision for myself and where I am now um that I'm I'm super excited about a lot of people don't have that right if you gotten let go and you have Severance or not like you you got to you got to put food on the table you got to support a family you got to support yourself right like you may not have that luxury and that's totally understandable so if you have to go out there and kind of take a job that you're less

excited about because you got to do what you got to do I think that's like that's what you have to do I would also not lose sight of that doesn't have to be the forever job like that could be a six- Monon job it could be a year job it could be a two-year job it could be longer while you're continuing to build skills and Network and and do all the things that I just said thinking towards the role after that and I never I'm I'm definitely not an advocate of like having no loyalty to

companies like I I I give what I have to companies that I work for I also want to be like really honest with people of like one companies will always make the best decision for themselves so if they think they need to let you go they're going to let you go and that like they're going to do what's best for them I think also the best way that you move up in terms of title in terms of salary in in terms of a lot of different things is that you go from company to company because

a lot of people get in a situation at a given company and they're like oh I I I think I deserve a raise or a promotion and they don't give it to you and then you're just kind of stuck and I think the way you combat that the way you put yourself in the best position to take that next step whatever that is is to at least consider and be open to jobs at other companies so even for people that are in current roles there's no reason that you shouldn't be entertaining conversations and paying attention

to what's going on at other companies and blah blah blah because you never know when you need that opportunity you never know when it might make sense for you and I will say the the one thing I have learned as I've not job hopped a lot but I've I've had a few different jobs the one thing I have learned is I've never regretted a change even even going to Planet scale and getting let go I got to work with some amazing people I got to get some experience with database that I hadn't had before I

got to get some exposure that I hadn't had before and it was one of those things that I was able to go from previous role at all serero and make a big jump in salary to planet I was able to do that and that was only by being open to opportunities as they came and um anyway so even if you're in a position now where you're you're fine always be looking or at least always be open to having a conversation because you never know when you might need that relationship or when you when you might

just be ready man that is just a fire hose of advice and I'm going to do my best to recap it because I feel like you you touched on so many important things that uh it it quick recap last time on the freeo camp podcast okay so James uh you you said that uh there's no better experience than a hackathon 100% agreed co-signed uh if you want to learn about how the role that hackathons had in my development as a career and how they helped me get my first job free code Camp uh book that

I published a couple years ago just Google learn to code book it should be the top result but uh you can also listen to me read the book episode 100 of this podcast learn how to learn to code and get a developer job and it's it's a lot of like anecdotal experience and also I have lots of stuff that I've learned from smart people like James over the many years um but uh hackathons 100% uh another thing you said is um going to conferences potentially volunteering to go to a conference to get into conferences are

expensive right sometimes you can get like a um you know some sort of subsidized ticket if you're a student or if you just ask for a discounted ticket like uh I know San who was doing code land she would always have like people could pay extra into a fund and they would use those funds to give people uh subsidized or free tickets um so there are ways to get to a conference and I think volunteering at a conference that's solid advice uh the other thing you mentioned is the role uh companies are always going to

make the best decisions for themselves I mean we saw that like the CEO getting on real quick shutting down all your accounts like they don't want you to be some bomb that's going to explode and screw this company I can't believe I'm outrage right like they don't they want to take away your your ability to express your outrage or or or like contain the risk right like and that makes that sounds extremely cold and calculating but that's how a lot of companies operate because they just don't want a PR disaster um that that is crazy

but you know when you put things from the perspective of companies are always going to do what's in their own best interest uh but at the same time you're not totally mercenary you're not totally cynical uh you do want to express some degree of loyalty to your employer and and that's something that really comes through I I really enjoy your balance take on that and then uh jumping from company to a company um there are obviously people who take this to the extreme and hiring managers notice these things oh I noticed you've only been at

each company for like six months and and yes like the the I don't think many people would dispute this if you are the kind of person who can uh just always be interviewing and continually um like ratcheting up their come through like what I I like to say wall jumping from company to company you know yes you can do that and and thank you for uh talking about that a little bit James but it's worth noting that you have historically been at employers for a long time like you were at Microsoft for like three years

four years you were at FedEx for a while you were at U like a lot of your employeers you've been there for a long time you're not like some total mercenary uh but at the same time you acknowledge the real politique of trying to you know maximize for your own interests uh because companies are frankly not looking out for your interests they're looking out for their own right um HR is not there to help you it's they're there to help protect the company from you right uh little things like that that people will come to

acknowledge and you'll you can walk into any bar in Silicon Valley or wherever and you can find some disgruntled industry veteran who will just SP vitriol about how all this stuff works but then you can find people like James who are very pragmatic and they just like yep you know don't hate the player hate the game you know that kind of uh again I I apologize if any of this seems insensitive to people who have gone through all this and but but the reality is you do need to look out for number one to an

extent and you should look out for your colleagues you should look out for other people in your community but you should maintain a healthy level of skepticism uh you know the turkey every single day leading up to Thanksgiving thinks oh the farmer is so amazing they're giving me this food I've got this great area to walk around it's awesome right until one day farmer comes that's it right like that's a very macabra um treatment of the situation but but I mean advocate for yourself right okay so uh you know you've job hopped a lot I've

never regretted it you said so I I think that that those these are words of wisdom uh I have a few more quick questions for you I want to be mindful of your time uh but uh I'm learning so much and I hope you all are learning so much from this uh so in terms of learning in public that's something you've been a big public advocate of learning in public and you know your Harry Potter app is obviously a great example of you building something and getting feedback and operating in real time and people know

hey this is just little James here uh grad like not even graduated from college building this app maintaining it putting it on the App Store doesn't know what he's doing you self admitted that you didn't necessarily know a lot about databases or web servers or any of these things when you set out to build this but you learned in the process what role has learn learning in public played in your progress as a developer yeah you know I it's funny because I think about how I haven't done that near as well as I would like

to at times um I I think there there's so many benefits to to learning in public there's getting feedback so like there's there's an old meme or like joke of like hey if you want to know the right way to do something post on social media the wrong way and and people will be happy to tell you what the right way is right so I think one one of that like if you just share Snippets of code that you write every day inevitably people are going to be like why'd you do that you shouldn't do

that you blah blah blah and and some of it is just like unnecessary like we my thing with feedback is like all feedback should be considered all feedback does not warrant anything more than that it doesn't warrant me acting on anything so by considering I mean like if you give me feedback I could say that's not worth my time it doesn't make sense or I could say like oh that's something I should actually consider and then act on and so they kind of fall into two categories for me but I try to pay attention when

people share stuff anyway just know like you'll get you'll get a lot of stuff that's not super helpful and and you have to learn to weed that out and be comfortable weeding that out but people love to tell you how to do stuff or or the good people love to tell you alternate ways to do stuff and I think that's a huge learning opportunity um I think there's also one of the things I I don't feel like I've ever done as well as I would like to is building a brand around a specific thing and

I've done like a lot of JavaScript I've done a lot of Frameworks I also like to talk about careers I like to talk about a lot of things I don't think I have just one thing that people definitively know James is the guy for this and like Matt pook is the perfect example of like Matt is the typescript guy and if if people heard of him or if you haven't like everything he talks about is typescript and he is the typescript guy so anything he shares related to typescript people pay attention because that's his thing

so I think that is one of the benefits if you're very like concentrated and intentional with the things that you share and build around a certain topic building the that reputation can be really huge and the impact of that is like whether you've spoken before or not getting invited to speak on certain things because you're a voice of authority that people have seen I think also if like if Matt pook as an example the typescript guy if he goes and applies for a job that uses typescript they're probably going to be really interested in hiring

him because he's the voice of authority on typ typescript so if you if you kind of backtrack of like hey people in my area are hiring for Java and and for what it's worth like I'm sure you do a lot of JavaScript you talk about a lot of JavaScript I talk about a lot of JavaScript that's not the entire ecosystem there's a whole ecosystem of other languages and and Frameworks and tools there's all these things and again it goes back to like do your research of what people are hiring for but let's say people in

your area are hiring for Java what better way to get on your radar than to start building something in Java sharing what you learn getting feedback from the community about your what you learn staying consistent about sharing that then giving a Meetup talk about something that you built in Java something that you learned in Java then go into spring boot the framework on top of java like what better way to be seen as a more ideal candidate for roles that people are hiring for in your community than like taking taking that topic that they're hiring

for and just going and building a brand around it and and people do this all the time right like people do SEO research of like what what keyword should I hit on this blog post to blah blah blah and then build build content around that because there's availability for for SEO around a certain topic so um I think I think you like you do your research and you kind of build around that and so all the things that I said getting feedback on the stuff that you're building so that you can learn building a reputation

for being a person that that uses a certain tool or language or framework or whatever I think also the more you build and get something in the hands of people again it's it's just huge validator of of like it's not just a local project that I created on a portfolio it's things that people are actually using and I go back back to read me.so is the perfect example of this of she was building this thing and she was sharing about it and people would use it and she would give she would get feedback and she

would create new features and and go through this whole cycle and then worked at I don't know if she still is but like got a job at GitHub which is yeah what an amazing place to be so there's so many benefits I think I think the number one thing to reap those benefits is consistency so if if you're approaching like oh building a public is something I see value in just know it's not something you do one day and then all of a sudden like people are coming to you with job offers this is the

kind of thing that you stay consistent over the course of months and are really intentional with that to then start to build that reputation and start to get some of the benefits that I'm talking about here yeah yeah and I'll just like not that people necessarily need to hear me mention yet another anecdote of but like this podcast for me is a way of learning in public talking with smart people like you talking with smart people uh like the many other luminaries in many cases of software development whom I've talked to over the years and

getting corrected getting like learning about uh things that I've done wrong all that stuff absolutely super super helpful so one last question when you're putting yourself out there you are invariably going to encounter negativity you're going to encounter people who are like oh you didn't even know that like you call yourself a JavaScript developer or you're just going to encounter people who are like uh just having a bad day for whatever reason and I always when people are costic toward me I always presume that like they're just going through something and that's not necessarily how

they are give the charitable explation that they're not just some troll living under a bridge they genuinely are just having a rough time and they're taking it out on you but like how do you address negativity how do you power through that yeah uh like I've talked about that in the past and I I think it at times it was really easy for me because the people who say really negative things are so ridiculous that it's like easy to kind of cast aside I think when the biggest struggles I've had is like insec is around

like oh you're doing this wrong or you're explaining this wrong and and that's really hard when you're a public facing figure I mean like like I am on on podcasts and YouTube videos and and at conferences and stuff like you're you're kind of looked at as one of the people that's supposed to teach the best way to do a thing and and the reality is like none of us know everything I think a a personal struggle of mine is I only have three years at FedEx of doing actual software development at the other times I've

been a developer Advocate which is Titan but it's it's like doing demos and it's doing like YouTube videos and and blog posts and stuff which is not like building real world production software there just a difference yeah and so that's one of the things that I'm I'm self-conscious of at one point and there was one I think really good example where I got feedback I was explaining something about like the event Loop in javascripts in a video and somebody called me out and said like oh that's not right blah blah blah and I actually recorded

a video that I published right after that in response to it that was like oh I was wrong and then as I like after I published that video and I was watching again I was like I I don't think that I was wrong to begin with and I ended up taking that video down and Publishing another video to like clarify like okay you asked me this question or challenged me on something I quickly thought I was wrong based on how confident that person was and and in reality I really wasn't and this is why and

just to clarify like here's what's going on and that was a really good learning experience for me of like I talked about this earlier feedback is one of two categories it's either something I need to act on or it's not but I want to pay attention to all feedback I can quickly throw stuff aside right like I think that's I think that's something you have to do but for stuff that's worth looking at I really do want to invest in looking at it and I think in that case the one thing I didn't do was

didn't take the time to really think through what the situation was what my explanation was what was wrong or not about it and I didn't get kind of outside conversation to affirm one way or another or confirm one way or another and I think that's one of the things that was a learning experience for me of like hey sometimes I want to be too eager to make a change or to admit that I'm wrong because I want I want to be transparent I think that's something valuable for people too like you hear West boss has

talked about this like he'll leave mistakes in his videos some of them so that you see like I I'm a regular developer right like I make mistakes like you watch a Polish YouTube video and it's just everything works and that's cool but it doesn't it doesn't show The Real World Experience so I think there something is there is something really genuine about having mistakes about being honest about like Hey we're all developers we're all learning we all have things to learn we all have blah blah blah but in that in that instance I didn't really

give myself credit enough to really think about it and confirm with other people so that was one of the things that like was kind of a learning experience for me I get things that like I'm sensitive about that people comment on and it's kind of ridiculous like some people just are kind of terrible I'm honestly like kind of um self-conscious about my thinning hair and people can see that I'm self-conscious about bags under my eyes I sleep you said like 9 hours I sleep well every night I drink tons of water I always have bags

under my eyes and I get comments about that all the time on YouTube videos and that kind of sucks and some of it is like I could do a better job with lighting and different things but there there are like personal things that um that really there's no reason for people to take it there because it's not relevant at all um also one thing to understand too sometimes it's a cultural thing like sometimes different cultures are just much more comfortable saying what they're thinking and they don't they don't mean it in a negative way and

I had lots of comments like that of like people like genuinely being I think maybe concerned because of the bags under my eyes of like oh my God are you okay like it looks like you're having a rough time and in my head that's just the thing I'm sensitive about I'm doing fine U anyway so that there like you you have to understand like putting yourself out there comes with your open to you're open to criticism you're open to suggestions you're open to ridiculous nness and that happens too and I think you have to kind

of be prepared for that I I think you have to quickly decide everything that comes through falls into two buckets I don't care about and I should care about to try to get better at what I do yeah and that is that is a challenge and it's something that takes time to get more comfortable doing and it takes more time to be comfortable taking ridiculous comments on the chin and just keep moving yeah yeah well power to you for uh just like braving that like a lot of people they get like a little bit of

negative feedback or something or maybe they say something dumb and then they're like oh my goodness I can't believe I said that my career is over nobody's ever going to respect me again you know like just address it and move on and do your best and uh and there are some things you can't change I mean you maybe you can go get plastic surgery in Korea and make your eyes not have those things and people quit talking about it uh one of the things people always tell me they're always like are you high right now

you look so high and I'm like no this is just how I look I I haven't drank a drink of alcohol in 9 years certainly not weed or anything but people people always think that like because the way I laugh or the way I look that that I like I'm inebriated in some some way so so but but I mean that's kind of comical uh in a way like if you're somebody who like um for example like has like you know scares on their face from like childhood accidents or something like like you just constantly

have to answer that sort of stuff uh and you know we're both men and like that means that we have it like better off than like half the population as far as like random nasty comments on YouTube so I don't I don't want you all to think we're complaining about it but but negative comes well we should also yeah yeah anybody to your point like so uh real quick to your point like they're especially for women and people of diverse backgrounds I think can significantly have it worse and some of the things I've seen people

share that are creators and they share like some of the comments and stuff that they get are absolutely appalling yeah and and that is something to consider I think I always encourage people um you know it's it's worked out for me the positive comments outweigh the negative for me I can't say that that's true for everyone I can't say that that's true for a lot of people but it is something that you have to consider when you when you look at doing something public facing yeah well um I want to applaud you for putting yourself

in the arena you know the old um quote from uh the Roosevelt uh the older Roosevelt Teddy Roos uh there's the whole man in in the arena speech and uh if you haven't read it obviously uh it's really old it's from like 100 plus years ago but it's about being the person who goes out there and puts themselves out there and not just one of the spectators in the in the Coliseum but the actual person down in the arena participating in the actual competition right and and all the U you know jeers you get from

the crowd and the booze and all that stuff you get along with the cheers right um so I I want to compliment you for continuing to do that for doing more than 100 conference talks that's so nerve-wracking when you're giving a conference talk I mean you're just exhibiting a a like an admirable level of uh courage and uh you thank you for doing that thanks for doing everything you're doing uh I encourage everyone to check out the compressed FM podcast I'm linking to that in the show notes I'm linking to some of james' other exciting

stuff check that out and uh thanks again for coming on the podcast man yeah I really appreciate it this is um I'm a huge fan as well have followed you and your journey and all the amazing things that free code Camp have done for uh for a long time super personal for me with all the things that I do of trying to give back to the community and help people make career Transitions and next steps in their career too so really uh really happy to be here awesome well everybody who's listened this far I hope

you have a fantastic day until next week happy coding