How you present your message is as important as what you actually say.
Tone of Messaging
Startup Life
Question of Morality
Does your business conform with your morals?
Startup Life
Judging Motivation
People are motivated by different things.
Startup Life
Listening to Consumers
There’s a difference between listening and taking action.
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You can’t imagine how happy I am with your decision. I like your content on failednormal.com, but I also like your YouTube live streams.
I follow you since quite a long time and I can be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m not. I notice that you found back the joy in the first place and an income that makes it worthwhile in the second place, to do YT live streams back again.
On YT there is a kind of interaction. Although you don’t have the same connection with us as we have with you. Nevertheless, I really enjoy it. So, as far as I’m concerned… “I roll out the red carpet for you” if you don’t mind. 🙂
P.S.: The sound volume from the Vimeo platform is +/- 6dB quieter than on YouTube. It’s not a problem at all. I just noticed it.
I personally didn’t mind your snarky sarcasm, I still took value away from the other topics you discuss. Some people don’t receive information well if you beat around the bush. The direct upfront and blunt approach is sometimes necessary to get them to rethink what they’re proposing or saying.
The one’s who can’t see the irony or common sense in your sarcasm probably won’t learn their lesson until they trial and fail. Nothing like a good crash and burn knee scrap to realize ‘hmm, guess he was right after all.’
I totally agree, Jonas. It’s true that in the real world, especially in tech, you’re dealing with snarky clients and bosses most of the time. If you can’t handle that, then you’re not the right person for a tech- but actually for any job! It’s also true that “Microsoft Certified, Cisco Certified, whatever certified” doesn’t carry any value at all if you haven’t something else on your resume that stands out.
Besides that, if you can’t write code, I guess the only job in tech you can apply to is “Help-desk Support”. Even then, if over time you don’t learn to code, you’ll spend your whole career at the help-desk. I don’t understand why somebody that wants to go into tech, doesn’t want to learn to code, it makes no sense.
Another thing that frustrates me is that every 16-year-old wants to be a pen tester, but for one reason or another they are going crazy when they must open the Linux terminal to run a certain command. Well, if you may not say to those 16-year-olds: “Listen, you dumb fuck, if you don’t learn to code and if you’re too lazy to spend a decent amount of your free time into the Linux terminal instead of playing with your PlayStation and shoving doritos in your face, you’re better off with a flipping-burger-job at Mc Donald’s. Stop wasting your time and mine as well”, then what’s the point in advising, “showing the path” to aspirant geeks anyway?
On the other hand, I do understand Eli his decision very well. Obviously, these young ones on YT are the majority and in order to make money from YT, you want them “to love you” and not “to hate you”. In order to do that, you have to say what they want to hear. In the end of the day, it are single-minded, unshakeable adolescents that you’re talking too. It’s true that this is an egocentrically point of view, but totally understandable.
I had a struggle with getting past the whole learn to code aspect of tech but I attribute that to bad experiences with it in the college classroom. I ignored it for a couple years after that until the realization hit me that if I wanted to get into ethical hacking / penetration testing and be taken seriously, I was gonna need to learn how to code. I sure as hell didn’t want to be just another script kiddie.
This resulted in my making the decision in 2008 to learn Linux and really dive deep. After struggling for a few years I finally made the full switch to Linux in 2012 and it has been a daily OS driver for me since then. I eventually overcame my coding phobia by applying the basic concepts to game development.
I have no idea why colleges don’t work to make their CS programs more interesting and applicable because I made so much progress just seeing the things I’d learned about applied in something I was genuinely interested in. It made me understand the concept Eli describes of “Find problems to solve.” Seems like common sense now but I was stuck in traditional US student mentality of ‘I have to read all this theory from the book first before I’ll be ready to code’.
Best advice I’ve ever come across for people who are struggling with code: find projects and try to design and create them. Remove the expectation of making the next AAA game or some fancy GUI application. Just the act of completing a simple project that parses data from a file and organizes it or making a task list application will teach you more about coding than banging your head trying to do problems out of a book. It may not be the next Office or Solitaire, but it’s far more than most people will ever do on their own after hours of time spent on code academy or other similar site.