Being a good engineer kinda sucks

Summary

In this video, Theo from t3.gg discusses the harsh realities of being a good engineer, revealing personal stories and insights from his career. He highlights the struggles between achieving personal satisfaction and fitting into corporate structures. Through anecdotes about his time at Twitch, Theo delves into the challenges faced when one becomes a key player in a team or organization. He warns against allowing a lack of support or incompatible work environments to hinder progress and encourages finding the right people and places that foster growth and fulfillment.

Highlights

• Theo shares personal experiences, both successes and failures, as he navigated his engineering career 🎢
• Discusses the tricky balance between being good at your job and the struggle with upper management 😤
• Emphasizes the importance of finding supportive teammates or leaving if they're absent 🚪
• Narrates the impact of becoming essential within a company and feeling stuck ✋
• Reflects on how speaking up in unfavorable environments can halt your progress 🎙

Key Takeaways

• Being a good engineer doesn't always mean workplace satisfaction 🌟
• Sometimes, being essential can feel like a trap 😮
• Finding supportive colleagues is crucial for professional happiness 🤝
• Your environment can either lift you up or drag you down 🏢
• It's important to shut up sometimes, even if it's hard to do so 🤐

Overview

Theo embarks on a deep dive into the intricacies of being a competent engineer in the modern workplace. He starts with the challenges of finding personal and professional balance, especially when one's skills make them indispensable to a team. From the beginning, he cautions against taking his experiences as a one-size-fits-all solution but hopes to spark meaningful conversations about workplace dynamics.

With vivid storytelling, Theo narrates his journey through various team dynamics at Twitch, touching on issues like upper management's perception, the struggle with recognition, and the difficulty of aligning personal work values with company goals. He transitions through different teams, detailing how some environments fostered his professional growth while others left him at a standstill.

In the end, Theo offers advice to fellow engineers about finding happiness and progress in their careers. He stresses the significance of developing genuine connections and knowing when to stay silent to maintain peace in the workplace. The video wraps up with Theo encouraging viewers to seek environments that allow them to excel and surround themselves with people who share their drive and understanding.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Disclaimer In the introduction, the speaker sets the tone by explaining that this discussion will deviate from their usual content. The focus is on the intricate dynamics of business operations and team management, intertwined with personal experiences. The speaker emphasizes that the insights shared may not universally apply to all but are intended to stimulate conversation through their own successes and failures in mastering their work environment.
• 01:00 - 03:00: Personal Engineering Journey In this chapter titled 'Personal Engineering Journey,' the author shares their personal experiences and challenges faced when starting out in coding. They talk about the improvements gained over time and aim to provide insights to both aspiring and current engineers who may feel frustrated in their careers. The author also mentions the capabilities and limitations of AI, particularly in web browsing.
• 03:00 - 04:30: Sponsor Segment: Browserbase The chapter delves into the use of Browserbase, a browser specifically designed for AI applications. It addresses common issues AI might face when browsing, such as CAPTCHAs and rate limits. Browserbase provides a seamless API connection and a cloud-based puppeteer instance, which simplifies the process for developers, especially those working in serverless environments. This tool is highlighted for its efficiency, particularly for obtaining data from web pages. The chapter also references OpenAI's new computer use model, suggesting the value and relevance of using Browserbase in contemporary AI browsing tasks.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Question from Ouijiro about Managing Workload The chapter discusses the advantages of Browserbase, a new tool for managing workload and browser environments. It is touted as being 91% faster than traditional methods and eliminates the need for spinning up a whole virtual machine (VM) with a graphical interface just to allow OpenAI’s computer use model to access it. This highlights the efficiency of using Browserbase over local machines or other browser environment setups.
• 05:30 - 08:00: Understanding Your Importance in a Company The chapter discusses the growing importance of using browser-based tools and automation within companies, particularly for AI development. Initially, the significance of these technologies may not be apparent, but practical application reveals their value. Companies, including the speaker's own, are increasingly leveraging these tools to enhance web data scraping capabilities. Browser-based solutions like Browserbase are highlighted as crucial for AI models requiring browser functionality. The chapter concludes with the suggestion to explore Browserbase for ongoing AI projects.
• 08:00 - 12:30: Experience at Twitch and Team Dynamics The chapter discusses the challenges faced by Ouijiro at Twitch, particularly in dealing with a demanding boss and an overwhelmingly large workload compared to other teams. The narrator reflects on similar past experiences in their career and mentions the unsustainable nature of such work conditions. It encourages a personal approach to dealing with these difficulties and hints at sharing personal experiences related to handling challenging work dynamics.
• 12:30 - 17:00: Challenges of Moving to a New Team The chapter discusses the challenges faced when transitioning to a new team, emphasizing the importance of understanding one's value to the company. It highlights the concept of the 'bus factor,' encouraging individuals to evaluate the impact of their absence on the team or project. The text stresses that many developers overlook this self-assessment, which is crucial for career development.
• 17:00 - 21:00: Handling Disappointments and Strategic Career Moves The chapter discusses the difficult conversation around an individual's role in a company, emphasizing the dilemma of being considered either non-essential or essential. If non-essential, an employee faces the harsh truth of being expendable. Conversely, being essential can trap an employee, making them feel irreplaceable but also burdened with ongoing responsibilities. This duality is a challenging reality that many developers avoid confronting, as accepting either scenario can be equally unappealing.
• 21:00 - 29:00: Misalignment with Product Management The chapter discusses the experience of constantly changing teams and roles within a company, as illustrated by the author's personal journey at Twitch. The author describes feeling indispensable as they adapt and move across different teams, having their team name and colleagues change multiple times, including an incident where their office location changed twice in two weeks.
• 29:00 - 33:00: Reflections on Being a Good Engineer in a Bad Environment In 'Reflections on Being a Good Engineer in a Bad Environment', the narrator recounts their experience with constant changes in their work environment. Within just three weeks, they had to switch desks four times and change offices twice, all due to an overwhelming series of reorganizations. Eventually, they found themselves working on the video-on-demand platform for Twitch, only to learn that it was not being used much. Consequently, the team was downsized the following week. The narrator then sought a new role, consulting friends in the safety department. This move proved beneficial as their friends supported them, leading to a satisfying new position.
• 33:00 - 36:00: Finding Motivated People and Building Connections The chapter discusses the importance of finding motivated people and building connections. The author shares a personal experience, explaining how joining an incredible and supportive team significantly impacted their career. Within a short period, the manager recognized their potential, acknowledged that they were underleveled, and initiated discussions to correct their pay and job role to better reflect their contributions. This supportive environment played a crucial role in the author's success and development, highlighting the power of being in a team that values and rewards its members.
• 36:00 - 41:00: Final Thoughts on Career and Personal Growth The chapter 'Final Thoughts on Career and Personal Growth' revolves around the importance of having supportive and proactive leadership in a professional setting. The narrator shares a personal experience of having a manager who advocated for their promotion, prompting self-reflection and recognition of their value and level in the work environment. The narrator expresses gratitude for having exceptional managers early in their career, particularly at Twitch, which helped pave the way for their success. The chapter also acknowledges the challenges faced by individuals who lack strong leadership and the need for self-reliance in such cases.

Being a good engineer kinda sucks Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 this is not going to be the usual Theo video it's weird to talk about these types of things because they're really deep in the mechanics of how businesses and teams operate and it's also a really personal story more than ever the things I'm going to talk about here might not apply to you and your role and your life and the specific position and team you're in so don't take anything I say here as gospel on the right way to deal with the workplace that you're in this is meant to be a conversation about the things I succeeded and more importantly the things I failed in as I got good at
• 00:30 - 01:00 coding a lot of this is going to be about my personal experience and the failures that I had when I started getting better at code and hopefully it's going to be helpful to you guys as well so if you're a good engineer or even a great engineer and you're getting frustrated with your workplace or you hope to be in that position someday hopefully there is something of value for you here but if not at least the sponsor will bring you some value feels like AI can do almost anything nowadays there are some things it struggles with though one of those is web browsing not cuz it can't do it we've seen incredible
• 01:00 - 01:30 demos of AI browsing the web but what browser is it going to use and how is it going to get access to it spin it up and actually search the web for things what's it going to do when it hits a capture what's it going to do when it hits a rate limit all of these problems are obnoxious to solve that is unless you're using today's sponsor Browserbase this is the browser for your AI the browser you can hit via API the puppeteer instance of the cloud that you'll never have to worry about again and so in my life as a serverless deb just trying to get some data from a random web page way easier if you've seen OpenAI's new computer use model the
• 01:30 - 02:00 one that can take control of a computer it might seem really good until you realize you don't have a computer it can use certainly on a browser well Browserbase just added support for computer use it is hilariously nice 91% faster than almost any other way to spin up a browser environment certainly way faster than doing it on your local machine if you're not using something like browserbased you're probably spinning up a whole VM with an actual graphical interface that opens a browser to let OpenAI's computer use model come in and control it what do you need an info team in order to spin up the
• 02:00 - 02:30 browsers that your AI models are using it makes all the sense in the world and I will be honest I didn't get it at first until I started playing with it and I saw more and more of these browser automation use cases and now I understand why every company is starting to look into browserbased from obviously Forcell and Perplexity both have obvious benefits but even companies like mine as we try to scrape more data from the web using these awesome new tools and agents if you're building with AI and that AI needs a browser check out browserbase today at soy.link/browserbase this rant was triggered by a message from the chatter
• 02:30 - 03:00 Ouijiro hopefully I pronounced his name correctly here it was a really good question mind if I ask you for advice on managing a thick-headed boss i've been assigned work that feels three to four times bigger than other teams inside the company and I work alone i feel like this is the fault of myself trying my best to work well and fast but I guess I shot myself in the foot and this is not sustainable i have felt this exact way far too many times in my career and I I I don't know how to explain this other than to get personal with it first though I want to challenge you the
• 03:00 - 03:30 viewer and also the chatter think about where you're at in your career the most important question before you can do any more deep diving here is how important are you to the company this is a hard thing to judge especially when you're still new or even if you're there for a while but lower level you got to think about the bus factor if you were to disappear or stop contributing to this codebase or working at this company how much does that hurt them or slow them down there are far too few devs who take the time to think about this because the
• 03:30 - 04:00 answer kind of sucks in both ways either you're not essential which means they can let go of you at any time and be fine and that is a harsh reality to face or you are essential and now you're kind of trapped forever because if you stop everything that you've ever worked on all the people you hired fail underneath and it sucks so it's a hard question to ask and I think that's why most devs don't bother it's not easy to accept either that you're not essential to the company or that you are essential and now you're stuck maintaining all of
• 04:00 - 04:30 these things possibly indefinitely let's assume you figured this out now and you've realized like oh I'm pretty essential here it would be really hard for them to operate without me this is the experience I had and I came there in a weird way i hopped teams a lot when I was at Twitch in my first year the name of my team and the people I worked with changed three times roughly there was even a window there where I switched my office twice in two weeks yes actually I
• 04:30 - 05:00 switched my desk was four times in 3 weeks and I switched the actual office I was in twice in two weeks it was an insane pile of reorgs and people being hopped around and moved i got shuffled to working on the video on demand platform which is how people watch things on Twitch when they're done being streamed turns out nobody does that which is why the week after I joined the team it got cut in half and I had to go find a role somewhere else i had friends in the safety or so so I decided to chat with them it went really well and they pulled me in and I am so thankful they
• 05:00 - 05:30 did i would almost certainly not be here on YouTube today if it wasn't for the incredible exciting and just supportive experience I had when I switched to that team i was on that team for 3 years because of how much they helped me be better the first crazy thing that happened when I joined the team was my manager within less than a month and I think it was our second or third one-on-one just immediately brought up you're underleveled you're not being paid the right amount for the work you're doing and your role does not represent the quality and reliability of the things that you're putting out i've
• 05:30 - 06:00 never done a promotion before but I'm gonna figure it out because you're getting screwed right now and that was such a shift for me to have a manager batting for me and fighting for me in that way recognizing these things and forcing me to reflect and recognize myself like where am I at what level am I actually and I owe that manager so much i am so lucky my first few managers when I worked at Twitch were as incredible as they were they set me up for so much success and it's heartbreaking to see the people who don't have that level of quality in their leadership because you have to DIY
• 06:00 - 06:30 the same things that I was just given when I was given that promotion I was given the opportunity to reflect on how important I was to the workplace and be more realistic about what I could and couldn't do it gave me the confidence to suggest big changes to how we were building tools and introduce new libraries and solutions to problems it gave me the buyin I needed to take these steps further and challenge people on the way they were doing things and request more money when I got a raise and push to get a hire that we might not have gotten otherwise because I thought this person was great all of this
• 06:30 - 07:00 happened because I realized I kind of have some leverage here i know what I'm doing and this team now is kind of built around the speed and the way that I build once I had that realization things got both a lot easier but also a lot busier i didn't have the fear that I was overstepping i just had more questions and looked for more opportunities i was hopping into meetings with teams that certainly were not mine and constantly getting questions from people asking why was I talking to them and then I would tell them be like "Oh that actually
• 07:00 - 07:30 helps us a ton." And my environment in my team was really supportive of this they were hyped seeing me helping out other teams we actually started to strategize around this where when other teams would block things that safety thought was important we would do swaps where they would send me to that team for a little bit they would send an engineer over to ours we knew that engineer wasn't going to get anything done on our team but I would unblock their road map so they could actually add the safety features that we cared about the result was awesome we had way more levers than ever as a team twitch was safer as a result and I was happy
• 07:30 - 08:00 getting to have my hand in so many different things but in terms of my like role and level and salary things had kind of plateaued a lot of this was because I had a huge stock grant that was worth a lot more because Amazon blew up so I wouldn't get promotions and raises because that would counteract it was a whole mess of how I was being paid but I also felt like I was running out of things to do on that team so I swapped teams that team swap showed me so much i I think I've called it the
• 08:00 - 08:30 biggest mistake of my career but in retrospect so much of what I am today happened from what I learned when I did that team swap i left safety to work in the creator org because I loved Twitch creators and I wanted to help them do better content by having better tools i wanted to get the creator tools to a similar quality level that the moderators had with new things like mod view and I failed but I learned a lot from this failure specifically I saw how important I was to the safety team
• 08:30 - 09:00 because when I left they were heartbroken since I was technically still not a senior role when I left that team the seat that was left when I quit and moved was a mid-level engineering seat you can't just hire another random mid-level engineer and get your team back to where it was even if it looks the same on the table it's not the same in terms of the speed that you're shipping this showed me a ton of different things first that my value is greater than any one or two or even three normal level engineers not because I'm a way better engineer than them
• 09:00 - 09:30 simply because I can ship faster and solve problems in a simpler more reasonable way for a lot of things especially on the front end and the backend front end relationship side when it came to building really complex systems that could be maintained for years eh but when it came to making things much much simpler and not adding complexity where it didn't belong I was really good at that part and when you're rebuilding the entire Twitch website from scratch what we were doing at the time ended up being a pretty useful skill that got me a lot of leverage but because of that my team couldn't just
• 09:30 - 10:00 replace me and be back at the same speed and I had to face that fact i had to watch the team struggle and shuffle around trying to figure out what the future of safety looked like at Twitch and after I left a lot of the other people who had been on that team for a while started to as well they're in a good state now there's a lot of people there that I genuinely care so much about and owe a lot of my success to but I made things a lot harder for them when I left and that that sucked to face but then I was in a new or that had their own opinions and the difference with this new org is that they weren't
• 10:00 - 10:30 excited and supportive of a person who was there that could ship fast and had a bunch of leverage they felt threatened by it i was showing up and taking tickets that they had been delaying for months saying "Oh this will take way too much work." And I would just grab it and do it in 2 hours and they hated me for it they were doing everything they could to try and poke holes in everything I was doing i had a meeting with my manager because he was upset that I was meeting with people higher up than him every week he would constantly check my
• 10:30 - 11:00 calendar to see who I was talking to and where I was saw the people I was talking to at the company the meetings I was being involved in and got mad at me for it i had never in my life had someone upset with me for the things on my calendar and I the insecurity and like just fear I felt from that moment was horrifying i immediately privated my calendar and started interviewing at other places cuz I was so offended by that but it got worse like way worse i ended up rebuilding the mobile app from scratch during a hackathon cuz I was so tired of mobile team blocking stuff we
• 11:00 - 11:30 won the hackathon we built the best Twitch app that's ever been made and my reward was two trophies and an HR warning because the mobile team was so mad and the HR warning wasn't because of the mobile team it was because the mobile team went to my hireups about how upset they were and the higher-ups in my org who already were insecure just from me being there threw me under the bus and made HR come to clean up the mess absolute disaster and all of that happened for two reasons first because I was building faster and better
• 11:30 - 12:00 than the people around me and in some environments they take the opportunity to do better but in this particular team in this particular environment they took the opportunity to drag me down and the other thing this one is much more on me i was nowhere near strategic enough about how I was better than my co-workers and how I shipped more effectively there was opportunities that I just didn't take cuz I didn't see them or think about them it was a waste of my my energy to spend time figuring out which of these tickets can be placed out
• 12:00 - 12:30 and run in a specific way to keep from pissing people off i ended up having to rely on other engineers that I still call friends to this day to coach me through that part and we got to the point where I would make the whole thing in a day send it to him and let him slowly roll it out with me so the team could accept the timelines that these things were moving at at the same time I was looking for new opportunities i was I was so done at this point i convinced myself that I could just sit and be patient though and this is the advice I was trying to give to go back to the
• 12:30 - 13:00 message here the thing I want to say and the thing that you should do if you're humanly capable of it is stop doing work that isn't going to benefit your role at the company and this drove me mad and I I outright failed at this if there was an opportunity to make something better like this dashboard I'm in right now the Twitch creator dashboard if I had a way to make this better for our creators but it didn't immediately benefit me career-wise or my positioning on my team
• 13:00 - 13:30 it wasn't worth doing and if I saw a co-orker or a product manager or a lead or whatever proposing something that I knew would make the dashboard worse speaking up is hurting my position at the company in order to make the product less bad for creators and that sucked that I felt like I was between my own role and what creators actually needed and the fact that my org made those two things antagonistic towards each other
• 13:30 - 14:00 especially in contrast to my experience in safety where making safety operations more efficient or making moderators happier immediately resulted in me having more leverage and more support helping creators hurt me on this team the solution here was really simple i just needed to shut the up and I couldn't do it i still to this day remember the meeting where this happened there was a proposal to change how the dashboard layout works the proposal was that we would start syncing it on the cloud so if you had three different
• 14:00 - 14:30 computers in an iPad all with your custom dashboard layout with everything sized specific ways that would now be synced across them there's a problem though this split this setup is all percentage based so what looks good on this screen will not look good on my vertical monitor this just went from usable to barely readable and if I make it even narrower that is entirely unusable so if you have different aspect ratios for your monitors or the devices that you're using syncing the layout is
• 14:30 - 15:00 a regression it makes the product worse not better because I customize my layout for my different devices they're fine they never need to change why make the product worse for no reason the reason is we just got a new product manager on the team and she insisted that this one random ticket on user voice with five up votes was the thing we needed to do and I you not the proposal for that was going to take five plus engineers 7 plus months to do my head nearly exploded i sat down with this
• 15:00 - 15:30 PM it went for 2 and 1/2 hours and it seemed like she actually understood when I explained this and how it would actually hurt the product she listened she asked good questions and I was really hopeful that this mistake wouldn't happen there was something I didn't account for though it was the end of December so we had this conversation we all took a break for 2 to 3 weeks or so and then we came back for the kickoff meeting for this huge new ship i figured
• 15:30 - 16:00 a lot must have changed because we had this long conversation about how bad this product change would be we're about to have the kickoff meeting for it and I wasn't even on the original invite i got added last minute and I'm thankful to whoever thought to add me because uh what a meeting someone tried to report me for sexism because of how pissed I was i went into this meeting with the goal of sitting back and being quiet because I already gave my feedback we already had this conversation this is done now and the proposal had not changed at
• 16:00 - 16:30 all it was the exact same PDF that I had read a month before and my question to the PM was "What happened to the 2 and 1 half hour conversation we had less than a month ago?" To which he replied "Oh yeah i'm sorry i kind of forgot about that we actually decided that we didn't have enough data to prove your theory right so we're just going to go through with this seven-month proposal instead." I genuinely thought I could just sit and be quiet in this meeting i
• 16:30 - 17:00 That was my goal going in and I outright failed i exploded i considering how pissed I was i actually think I was relatively calm but holy that was the moment that my career at Twitch ended not because funny enough I didn't actually get in trouble for any of those things my manager as much as he was not great he knew me well enough to stand up for me in that and also was a streamer so he knew I was entirely right i had also at the same time started and was running a data experiment that tracked the aspect ratios of different displays and of users that use more than one
• 17:00 - 17:30 device 5% had the same aspect ratio on both devices so I was like literally entirely correct here like I I couldn't be proven more correct than all the numbers I ran and stats I did and interviews with users i was right it is what it is the frustration here is that I couldn't just let them do the wrong thing if I actually cared about my position at Twitch and I really wanted to get the highest salary the highest role and be in the best place possible I
• 17:30 - 18:00 would have shut up and done the same thing that my co-orker did when he built buttons that click themselves that's a whole separate rant for another day i will give you a quick TLDDR because otherwise I'll trigger myself see these buttons here quick actions the onclick for these buttons doesn't trigger the action for the button the on click triggers a state change to the active state for the button and the active state for the button has a use effect in it that runs the action already terrible but it gets worse the state of these actions gets saved in the layout which
• 18:00 - 18:30 means if the buttons in action state and you trigger something like a resize that causes the layout to save and you refresh the page every time you load the dashboard it'll trigger that action this caused ads to run automatically in the middle of the League of Legends World Championship in the middle of the PS5 reveal and the engineer who built that got two promotions during my time on that team because he wrote a really fancy looking PDF it shipped because I wasn't on the team when it happened and the best part was I wasn't on call when that bug happened the ads team reported it to this team they
• 18:30 - 19:00 denied that it had anything to do with them because look there's an onclick event that proves the user clicked the button and then I not even on call at the moment looked at the logs and saw the page load event happened 4 milliseconds before the onclick there is no user in the goddamn world that can click a button within four milliseconds of it appearing on the page it was triggering itself and I rewrote this whole thing because of that they refused to merge it but they at least were willing to merge my like quick fix that removed all the state data from this the
• 19:00 - 19:30 load added a bunch of tests saying if any of these break ping Theo because you up they deleted all those tests when I quit and then immediately broke it again i I I could rant i have a video I've been planning for years now the dumbest bug I've ever seen the button that clicks itself it'll be its own full dedicated video someday everyone who gaslet me throughout that process you should all be fired for your it's two people and they both know who they are if if you're not sure if this is you it's not you you're fine i know this is going to go around i I know how my videos do at Twitch i know you guys
• 19:30 - 20:00 are going to watch i'm over four years out now you can't come after me sorry guys anyways the reason I'm bringing all of this up is because I went from being a great engineer on a good engineering team to being the best engineer on a team being the best engineer on a good team is great because you're surrounded with people who want to do better who want to push themselves and want to excel and improve themselves and if you don't have people around you that are at least trying to keep up you're
• 20:00 - 20:30 screwed and you need to get out of that situation if you want to move forward and no one else wants to move at all you're never going to be happy and it sucks that that's reality but there are some silver linings here the first one is what happens when you find those people you will find some at your current job there is no company with more than five people that doesn't have at least one that's a bit motivated and I've basically collected these people like Pokémon throughout my career to this day I have so many random people from like when I was in university hell
• 20:30 - 21:00 when I was in high school to people I worked with on random teams to people I collaborated with for one feature on a product that are still people I talk to to this day that I consider good friends some of them mentored me some of them I mentored some of them are the reason I learned React in the first place and then the people who taught me React at Twitch showed up at React Comp i was so hyped to see them and then Dan Abramov came in to say check in on me and see how I was doing and they were like "Wait what these moments are not rare you will find so many of them throughout your
• 21:00 - 21:30 career but only if you do this one important thing you need to find these people if you're motivated enough to be however many minutes we are into this video too many I don't even want to think about it if you're sticking around these types of videos for this long you're watching my stuff you're progressing as an engineer and you you know the feeling I'm talking about you have exceeded and excelled past not just where the people around you are but where they want to go if you want it more than they do or you want it and they don't you're screwed but the people
• 21:30 - 22:00 who want it make themselves known very quickly when given the opportunity and I have been one to misjudge this i've had people that I was sure didn't want to really progress in their careers they were happy with where they were but as soon as I gave them a little more buyin or just said "Wow that was a really good solution to that problem." All of a sudden they cared a lot more and some of these people are some of my best friends now i gave them the slightest nudge and they ran so far with it and there's a bunch of these people in my chat right
• 22:00 - 22:30 now here's one from earlier from void crazy how much I've grown as a dev in just 5 months watched all your YouTube videos and your all your Twitch past podcast stuff and I'm surprised at myself how well I code now and what I find more valuable reading others code and understanding it this message is not about me it might seem like it is but it isn't i happened to provide an environment where someone like void could grow and do better but I'm not the one who made them better i am just a
• 22:30 - 23:00 tool that they used in their process to get there that is all their hard work i'm just a person creating these resources but what's really cool here is now I know Void isn't just an okay dev or a good dev he is probably already a great dev and if he's not he's going to be very soon because he is motivated to improve and change and a lot of people in his position weren't in that position until someone around them pushed them to try a little harder or rewarded them for something they didn't think that much about once you get addicted to that
• 23:00 - 23:30 feeling once you feel what it is to progress and have more confidence and ownership over the things you're doing you either don't care or you get addicted the people who get addicted are very visibly addicted that's what I am here and if you're that type I don't know if you can properly assimilate into people who aren't i and this is again the thing I said at the beginning don't take my words as gospel here i did this wrong i am very fortunate that I found this YouTube career that now pays way better than my job at Twitch did it took
• 23:30 - 24:00 a while to get there but most don't i very well could have destroyed my career by not just shutting up and letting things go i would probably be a principal engineer at Amazon or Twitch now making a lot of money if I could just shut up and smile through things that were stupid and just ship the thing I was told to but I wasn't capable and the people who around me also weren't and just cared more are still people I am close with to this day and I value them all immensely they are the reason that I was able to have the successful career I had because they would defend
• 24:00 - 24:30 me they would understand me they would coach me when I was being stupid or aggressive or my autism was causing me to spaz out on things that didn't matter and they supported me when this stuff when it hurt and when it sucked and those allies those friendships those people that you know you can trust matter more than any title or role or technology or feature that you ship find those people and if you can't find anywhere you are now find somewhere that you can because if they don't exist where you are that's the truth they don't exist where you are and only one
• 24:30 - 25:00 of two things can happen either they make you no longer one of those people or you find somewhere better i don't know which one's right for you but I hope this video helps you figure it out for yourself what a rant until next time peace nerds