Becoming An Irreplaceable Software Engineer

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right it is Wednesday I'm leaving the office and I got a topic from Reddit I think this one's pretty cool um let's see let me just pull it up cuz I'm parked I can read it this person asks what are things I can do to make myself Irreplaceable they say Okay hear me out I know everyone is replaceable but I meant like how do I make myself a soft 3 years of experience very important to the company I want to be a tech lead I don't like managerial positions I'm a tech guy I like the tech side of things like system design architecture so on so forth so what are things I can do to make myself Irreplaceable it's an interesting question um so let's get that moved um when I hear this kind of thing come up uh and I don't necessarily think

that this person's saying it this way but when I hear this kind of thing come up about IR being Irreplaceable um a lot of the time I hear people talk about this kind of thing from the perspective of like job security and I think partially this person saying they want to be important that is like a job security thing but I think that sometimes I hear this come up as in like I want to be Irreplaceable as in like someone can't fire me because the company would like go up in flames right like I am that important that if they lost me like I have some type of secret people are flying down this road man holy cow I've never seen this I never seen it it's nuts sorry this is like this is too much come on Tesla holy cow what a what a

jerk um okay so when I hear people talk about this usually it's like such that uh right someone has to cross the street here um they can't like they're so important they can't be fired not like I'm so good at this but like if you fired me I have I have the keys to the thing and you don't have them now because you fired me like that kind of thing where it's just dangerous to have the person go um so I think this framing is I hope a little bit different um but I wanted to kind of talk about the other part first and why that doesn't really work from a job security perspective and before I do that just a quick reminder that if you have questions you want answered please just add them to the comments below and um if you have something

that's like I don't know like you want to keep more private keep Anonymous like just send me a message look for Dev leader on social media or Nick centino on LinkedIn I have a premium profile you should be able to message me uh without any issue as far as I know that's how it works but try it out um happy to try and navigate uh the challenges and stuff you're having in your careers uh for software engineering so the the idea of like job security and like how do I make myself Irreplaceable for job security uh I don't think that that works very well uh at least not the way that people like to think um so people think often that um you know if they're if they're irreplaceable it means they can't be fired by the way no uh bad strategy uh but they

also think like that that's their their ticket the secret to job security is like you know be Irreplaceable be the person that like hoardes the your hordes something and that's why you're irreplaceable but I think that this fails ultimately you because it means that probably you're not able to actually have growth in your career because you're literally stuck so even if you had a you were working at a company and they were like okay we're not going to fire Jim because Jim has the secret we can't have Jim go like okay but guess what Jim I hope hope you really like that thing that you're holding the secret for because that's probably all you're ever going to be doing so I just think it's a crappy strategy um and I think that that's like a pretty career limiting thing to do uh not only that

the reality is um I think that trying to put yourself in that position just so you won't get fired or something is probably like um G to be a very uh bad surprise someday for some people so um please don't do that okay I wanted to get that out of the way because I think that that's one sort of perspective we can take when looking at this question but um I do think that the way that this person's asking this is like is not so much hey I want to be Irreplaceable like how do I maliciously find a way that's going to secure me that kind of a situation but they're actually saying like I do want to be like a tech lead which like I do want to have responsibilities and be important and be valuable so when they say Irreplaceable to me it

sounds like and they kind of say it like in their their wording but like how do I make myself important and add value right so I I I do like this question um I think that there's different ways to look at this for different people um but I wanted to kind of walk through my philosophy on this and it's interesting when I was kind of looking through for a topic um and came across this one uh I I knew what I wanted to talk about about which was that very brief part and then I wanted to talk about how I approached this in my career and I was scrolling through and I saw someone leave a comment and I was like Ah that's the thing and I actually I responded to the comment I don't comment much on Reddit because usually people are uh in

my experience people are pretty awful on Reddit for some reason so I decided I would comment and say like hey like you know I appreciate that like that's kind of My Philosophy as well um but what does look like my Approach on this kind of thing is to it's going to sound very backwards so hear me out because I'll try to explain it as best I can it's not about um it's not about making yourself Irreplaceable it's to make yourself very replaceable and uh I've actually done live streams on this I've written articles on this um but it it's kind of flipping the thing around so the way in my opinion that you make yourself extremely valuable is by finding ways to to literally make yourself replaceable so that you can move on to more important work sorry I got to move over Lanes here

it's pretty was like an hour to get home so you guys are stuck with me for a long time get ready um and we have our first person of the evening without lights on behind me God I don't understand how people drive like this like did you just forget to start thinking today how you're in a car at night you don't have lights on how does it happen okay so when I talk about trying to make yourself replace the reason that I realize it sounds like kind of stupid like so you're just telling me that anyone should come in and be able to do my job and like kind of like you want you kind of want to move things to a point where anyone could be able to do your job okay so the reason that sounds scary I think to a lot of

people is because you might be saying well if anyone could do my job doesn't that literally suggest that they could get rid of me and I am of no value then but the idea here is that you've added so much value into the I'm going to use air quotes here cuz I don't have a better word for it you've added so much value into the system that that value add that you've put in has replaced you I really need this person to speed up so I can switch lanes here come on okay um sorry I if I didn't I was going to get stuck and have to merge over like three lanes no one wants that um so that idea I think is is sort of like the Crux of it right so it's not that hey you didn't add any value it's literally that

you added so much value that what you put into the system now means that you no longer have to put in any more effort because it's almost like perpetuating the value that you added and here is all the traffic excellent I thought we were on to something good but 58 minutes to get home I don't think the time went down since I got in the car which is scary so let me get a SI because I'm dying I'm so hungry eny at the same time good thing that's a smoothie so let me talk about this from an Engineering Management uh perspective because that's going to be at least a lot of my career but then we can you know have uh sort of different takes on this and I'll try to dive in different directions but I think that when it comes to Leading teams

right I don't think that like okay so when I think about leading a team I want to make sure that I'm working with the individuals on the team my role as a manager is to enable individuals to do their best work possible and align that with the business right that way they can grow in their career people have good challenges the business is able to do better because people are doing their work more effectively and it's aligned with what the business needs all these good things happen there are parts to my job that aren't just like hey let me talk with so and so make sure that things are good like there are parts to my job that are very much like we have inefficiencies or challenges and we need to sort them out and let me kind of like interject let me find ways

to work with people on the team let me find ways to work with partner teams whatever it happens to be to try and make these things better and so it's almost like trying to smooth out a lot of the different processes or whatever that are in place so when I talk about making myself replaceable as an engineering manager what I'm not saying is like oh I just need to make it so that people are so comfortable they don't need any career guidance or they don't need one-on ones like that's not what I'm getting at it's it's a lot more of the other parts so to give you an example if someone brought me into a team and was like Hey I want you to leave this team I want you to work on you know making this like an effective team that's thriving they can

be productive they can be happy and like kind of leaving that up to you to go make that happen right um if the team itself wasn't sort of working well together maybe it's a new team maybe it's a team that's had some churn like whatever whatever the situation happens to be like my goal just from a team Dynamic would be to try and make sure that the team can work cohesively okay so that the team has aligned values in terms of what the team's Charter is the things that they need to be delivering if this sounds all kind of handwavy the reason I'm saying these things is because when it comes to the different types of work items that are coming up that we need to prioritize and get work done on ultimately there's going to be disagreements and priority there's going to be disagreements

in implementation deta but when the team canally behind like what are the things that our team values that we want to prioritize when there's alignment that way it makes those conversations when there's disagreements around priority or what's most important or how to approach things you can really start to say hey look if we go back to what our team cares about this is an important thing like that means that we should prioritize this thing over this other thing and it can make decision making a lot more clear but that's an aspect of like efficiency within the team okay so my goal is to try and drive a team towards that now it's not as clear-cut as that it's not just like I snap my fingers and like hey everyone on the team is aligned and we get along and everything makes sense and there's never

any CH like it's not like that but I need to work with the team to build up like what that looks and feels like it also means that I need to make sure that the team is comfortable having disagreements I need to make sure that the team is comfortable refining their processes speaking up about things right um we can't just have a team where the one senior person on the team just like calls all the shots and everything none of the Juniors can talk can't have a team where the Juniors don't feel comfortable asking questions like there's all of these different components that go into making a team run smoothly but at the end of the day if I am the one that constantly has to go around enabling that to happen I don't have time to do other effective things so the way that

I approach this kind of stuff as an engineering manager is sort of finding ways to enable the team to do that so to give you an example of what I mean by that is like if I were to talk just to give you a really simple contrived example um we're talking about team processes and um we don't do code reviews yet right and I want to propose to the team hey buddy you're not supposed to merge over that line what a jerk um that's not what I would propos on the team sorry um if I if I want to go say like hey like we actually have a gap here we need to like propose this we should do code reviews we should put something in place like if I'm the one who's constantly doing that and looking for all of those opportunities that's something

that I am constantly required to do it means I'm going to have to go chase down the next thing and propose it and the next Improvement and the next Gap to try and make progress on but instead what I should be doing is demonstrating to the team hey look we should be able to have open conversations about these opportunities to improve things right and then empowering them to be able to speak up about that kind of stuff and I might catch on a little bit more with the senior people come on get in here go go go go oh my God let just this is I wish I've said this before I wish that I could have two cameras in here maybe this channel will be successful one day and I can have two cameras going and I can hire a vlog editor and I

can show you what I'm seeing because holy man it's some people and the driving ability they don't they don't meet um the point sorry we got a long time so this is it's pretty wordy and I apologize but uh the point I'm trying to say here is that I want to enable my team to be able to start doing that stuff I want them to know that they're supported and suggesting things that we can try things out but it's not me sitting there just telling the team here's how we make improvements I need to show them that it's safe to do so safe to make suggestions safe that we can experiment with trying something and if it sucks then we undo it it's okay but this is one example right and when I can find ways like that in a team ultimately what's happening is

I am I am slowly replacing myself right the example I was giving there was like hey let me try to find a way to suggest to the team a way that we can be better right let's introduce code reviews that should help us write better software okay and I can keep doing these things but instead of me doing that if I teach the team how they can do it I'm slowly replacing that aspect of what I do and that doesn't mean that I will never have an opinion about stuff or ever speak up it just means that I'm no longer required to do it every single time same thing another quick example um you know helping more Junior people on the team if I were responsible on a team to go around and make sure that I was helping everyone individually that would occupy a

lot of my time and I want to make sure that everyone is helped but the only way to really scale that is to make sure other people on the team are enabling it to happen and that means that you need to have more senior people helping more Junior people out you need to have people helping out their peers so again trying to create a culture on the team where people do this it's another example and it's like these are small things right but an example of where I am doing things that start replacing me there are certain aspects like the 101s I was talking about or career conversations those are parts that like ultimately I'm going to need to do that but there's a lot of other elements that I am air quotes replacing myself I'm showing the team how they can make the whole

team more effective so this is sort of like a philosophy that I followed throughout my entire career um and yeah like the the reality is if I can have a team doing that where the team really feels like they're autonomous in terms of how they're accomplishing work you know what's like a really cool test of this is to be a to go on vacation right and you come back and it's not like the team's like oh thank God you're back like we we didn't know like how to get this work done and this thing came up and we couldn't rep prioritize it and like Joey's been stuck on this bug for two weeks and like if you can come back and people are like yeah like we've been going like things are good we're making progress you know you have a thing here and there

maybe that come up but when overall everyone feels like very good when you step away to go on vacation to do something right it's a really interesting little check to be able to say hey look like that team is actually doing pretty well so just to you know I just wanted to kind of share that perspective as an engineering manager like that it ALS like that this philosophy applies to how I look at my career as well from a sorry there like a seed in my throat from my smoothie from a software engineering perspective as an individual contributor the the way that someone responded in the comments like the one comment that I replied to they said something along the lines of like don't don't try to like um how do they say it it's not don't make yourself Irreplaceable but they kind of said

like almost like run towards being replaceable like this is that's the direction you want to go in like automate your job or automate yourself out of a job which I think is super interesting right um this might I mean the analogy doesn't make sense for everything you're doing in your role so don't um I know as software Engineers like a lot of the time we're very literal and and what someone's saying and you might say well that absolutely doesn't make sense I can't just have everything automated that I do um and I don't think that's the the point of what this person is saying but if you imagine the things that you're responsible for okay it's a little bit easier to imagine with like a live service or something like that uh but even without let's say that part of your job is like you're

responsible for uh product like a feature area okay could be a service um part of a service or like truly like a feature area in a product that shipped doesn't have to be a live service whatever you're responsible for it there might be aspects of your job where like you need to be looking at data okay so I'm just I'm making up an example here bear with me um so you have to be looking at data as part of your job because we need to make data driven decisions okay so you start things off by being like okay we need the data we actually don't have any data that's being reported so you might start off by going okay like you know um what's really important for our our customers is like latency latency is really important to look at so what you do is

you're like well I need the data so I'm going to go run some tests and collect this information and you go run it and you're like okay well here's here's our latency you have some numbers okay you're happy like you have a starting point this is helpful and then you share this with your manager your team whatever product owner and it's like okay well those latency numbers aren't good enough we need to improve them and you're like makes sense okay drive towards this goal and then what happens is you make those improvements and then you're like okay well I have to go run those you know I have to go collect that data again okay so you go do it you spend some time doing it now the problem with this is that both you you acknowledge like we need data so let me start

by saying the good thing is that you went and figured out what data you need to collect right you did you did a good thing we need data let me go find how to do it let me do it let me analyze it now the problem is that both times you had to go do it okay so what about the third time well you might say okay look instead of me doing this every time I am going to automate this part why don't we instead have the metrics always going up somewhere right okay so now the next time I need metrics hey look like we spent some extra time we built this thing the metrics always go up now I need metrics I'm just going to go look where the metrics are reported and now I can just do the analysis this is great and

then you're doing the analysis you go okay manager product owner again however this looks um you know here's the analysis and it looks like we have regressed a little bit so like let's go make sure that we can you know we'll spend some time and we'll we'll tune this and you might do this for a little while and then you start to realize like hold on like why am I why am I running the analysis every time here why am I doing this like wouldn't it be good if it just told me when there was an issue so then you go okay look hey manager product owner we're going to invest in trying to make this more like more efficient instead of me spending x amount of time every week or every two weeks whatever it is collecting the data like that's already sorry you're

not collecting anymore analyzing the data let's say and then trying to say oh now we've regressed or we're good I'm going to go change the infrastructure a little bit and it's going to alert us if we regress so you invest a little bit of time into that and now you've automated this part of your job that you are responsible for completely away so it's not that like hey you don't have to code anymore but you had some responsibility and what you are able to do is leverage software for a core part of what you're responsible for to be able to start making that go away so this is just one simple contrived example where your job requires you know metrics and Analysis um and finding ways to make that better so the idea being you know in your role whatever that happens to be right

looking for these opportunities how am I spending time how am I spending time how can I make it not not so that people come to me and I am the bottleneck right that's another way to look at it perhaps is like maybe less of like a technology perspective but historically you know people are people come to you because you have the secret sauce but you're the bottleneck now and it might feel good for a bit because you're like oh like I'm important like people come to me for this I'm the subject matter expert but the challenge with this is that you're the bottleneck so you can actually make the entire team more efficient by enabling the entire team or at least more people to do that thing that you're doing right like what if people didn't have to come to you to get that data

or to make some change what if they didn't have to do that what if instead that was something that multiple people could do or better yet what if that was something that there was an automatic system for that didn't require people to have to do it they could just go use the tool or use the system and not have to disrupt anyone to make that happen so this is sort of that mentality or the philosophy around trying to automate yourself out of that job and instead of latching on to these things where you're like I need to be the person that holds on to this how can you find ways to say like nope like I'm not going to be the person that holds on to this here's the tool or the system or the process make it happen and now you're probably saying well

then what like why do I want to do this because aren't I just giving up the things that like people see me as important for but I think it is backwards thinking I understand why it's kind of easy to to think this way but like let's let's take a step out from that um that that thought process okay so now let's imagine that you're an engineering manager okay would you rather have people that you're bringing on to your team that are being bottlenecks that are hoarding information that do do things manually or would you rather bringing on people to your team that enable all of their peers to be effective that aren't bottlenecks that try to automate things so that they're not spending their own manual time doing it like if you see what I'm doing there I'm flipping the entire thing around you look

much more valuable to other people when you're able to demonstrate that you're doing those things so that's why I'm saying it's backwards thinking it might feel like oh I'm so important to have this thing that I own and no one else can touch it but the reality is like think about the people that are trying that want you on the team right you don't want to compose a team of people that are going to hoard information or or gatekeep certain processes or something like you want the exact opposite so you become much more of an attractive employee in terms of like your capabilities by flipping that mindset around so yeah I I I hope that kind of helps for the framing right it's like people people would want to hire the person where they're like holy crap look that person you know they enabled their

whole team or part of their organization whatever to be so much more impact like more uh effective like we want that like that's we want that over here I want that person right this is why like even on some of those things sometimes it doesn't have to be like a a technology specific thing it can this is why we talk about informal leadership a lot and why that can be so valuable is like I know the context here was a little bit about like automating yourself out of the job right but um when you can it's not just an auto like an automate kind of solution it's more like um making like truly making yourself replaceable right I like thinking about informal leadership this way because you can what you end up doing a lot of the time with uh with people that are really

good like um in my opinion really good informal leaders is like they take their time and effort they invest it into other people and they sort of it's like a multiplier effect right so they enable those other people around them to be better but it also builds up a culture of like other people seeing the positive effect of doing this and then they start to do more of it too the exact opposite thing Can Happen by the way when you have a culture where people are like are the opposite of multipliers and they can be like really toxic so I think it's really important to try and make sure that you have these types of people that are that are truly like multipliers really good informal leaders uh helping others be better and then trying to reduce as much as POS as much as possible

the uh sort of the people that are more toxic in the other direction but um yeah I think that's a lot of what I wanted to say but um the reality is there's another 23 minutes left in this drive because this is crazy traffic so I don't know if I have any more for this topic but I still want to chat with you folks so um now that you're here if you're still listening hopefully that was an interesting topic um I think like I said at the beginning of this rate if you have questions you want answered put them in the comments uh or message me it's probably more valuable for you I'm assuming if you're like hey I'm curious about this like message me I'll lit I'll literally make a video and as long as it's not ridiculous if it's uh related to your

engineering career I'd be happy to do that um but with that said maybe you know I got a little bit of time on the drive left here so um maybe let's just talk about code commu in the direction I'm trying to head with things so I I recently I I think I mentioned this in one of the last videos but Channel recently was monetized which is pretty cool um I actually don't know if YouTube was showing ads on the channel before I feel like why wouldn't they um they're just not giving me a cut of them monetization on a channel I think if you're not familiar with like uh with YouTube and stuff having a monetized channel does not mean like all of a sudden like I'm I'm rolling in the dough um my main channel has uh you know nine nine times almost 10

times the uh the subscriber base is this one and uh I think it's declined recently because I had a couple of weeks over the holidays where I wasn't pumping out as much content but um from ad Revenue it makes it was peing at like $3 a day okay so and if you're like hey like that's still like that's like a 100 bucks a month but yeah it is but like context uh three videos a week plus an hour and a half so an hour to two hour live stream okay so we're already ready like a bunch of time um I used to edit my own videos I stopped doing that because that was chewing up a lot of time so I pay an editor I pay to have my thumbnails made uh that channel that makes $3 a day also loses about $500 to $1,000

a month so so I'm very underwater on my main Channel um so having I'm just sharing this with you so you understand when I talk about like why this is exciting for me is um having code commute as a second monetized Channel um I will be you know hoping to cover more of my costs on my main channel that requires professional editing um which is pretty cool if this continues to grow like obviously if we're looking in the future like um if this channel gets bigger I actually think this channel will overtake my main one at the sort of based on the metrics I see um it might take a little while but I think it'll do it if that's the case then you know at some point maybe I can hire an editor for this this channel um I don't know if people are

like hey no we actually like the format we'll just stick with that so I don't know we'll have to see but um right now the way that I've structured this channel is really nice for me to be able to uh very low I use the phrase activation energy a lot but it's a low activation energy approach for me to get content on the internet and uh based on the feedback I've been getting in messages and stuff people are finding it very helpful so I'll keep doing it but the when I say activation energy if you're like Nick what the hell are you talking about um I I a lot of what I do is like I I end up like overworking myself I spread myself too thin and then the result of that is that um it's not quite burnout but like I kind of

ride this fine line of like I'm overwhelmed and what can happen is like if I'm riding that line too close and something comes up and then I become overwhelmed it's almost like everything falls apart so to give you an example I mean I was sick over the holidays a little bit so uh not quite the same but if I'm over overwhelmed then I might go well I can't make YouTube videos and then that starts to fall apart and then I'm like well if I'm not making YouTube videos I can't be posting online like I don't have capacity to think about responding to people's comments like everything just starts to to kind of have a cascading um like downward spiral right so um when something when I'm saying it's a low activation energy what I'm trying to say is like it doesn't stress me out to

go turn this like turn a camera on and talk to it about software engineering topics so that's actually very helpful for me because there are some things I do as a content creator that are extremely high activation energy and one of them is like what I do on my main Channel when I have to put together a programming tutorial that is high activation energy um it's less activation energy for me when I have a a handful of topics that I can string together for tutorials but I still have to go sit down and code them and walk through and it's more Technical and um for example you hear me saying um and thinking and pausing here like I need to be cognizant of that when I'm recording stuff because that's time that my editor has to sit there and trim out so it's just like

it's just more it's more stress it's more work but this is uh this is nice for me to be able to do this now I also acknowledge that because this was a long drive by the time I wrapped up the topic probably half the audience or more already was like nope I'm out of here like I'm came for what I wanted but the other nice thing about this channel is that I think actually a bunch of you stick around you're like I'm on I'm driving anyway or I'm on the bus or I'm commuting like whatever I'll just hang out um so it feels a little bit nicer that way that I feel a little bit more connected with uh with the subscriber base right now which is cool so I did want to say thank you for being here cuz I do appreciate it it's

uh actually I talked to my wife about this last night today's Wednesday right yeah last night um so I did my I'll I'll just kind of give you the background story here so I did my my Dev leader live stream on Monday which by the way um that's every Monday at 700 p.m. Pacific if you want to come check that out and uh it's cool like there's actually a bunch of people from from code commute that are coming over and looking at that so it's it's great to see you guys there um but I was what had happened was someone like did use like super chat and they tipped me which is super cool like I was uh you know it's not it's not the the amount of money or whatever it could have been a penny it could have been like $100 doesn't matter

the point is that someone was thankful and did it so it kind of caught me off guard and I had said to them like my wife watches a lot of like Court TV like loves watching uh live streams of uh of basically former lawyers or or maybe they are currently lawyers talk through court cases and stuff like very interesting for her but they're live streaming it and we've talked about the fact that like if you just sit there and watch it you'll see that's constant people tipping and I'm sure like given the size of Their audience their sponsorships whatever else like I'm sure they're making a killing from it right it's nuts um so I made a comment on stream that was like Hey like thank you so much for that um I mentioned the court thing that my wife watches that and um I

said like my wife I think she probably thinks what I'm doing is a little bit silly like that I you know I have my YouTube channel with my my tutorials and my live stream and like I have code commute and like I think to her she's probably like okay like that's that's very nice but the reality is like she she knows that I enjoy doing it and um and like supports me that I'm doing it so we were talking about this last night and uh and I said to her like you know we were talking through how I I mentioned it on stream and she's like oh but like you know you made me sound so supportive but like you know I know you probably like probably don't actually enjoy it or whatever like it's just work and I said no like that's actually not

true um I said sure like the tutorials and stuff like back to the activation energy I said sure like that's sometimes pretty taxing but I said to go to a live stream I said I actually I do really enjoy that and like same with code K I said I do enjoy that and I enjoy it because it's uh it's this opportunity at least for me um I I get the opportunity where I'm helping people and that that just feels good like it's a very fulfilling thing so um you know I realize that even like maybe this part of my conversation you're like Nick that's you're not helping anyone you're just blabbing um I put out a lot of videos Okay so uh when I have people message me and stuff or they say in the comments like hey that really helped like that actually makes

me feel really good um so being able to have folks like you listening give me some time of day of yours everyone's got busy days so the fact that you chose to sit and listen to me talk about this stuff and hung out with me and you were willing to kind of hear about my experiences like I do really appreciate apprciate that uh the when people write in like I don't know for for some perspective like think about it this way like this is maybe one of the best ways I can put it I have complete strangers that are writing me emails and sending me LinkedIn messages and trusting me to talk about a topic like they're explaining all these details because they're hopeful that I can help them at least navigate or have some different perspective and for me that feels really cool because

like like I said they are strangers to me and the fact that they're like hey I I at least admire some part of what you're saying and how you're talking about these things like that feels good to me so um being able to do code commute being able to do Dev leader being able to put out content and stuff like I do enjoy that it's a it is a Feelgood kind of thing so anyway I wanted to say thank you but uh I don't know I think this channel this Channel's been a lot of fun to put together it's been I don't know when I actually started doing it a little bit more seriously but there's over a hundred like vid like Vlogs on the channel already and I think it's only like a few months old so tires are low come on oh maybe

that was gas it's both need gas and need airs air in the tires it's never ending but um what I was sorry what I was trying to say for this channel is like there's a lot of videos that get to go out which is cool but um I want to I asked this question on one of the community posts on YouTube and there's this option to essentially like have like Channel memberships and the original question I had to folks was like Hey like for me code commute is like I get to get to I like cars like it's a hobby of mine so I get to be in the car talk about software engineering also a hobby of mine also my career and um initially and I mean this is always kind of going on in my mind I'm like are people joining in for

the software engineering or are they joining in because they're like hey like I like cars too um I think based on that question and I don't know just like as the channels going on I think it is a lot more for software engineering but I've been curious if people like wanted to see more car stuff and I was thinking I might do and I have to experiment with this and kind of get feedback but what I might do is like Channel memberships and uh I'll show more behind the scenes for car stuff and I think that might be fun for some people um it's just one of those things like if people are interested like that might be fun to do but I don't want to do Channel memberships that don't actually offer value to people like if I if I do it and people

are like hey like we just don't care about the car stuff then like then that's a waste of everyone's time I won't do it but we'll see so um just kind of wanted to share that because I'm trying to think if there's some interesting things to do there I on my main Dev leader Channel I did Channel memberships for um what are essentially like weekly Vlogs and I think I had one person do a channel membership before I was like noex screw I'm not going to do this because it was kind of an indicator like if I make it available and people just don't want to pay for it then I just it's either I'm not telling people about it or they don't find it valuable and truly like I'm not it's not going to hurt my feelings if people don't find it valuable that's

totally fine I will find totally fine I will find another thing to do um so it's one thought for the channel membership we'll see but I think there could be some exciting things I might as this channel grows I might try to look for channel sponsors and stuff but I have to be like conscious because because I have the two channels Dev leader and code commute um if I get channel sponsors for this like I I I need to start covering costs on dev leader so they might feed back into that but I would like to be able to feed um you know if this channel is making any money I'd like to feed back into what this channel is doing so I already have the equipment the thing I mentioned earlier about the two cameras like I'm going to need an editor for that

to to stitch that stuff together so there's editing cost right um I think I'm a long way if I already can't support one channel economically I think uh supporting a second doing the same thing is going to be kind of tricky as well so anyway point of all this is like I'm just thinking through like the growth of this Channel and where I want it to go so got some fun stuff ahead but lots of options to explore so how long's this been I'm stopped right now that's why I'm looking at the camera so 50 minutes we'll wrap it up I appreciate you being here thanks for sticking to the end and I'll see you next time