Is Content Creation a Good Side Hustle for Software Engineers?

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, we're going to YouTube for a question. I apologize. I've been sick for a little bit and my nose is still a little plugged, but the question is from Epic Technav. Thanks again for your questions. You got lots of good questions. This one says, "What's your advice for a software engineer looking to start making content? I've been thinking about it as a side hustle." Um, so let's chat because I think that this is something I've been doing for a little while. Um, and I'll kind of give you a little bit of background for those of you that are that are new to the channel. Um, because I think some of the history is kind of important for me explaining my perspective on it. So, um, Dev Leader itself is like my main sort of personal brand. Obviously, you're watching code commute right now.

I do code commute like as part of my whole personal branding for software engineering but it's kind of just a different take on how I I share content and dev leader is my my main personal brand and that originally started 13 years ago and I started that by trying to create blogs and I did that because as a new to engineering management sort of role and like someone exploring this kind of stuff uh I was like hey it would be good to learn in public to like try and document the journey and and stuff I'm learning about going from being a developer to an engineering manager. And I'm sharing this because and I I will always kind of bring up this story because when I gave up on content creation, I think it's cuz it was the wrong motivation. And um part of uh the question here is like I'm I'm thinking about starting it as a side hustle.

And this part makes it super tricky. I feel like because turning it into a side hustle is not something that happens quickly. Like you I think a lot of people uh underestimate the amount of like time and commitment that goes into it to be able to monetize it. So for example um you know like I I do my YouTube videos and stuff all all outside of work. like it's just on top of what I do on my day job, on top of building brand ghost as a business, like outside of work and I like to make videos like this, right, to try and help people. Um, I don't have sponsors on my videos, right? I could spend more time and try to look for sponsors. There are times where I've had the odd like sponsor like ad placement and stuff like that, but when I've talked to those people, even if they're repeat for putting ads in videos, u I still don't have any that are like willing to pay for videos, right?

So, this channel's a little bit unique because I just kind of make the content. I usually am doing it while I'm driving, but I'm trying to catch up now that it's a long weekend and I've been sick. But on my main YouTube channel, like I lose hundreds of dollars every month publishing videos. Like I lose money creating content. Um I end up making money from course sales on the side. And the only reason I make money on that is because I use like I'm a creator for domain. And if you're a net developer, you know Nick Chapsis and that's his course platform. So all of that to say like if I was relying on my own content creation like I am not the a good person to model for for monetizing content and making it a side hustle. U and if you see the content I create you know that I create a ton of content like this is like what I enjoy doing uh outside of work.

So again, all of this to to try try and frame up the question a little bit more is like um my personal take on content creation for software engineers as a side hustle is like buckle up because if your goal is to like make money as a side thing, the amount of time and effort that goes into it is significant. I don't personally make Tik Tok videos and stuff where I'm like doing trendy things and trying to make viral videos. Um, you know, is that easier than putting educational content together? Maybe, maybe not. It's way more work for me because I would burn the hell out if I was trying to look up Tik Tok dances and trendy things and probably not dances, but you know what I mean? Like doing all that kind of stuff on a regular basis to try and be like, what's what's going to get me the next big wave of views?

I would die. Uh, I would rather just talk about software engineering stuff, right? And if that means I get lower views because it's a little bit boring, like at least the people that I'm reaching, hopefully it's helping, right? Some perspective. So, I don't say that to discourage. I just say that to like set, you know, set some expectations because I think that's important. Um, you might be way better than me at this kind of stuff and that would be great if you got started and just had better traction. I know there's a guy on LinkedIn, I I can't remember his name, but he had done like six YouTube videos or something, and like on his sixth one, he ended up getting like, you know, uh tons and tons of views on it. It was kind of just a talking head video like this one.

I haven't even watched it, but he got more subscribers from that video than I've got on this channel and my main dev leader channel in like 3 years just from one video. And like that's not even like the number of views and stuff he got isn't even insane compared to some YouTubers. It's just like it happened to take off and he got a lot of subs from it, right? And like I think on this channel, I don't even know like how many videos I have now. How many videos YouTube? 424 videos on this channel alone. Like these are all vlog entries kind of like this one, right? So, and this is uh been 3 years now with dev leader sort of uh creating content more regularly. Um code can be a little shorter than that. But point is I do tons of content. I hope that it's helpful.

Um but in terms of monetizing it, like that's a whole different angle to add in. So to kind of come back to the question, if you wanted to get started doing this, my personal recommendation is to start off by um like take things slow because if you try to do too much all at once, it will be overwhelming and you'll give up. I say this as someone who has given up. I say this as someone who has consistent systems in place now. I've literally like built software like Brand Ghost to try and help with the consistency thing. because I know how big of a problem this is for people trying to get started with content creation. So, find a couple different angles. So, find stuff that you enjoy talking about related to software engineering, right?

Um you'll notice that if you try to do too much all at once, you kind of have to like start gravitating towards stuff you might not really be interested in, but you're like, I got to talk about it cuz it's trendy or whatever. and and now it's like work and now you're like why am I doing this? Like it sucks. It's a pain in the butt. Um you you'll burn out from it, right? So try to find the things that you like talking about. If you watch my other content like on Dev Leader, I actually like the code commute topics better because these are general software engineering career things. I love talking about this stuff because it's literally my career. dev leader like how it's like how I built my audience there is a lot of C development. I had to go split other channels off because people only wanted to see C stuff on that YouTube channel.

I love C# but I'm more than just C. So dev leader has become like work for me because people have car questions and I'm like I don't want to be every otherNet YouTuber where I'm just like here's how to here's what dry and clean mean like C context. I'm like this is I'm not I don't want to be that. It's just it's not for me. No offense to those people. There's lots of people doing it and crushing it. It's just not for me. So I love code commute topics. Find something in software engineering you love to talk about. Another angle is learn in public. Right? This is how I started when I do dev leader topics. A lot of my dev leader stuff at this point is me learning in public. Why? Like I could keep doubling down on all the stuff that I know Created and realistically I should to try and get more content out.

It's kind of like what I say for social media stuff in general. You can say it once, you know, a small fraction of your audience will see it. That's why I end up making sometimes the same videos here on code commute answering the same questions. I'm like, I'll do it. I know more people will watch it. It's fine. I should do that more for Dev Leader. But um a lot of the time for me to get inspiration, I'm like, hey, there's this thing that I'm learning about with AI tooling and how I'm trying things out or you know, more recently it was like source generators and Rosland. I don't know a lot of that innet. I'm still terribly inexperienced at it, but like why not make some videos and show people what I'm trying to do? Like learn in public, right? A big challenge I have to cough.

Sorry. A big challenge that happens with this is that if you're trying to learn about content creation and um getting people to to watch the stuff that you're doing, engage with it, you'll see that people will say you like you need to become an authority in the space, right? You want people to come to you because they trust and respect you. You're a knowledgeable person. You're an expert. And like this is true to build up over time. I agree with that. Right? If I like I did it for a long time in my YouTube videos because this was advice given to me and I cut it out just cuz it's like it it wastes I don't want to say waste time. It spends more time and it like disengages people I think. But I will tell people in videos or I'll remind you on code comm right like I'm a principal level software engineering manager at Microsoft.

I don't say that to brag. I don't like to me the titles and stuff don't actually really matter. But I say that because if you have no idea who I am and like why I might be relevant, I might not be even relevant at all to you. That's totally fine. But if you're like, who is this person? Should I value the things they're saying? Am I just a random dude who happened to pick up a microphone and I have tattoos and a bald head? Maybe. Maybe. Like that is part of who I am, but like also I've been doing this for a while, right? So I can try to offer some background about why I do have experience in the space, build up some authority talking about similar topics over and over, right? When you're learning in public and sharing this kind of stuff, one of the challenges that happens is that people get this stuff confused.

Learning in public is different than being an expert. And when you're trying to learn things and then you confuse that with being an expert, my goodness, um, what ends up happening is that the way that you come across is like, I'm an expert on this topic and you write very confidently and you share details and people are like, people that are more experts look at what you're saying and they're like, you're full of Like people can see through it, right? Like so the point is not to trick people into being an expert. If you're going to learn in public, I think that's a great strategy for you know engaging with other people, building an engaged audience, like working with others, you get to learn yourself. This is different than being an expert in a space. And if you do enough learning in public and just learning in general, you'll have topics that you can talk about where you do have expertise and that's totally fine.

So, in my opinion, be careful about how you treat these because it can be offputting to an audience if you're like pretending to be something you're not. I guess it's a very long-winded way of saying don't pretend to be something you're not. So, um find stuff that you love to talk about in software engineering. Uh if you're going to learn in public, treat it as learn in public. Be open, honest, transparent, vulnerable. Treat it as a learning opportunity. Um, I think that you need to start small so that you can be consistent. I think this is incredibly important because it can be very overwhelming. And then once you give up on creating content, if you're like, "Hey, it's too much work. I'm not going to do it this week, these couple weeks, this month." Good luck getting the rhythm and momentum back, right? It took me 10 years.

Do better than me, please. So, um, I find like ways to become consistent. So, I've talked about brand ghost, right? If you watch my channel, you know that I build brand ghost on the side. I f for me, I focus on content that's educational because a few reasons. One, it's what I actually care about talking about. I want to be helpful and educational. Two, um, I can reuse the content because if unless what I'm talking about fundamentally changes, and a lot of the time it doesn't fundamentally change, it might become outdated because there's newer things. But if it's not fundamentally changing, I can reuse that content, which means creating a piece of content becomes an investment because I can repost it later. Means I save time later. All of my dev leader content is like that. I I literally for the first time in almost two years, I just wrote a blog article like AI assisted and it has a disclaimer and says it um on my website and it's going to go out tomorrow.

By the time you watch this, it's it's already been out. But I've been doing newsletters for two years, but I haven't written other articles on my website. I just been repurposing the content, right? So like short form videos, I'm clipping more short form videos because I've been repurposing them. My YouTube video links that I send out some of the you like people are like I had someone being like why are we still talking about autofac? I'm like because autofac still in use first of all. Second of all it's because that video is a year and a half, two years old. it's still relevant if you use autofac. It's not like you can just migrate a whole codebase in a company and move away from something uh trivially. So anyway, educational stuff is reusable and very valuable and it saves me time. So I like to do that because then I can um not feel like I'm const like every day I have to come up with a new topic.

What am I going to post about? I can take I built up enough content now and I've shared if you watch my live streams so uh Dev Leader podcast YouTube channel every Monday at 7:00 p.m. Pacific I do a live stream on topics from this channel. I've I periodically show my Brand Ghost content calendar and like I have, you know, I have content across all these different types and formats and I can go like show you like, you know, two years out, full month of content scheduled, and there's enough there like the the memes I post uh at the rate that I post them, you won't see them repeat for over a year. My blog articles, the same thing for over a year. my short form videos the same thing I think for two years you won't see them repeat. So there's creating content that's reusable is how I systemize um to make that easier for me.

Um what else is worth sharing? Um batching content creation I think is very helpful. So everyone will be different I think for this but I don't like thinking about creating a bunch of pieces of content end to end. I have to do it um in kind of steps. So I might draft, you know, five LinkedIn posts at the same time. Sorry, my throat's so uh tickly from talking. Um and I do that because it it's like a different state of mind where I'm like I want to generate some ideas and kind of like play around with it. And I'm like cool now that I'm feeling fatigued from that like step away. And then another session I might sit down for those five LinkedIn posts and I'll like kind of massage them and edit them and kind of format them and I'm like okay I feel

good about this and that might be just like across two sessions I get like five LinkedIn post on them but it's like ideation in one and then like editing and polish in the other short form videos I will take a session and I will clip a bunch of them but I'm not going to like I don't write post for them and then another session after I'll go through a handful of the clipped videos and I'll write some quick post for them and have them uh automatically scheduled by brand go. So doing things in batches I think help I think helps um depending on how your brain works. That's how it works for me. Um collaborating with others I think is a great strategy for content creation. I think one of the side effects of content creation for software developers is the networking part cannot be um cannot be overstated.

So I know the question was really about like as a side hustle but man like the networking opportunities just because you're actually actively engaging with other creators super helpful. Um what else? I don't know like if you have questions around like how to get sponsored content and stuff like that. Um, I think ask right like ask companies a lot of the time they're looking for like follower counts and how much engagement and stuff you get, but like the reality is if you don't ask, don't just wait for stuff to show up. Like ask will make a big difference. Um, and then honestly consistency, right? The it's the final thing I'll say on this is just like you have to keep showing up because you don't it sounds like I don't know like Alex Hermosi says stuff like this and it sometimes sounds kind of funny but like you only lose at it if you give up right.

So, if I go back to the thing I said at the beginning of this video, I started Dev Leader 13 years ago and I gave up for 10 years, right? So, I have been doing Dev Leader consistently for three years after a 10-year break. But that means over three times that length of time that I've been doing this consistently, I've taken off. Imagine if I just would have stayed consistent that whole time, right? So stick with it. Don't give up. Pace yourself. If you need little breaks, that's fine. But use that as a reminder that like maybe you're trying to do too much all at once and then find ways to make that sustainable for you. So um I do encourage everyone at a minimum try learning in public. I think it's such an awesome way to um to get feedback, to learn from others, work on communication.

In terms of a side hustle, I do think that like it's a little bit less glamorous than it looks. Like it can be a lot of work and not a lot of money going into your pocket. Um I lose money every month on YouTube, but I like putting out content. So, I hope that helps. Thanks for the question. I'll see you in the next video.