handling an uncertain market w/james quick

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auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me, old fashioned email, social media at tdesint, D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. All right. That took a second to load. I was like, well, we're obviously not going live today. Because it's not loading. It's good to see all this morning. Good morning. That was here yet. I don't even want to say that.

Excited to hang out with James. Yo, yo. So the last time James and I did this thing. So long ago. Yeah, I just cold DMS. James said, Hey, James, I admire stuff. I kind of I really use my own template that I preach, right? Hey, I'd not even go to great. Would love to go live with you. But no, James goes, yeah, sure, let's do it. So we went live and I don't really do like stage stuff, right? I know a lot of podcasts and a lot of prep, 10 questions, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, hey, let's just get on and hang out, right? I, the whole point of this show is to, it's to really kind of be a fireside chat with individuals.

And so that's what I want. So James, I texted James Morrisley, what do you want to talk about? He was like, well, he goes here. And I said, man, this is great. So we're going to talk about, actually, I'm going to read our text. I said, he goes, have you talked much about handling uncertain markets right now as a developer, power networking, content, et cetera? I said, actually, my daily vlog this morning is the job market sucks. So let's chat about that. So for those of you, again, welcome. I want to give a shout out to that conference. So I need to actually, I need to open up a banner real quick.

So actually that conference is the official coffee sponsorship. of Oh sweet. Guy just counts as 2.0. For those of you who did not know, there's a conference actually sells coffee beans, and they're really, really good. I promise they're good. Drinking right now. Check it out. I'll have any more. Say what? But he did. I had some. I bought him in. Well, I need to send you some. He gave me an entire box. So do you send me one? Okay. Yeah. Yeah, because I, yeah, because I bought like three bags in Wisconsin and then he didn't have them with them in Texas. in Texas and I won't be there in Wisconsin again.

So yeah, you have to send me something. Yeah, awesome. Do something. So anyways, James is great. Shout out that conference. So that being said, James, let's dive into it, man. So give the people actually want to give people shout out. There's a lot of people tune in this morning. See here, William's good to see your brother, Joshua, Marshall Brandon from Marshall's in Tennessee, by the way. Yeah, he has Columbia, Columbia, Tennessee. Yeah, sweet. Alex, great to see you. Dev, Mark, Kevin, JC from Memphis. It's good to see your brother Becky Michael Morgan Chris Bill I didn't know Chris Jarvis was a Nashville. I don't think yeah, Chris are oh wow James quick.

I'm wrestling Yeah, look at this. Yeah, so again James pretty cool James cool So I'm gonna stop talking James get the people what they want Who are you? What do you do? Yeah? I think my tagline like covers the the simple part. I don't know if you're showing it, but developers speaker and teacher I've been doing some combination of that stuff professionally for for about 10 years, basically. I've spent a lot of time in developer relations, developer advocacy for companies have experienced in engineering and architecture. And then most recently, for the last eight months or so, I've been doing content creation in full time, which the background that's super relevant to that is I was like go from my job in July of 2022 and took that as an opportunity to do content creation in full time, which is something I've been thinking about.

I was scared to do. know if like I could actually pull it off. And so eight months in, things are going really well. And awesome. It's cool. I guess one of the big things that I talked about, I talked about this a lot on the keynote at that conference in Texas, which Taylor is giving. One of those in Wisconsin was just how tough times are, right? Like I feel like every day I'm getting either getting a message from a friend of mine or seeing a message from someone saying and they got let go. And it's scary, but it also, I think, just raises the importance of networking and the impact that content creation can have on your career and that sort of stuff.

So I figured we could talk about that today. Yeah, definitely. I want to talk, and again, for those of you who are so funny, Aaron, yo, James background's getting louder. Going to new heights, I see. Yeah, James, you want to give a background in the ladder, because I'm sure people are like, what the heck's going on? Give a background on the ladder in the background. Go with the construction vibe for a day. Yeah, it actually is like almost kind of cool to be honest. Yeah, it's just a really like rustic feel. I'm a man of the people. That's what it says. For everybody that doesn't know, we were expecting our first child in May and we're doing as many house projects as we can, starting with we had our floors redone in the back half of our house, which meant all of our stuff came out of the air, which meant Jess and I and literally half of our stuff from our entire house is behind my monitors back here.

So we're just making the best of it while we can. Instead of MTV Cribs, content creators need to do like behind the screen. Yeah. Because I would love to see like other people's houses and what it looks like on the other side of your monitor. I bet we'd see some crazy stuff. So right now would be very interesting. Yeah, exactly. So James, so I've never been laid off before. I've been fired, believe it or not, internally at Vaco on some projects, but I've never been let go. So I wanna ask, man, how did it feel? Cause I wanna get in people, I wanna get your brain and try to help people as well.

And also, people see you and they're like, James is great, James has no worries in the world, right? But I mean, you went through a layoff, right? And so talk about how you felt when it happened. Talked about maybe what you did in the first 24 hours, 48 hours, et cetera. Yeah. First of all, thank you to all the comments and current examples of that. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to keep up with all of them. Yeah, that's a lot. So I appreciate that. So I've got a very unique perspective on this and I'll kind of get into why, but obviously the first thing is shock.

So the way this went down was I got to invite from the CEO of the company. And that wasn't like it's a small enough company that wasn't super weird. And I sent him a message on Slack like, hey, like anything I can do to prepare, like trying to be a good employee type thing. And he didn't respond and he sent it like an hour to you before and showed up to the meeting and HR was there. And I sent like immediately when I saw HR and they were like, we should wait till Sam gets here. I sent my wife a message who was working in the room and I was like, something, something's not right.

And I don't know if I got to send her the text like before it actually happened or not. But in my head, I was like, I'm getting like, oh, and I have like out of nowhere like completely blindsided. So he comes in and he says, this is your last day at PlanetScale immediately signed out. As he said, those words immediately sign out the slack, email, everything. Like I got notifications like Bing, Bing, Bing, just sign out of everything, which is like, I mean, traumatic, right? Like that's anybody that has gone through or can imagine going through something like that is obviously traumatic. The thing I think that worked well in my favor and the reason that I was in a unique position is a few different things.

I've been thinking about doing content creation for a couple of years. I had started to make more money as a content creator for sponsored content. So I knew I had the ability to generate some money and not be broke. So I at least could have a chance to go and pursue this thing. The other thing was, I think, I really enjoyed my time at PlanetScale as a database company. I think that wasn't the most exciting thing for me in my career. So it also turned into this opportunity of, if I were to go and work for somebody again, I could be super freaking picky and say, this is exactly the thing that I want to work for.

Again, not saying I didn't enjoy my time there because I did and the people were incredible. but it was like, it was never quite the perfect fit for me. It makes sense. But anyway, so like I talked to my wife, we kind of took the rest of the day off. I can't remember what we did the rest of the day, but then we went out oddly, ironically, for an expensive dinner that night. So like- I love that story. I love that story. I love that story. Probably not the best thing to do when you like all of a sudden don't have income, but that's what we did.

And I put this message out on Twitter. I was like, hey, like just got let go. If anybody's hiring for these type of roles, let me know. I don't know what my next steps are, but just like send me a DM. And so the big takeaway, and I feel like this is like on the verge of being insensitive, but I think it's important for people to understand the impact, is like by sending that, by posting that on Twitter overnight or over two nights, I got 100 DMs on Twitter, hey, we're hiring. And not only like we have an open position, like more messages like we'd love to hire you type thing, where it's like, I'm sure I would have to do something, but it seemed like the process would be a formality.

And so I like, I run the risk of sounding insensitive because most people don't have that. Like that's a very privileged position for me to have been in. But that's also the benefit of me having been a content creator, of me having been in the community, of me creating value for people and earning their respect over the course of years to come to this point of like, when I ultimately needed to lean on that, I could. Yeah, it's so powerful. And I want, let me ask you this, when it comes to content and it comes to networking, you know, again, there's a lot of people, I've heard it from my end, right?

I can't do a Taylor desk, right? I can't do all this stuff. And it's like, I understand. Nobody can do a Taylor desk. I understand. So, but my thing is, it's like, you know, I encourage people to start somewhere. So let me ask you this, where, what would you encourage people to start? Where should people start? Yeah, the first thing is just being active somewhere. Like Twitter is my big thing. It's a big thing for you. I think it's a big thing for a lot of people. It's kind of hit or miss right now. And people are literally uncertain. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere to be honest.

No matter how many bugs they ship to production on a regular basis, unfortunately. But it just makes it more exciting. You never know which, it's like a box of chocolate. It's Twitter as these days. But like just being active on Twitter, I think can pay huge dividends. Like now when I go to conferences and I talked about this in my talk as well, like I know people, at least from Twitter or previous conferences. Or like you don't even need to tweet. I would argue you don't even need a tweet. Like actually put out content. Do you include responding to other people in that? No, that's separate.

See, and I would push back. Okay, because there's like, I think it comes with like your visibility, right? Like the networking piece and I should also clarify, like I don't like the word networking because people use it as this whole sterile thing. I will use that word, but in your head, people that are listening substitute that for just being active and engaged in your community. Like whatever that means for you. Just being friends. Like just being there. Yeah. And so I think the visibility and networking opportunities on Twitter, like yes, you can consume a lot just from being there, but also participating, I think, raises that awareness for who you are, for what you do, and you can tailor that message too, right?

Like if you wanna be known as a React person, go and post about React, right? Like I got this feedback once where I was transitioning from a point in my career I was doing a lot of C-sharp and .NET stuff and I was moving into web development and I told someone like, yeah, I want to be a JavaScript person now and they looked at my GitHub. They're like, nothing on your GitHub says JavaScript. And so that was like a really easy thing for me of like, if you want to be known for a thing, go and talk about that thing. So Twitter, I think, is like one of the easiest ways to start because I don't know if they've actually upped the limit yet, but like you got 240 characters.

So you don't have to overthink it in some ways. You have to overthink to like concise it down. But in other ways, you're not having to create a full blog post, you're not having to create a full video, et cetera. So that's like one, just a practice of getting in the habit of sharing, I think is super important. I think blogging is another low barrier to entry. You don't have to have a video camera. You don't have to have a microphone. Like you just write, it's not my favorite activity, my favorite video, but that's more intimidating for people. Sure. But the biggest thing is just to get in the habit of consistently engaging and sharing, whether it's on Twitter or Discord or your own blog or whatever it is, just share stuff constantly and show up where developers are.

So I wanna do this, for those of you who are watching right now, if you've had a win, if you've had successes off social media, I want you to share it now. I wanna want you to brag on yourself too. I wanna show the people like the power of it because I still don't think people understand the power of social networks. So if you've had successes, let me know, Deb already posted. He was like, I'm an interview after CCO heard me speak on queer space. Love it. I mean, I don't know. Can I add like some more validity to content? I mean, technically I'm the one interviewing you.

So you can talk about it. Yeah, so I'm going to go do my thing. So resumes, right? We apply for jobs. We send in a resumes. Resumes are like literally just words on a page. They don't, they really don't mean very much at all. It's literally just like, hey, you have to do this to kind get in the door to get seen and get past that initial screen or like whatever it is. What I'm trying to make is like if you say you're a good communicator on a resume, they have no way to verify that and they get to the interview, which means that that word on your resume doesn't actually help you like get the interview versus content is kind of the ultimate validator.

Like for me at my point in my career, if you want to know if I'm a good communicator, go watch one of 500 videos that I've done. If you want to know if I know JavaScript from a technical perspective, go watch one of 200 JavaScript videos that I've done. If you want to know if so and so knows how to write, go read their blog post. If you want to know so and so knows how to engage in the community, go look at the stuff they've done in the community. All this stuff is like validation to the things that you put on your resume, which I think gives you a leg up not only to get the initial interview because you have stuff to actually reinforce the words that are there, but also then carry a lot of weight and you can talk about in the actual interviews itself.

Yeah. I love that so much. Emmett comes in here, goes all my opportunities to come from social media and I can speak to that because Emmett's kept me updated with his job search. Everything has come from social media. I think is in a good place. This was like shared and discord. So I don't think I'm getting ahead of myself. I don't think he's publicly posted it. Does end discord count us public? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. No. And we're not putting you on the spot. I just want to. Yeah. Let us know. Yeah, for me, it's being involved in the community.

It's because of that, friend introduced me to Taylor and James at RenderATLS. Yeah, I mean, again, like your community. Okay, so he said yes. So, yeah. So, congratulations. Congratulations. I get is the main point of the problem. Yeah, so Emmet found a job and he messaged me and he got it from one of his Twitter followers that has been following his journey for years. I mean, I just… I can't stress… It never fails. It never fails. I see this story over and over and over again. So another thing that people may not know about me is I've taught two rounds of bootcamp called launch code Which we start out at 160 students usually end with like 50 or 60 just because it's meant to be kind of a numbers game of get a lot of people in and try to get People to the finish line that we can Every person that's the most successful does exactly the things that we talk about they share they engage they go to meetups they engage on discord and so they do all these they'd never never never fails all these things pay huge dividends if you take them seriously I love it.

I love all the comments celebrity and I'm it JC comes in I was able to get an opportunity for my first tech job based off someone knowing me from volunteering at tech events and sharing My journey at tech meetups again if you've had successes from social media Please post it and because I want to give you a shout out But again, it just I love what you said is the ultimate validator. It's the ultimate validator You know, it's not words on a page. It's you speaking and be involved in the community. James where so Twitter can be Twitter can be a lot for people You know Twitter is is kind of a beast of its own Where are some other places that you'd recommend to get involved with?

I know obviously you have a great community. So if you want to plug that Yeah, Discord I think is a huge one So I run learn build teach which is learn build teach calm if you're interested that came from learn build teach calm Yeah That's a philosophy of mine of like as developers, we spend a lot of time learning, we have to, we use what we learn to build stuff. And then selfishly and for the benefit of the community, we teach other people how to do it too. So selfishly, teaching is the best way to learn slash reinforce things you've already learned. And then also you just get to benefit the community as well.

So that's the discord community that I run. There's a ton of amazing communities out there. Another one like Becca, Becca is a shared friend of ours. Virtual Coffee is an amazing community. It's one of my favorites, Code Connector, which is local here. Well, excuse me, I should clarify. Some of the leaders in Code Connector are local. It is now a global group post COVID, and we also do in-person stuff, some here in Memphis. JC, who's in the chat, is one of the leaders of Code Connector. It's one of the best groups, I think, for ongoing continued engagement and activities. So they do code reviews and resume reviews.

They've done live coding, practice sessions for people, and it's just one of the best ones out there. So virtual coffee and co-connector always to the big ones that I recommend for people. What, so yeah, discord, amazing. What about for the people who are sitting on the sidelines and are scared to ask, are scared to slide into the DMs, or are scared to put themselves out there? I mean, at the end of the day, these people have to do it on their own. But what would be your words and encouragement people sit on the sidelines. So I go through this like, I'm, I'm oftentimes a very like, just straight, practical person and the tough love type thing.

So like the short answer is like, if it makes you uncomfortable, get over it, like not to be insensitive because it's tough, right? Like, sure, but you have to, you have to force yourself to do things that are beneficial for your career. And you'll hear a lot of times people give the advice of like, They give the advice of be comfortable, be, learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. That's right. Right? Yeah, that sounds good. So basically get used to being uncomfortable. And the caveat I would say to that is there's no reason to be uncomfortable if it doesn't actually provide value for you.

So you put yourself in uncomfortable positions because you know it's something that's going to benefit you or you think it is and that's your best guess. So like those things of reaching out to people and say, hey, I'd like to have a coffee chat thing, you could be the most awkward person and you could be really uncomfortable reaching out. You could feel awkward during the session like that's just going to be there and you just have to go and do it anyway. Like that's the reality is you have to force yourself to do that because you think it's going to pay dividends for you and your career.

And I've talked about this for me. I have forced myself to do this sort of stuff over and over and over again in my career with having hard conversations with managers to say like, one time in particular, I had some really negative feedback for a colleague. It's not my thing like to go and like talk bad about someone, but I thought it was an important enough situation that my manager needed to be aware of it. So this and other similar conversations, I've been in the room with a manager, like literally like shaking, trying to get the words and like just doing the best I can because I know it's something I need to do and it's important for me.

So don't think that because you're nervous, because you feel awkward, don't think you're unique, like that happens for all of us. And I at this point in my career have spoken professionally for 10 years. I still get nervous before I go on stage. But the thing I know now is because I've practiced so many times, because I've done it so much, I know it's going to go away. So it comes with practice. But I think you just have to force yourself to do those things because you think they're going to be beneficial for you in your career. 100%. Omar, I want to get to your question.

Yes, I'm actually starting to do more meetups now in Nashville. So I have a lunch meetup. If you go to here, I'll throw it up here. Let me ask James a question and then I'll go digging for the link and I'll throw it out there. But Omar, yes, I have one I think next week or the following week for people in Nashville. So I said, James. I should tell you one of those, by the way. Yeah, no, well, I mean, listen, listen, if you're in town, let me know, please. No, no, no, no, no, no, good time. So let's talk about your laid off. You are in a Slack channel, you're sending DMs, but no one's responding.

So that's the biggest thing I'm hearing right now. No one's responding. No one's responding. What are your thoughts and as you're answering, I'm gonna go find this link for Omar, but what are your thoughts on the no response? I think people aren't responding and this is not necessarily a bad thing. This is just kind of the reality of where you may be for individual people. People aren't responding because they don't have contacts for you. So like we recommend for a lot of people, like go and send cold DMs for coffee chats, right? like regardless of being laid off, like, or looking for a job, whatever, like do that just from a networking and learning perspective.

But you gotta understand that like, you'll probably get a lot of nos or just like no answers. And that's totally fine. But the reasons people specifically aren't responding that could change is not having context for who you are. So in what you do and having appreciation and respect for you as a professional already. So again, like by the time I got let go, I was able to get all these messages coming in for job opportunities potentially. And that was because of this earned reputation in the community. So again, that doesn't fix itself overnight, but in addition to sending these cold DMs, start to work on all the things that we already said.

Start to share consistently, start to show up consistently to meetups, start to build those relationships, and then now, even if it doesn't pay dividends right in a second, you're building that up. So if it happens again, you've got those relationships in place. And I think it's you that I got this from originally, but like you don't build your network when you need it, you build it for when you need it in the future. So by the time you actually need it, you already have that thing. So I would look at it as two different things. Like don't stop doing the cold messages. Maybe there's some way you could tailor it.

Maybe there's somewhere fun intended that's just. Maybe there's some way you could tweak it to make a little more sense. But don't think that's necessarily gonna fix the problem. Also work on these other things to build up your brand and your reputation and the community along the way. Yeah, it's definitely two fold or three fold. You need to be putting yourself out there with content, being thoughtful around certain topics you wanna be known for. You also wanna do the DMing, and then you also want to be talking to the recruiters and all that stuff. So like I said, multi-faceted. I mean, there's a lot, that's what I'm saying.

The job strategic full-time job. Like if you do not have a job, it's not a wake up and drink a few cups of coffee and watch some Netflix and send some DM's and be done in an hour. like that's especially with this market right now. Yeah, Deb, to answer your question, and also Omar, I know I threw up that link. That link looked terrible. I will follow up with you after the show and just send you the direct link. That looked awful in the banner, so I took it down. Deb, in other words, how many times you follow? Listen, for me personally, usually around the third time, like a lot of times, if you text me or DM me the first time, I'm probably, I'm not gonna miss it.

and James probably the same way. Second time, I'd be like, ah, I need to get back with that person. The third time, I'm like, okay, I really need it. I need to do it right now. So I would say three times for me before it comes across the spam, James, do you have- At three would be max. Yeah, I'd probably be max. Personally, I would probably stop after the second, just because you've kind of given that reminder. That's just me, but I also am very sensitive to the staged messages and stuff or canned messages I get and emails I get from people, they just annoyed the shit out of me if I can say that on the stream.

Like they bothered me so much because they're impersonal. Like they're not real. They're not actually trying to talk to me. They're just sitting canned stuff. Talk about that real quick. Talk about that real quick. Yeah, well, so the reason I'm such a big fan of Taylor is because I like get all these messages from recruiters and they're terrible. They're, you know, I have this job for something that you've never used before that I think you'd be a great fit. I'm like, why, what on my, I've literally said this to people. what on my page makes you think I'd be a good fit for this? Cause I've never done that before in my entire life.

And it's just such a waste of time. And then I get like, I've gotten, I've gotten a couple of series of messages where they literally don't stop. Like it's literally been like every couple of days they have this, they have the sequence and it'll send a message two more days and another message. And I had this one guy do this. What he thought was like a really creative story about how his pet dog was really upset because I didn't respond and went down this whole thing that you could never imagine the story. It was ridiculous. did was just piss me off because you're just proving that you don't actually have respect for the fact that like I've made a choice now to not respond to you.

So I think like I think three is reasonable. I would caveat those like I wouldn't just repeat the same thing. Obviously I would just I would just make sure to like try to have empathy for the person. Hey, I know you're busy. Like I just I particularly interested in talking to you because of X, Y and Z. If you have a chance, if not, it's totally fine and I understand like just have empathy for people to know that they're busy and they may not be able to do that. And just accept that like, you can reach out to a lot of people, you're not gonna be able to talk to all of them.

And that's totally fine. So I think what like from two to three, you should be showing more of that empathy to say, like I'm not responding because I think you have the, because it's your obligation to respond to me. I'm sending this because I think it's important to me. I would love to talk to you. And in case you didn't get it or needed a reminder, I'm kind of bumping this up for you. You know, self, self-deprecation was a real long way. I'm just going to be totally honest with you. Um, you know, that's been kind of my approach. It doesn't work for everybody to get it, but, um, you know, just being open, right?

Yeah. I, I told a lot of people, the reason why recruiters don't give feedback is a lot of times, not most of the times, but a lot of times we're actually scared to give you feedback because we feel bad. And so if you can approach a recruiter and say, Hey, listen, I haven't heard back for you. I know I'm probably rejected. That's totally fine, but do you have any sort of feedback? It's it's gonna make it easier for me to respond and I think you need to take that type of response, right? If I messaged James. Hey James. We'll love to we'll have a chat with you on my podcast James James is gonna see it goes No, that's weird right cuz that's super quick, but what I would do I'll follow up ago Oh James listen at the end of the day like I know you're probably getting bombarded a ton by Twitter DMS This podcast is specifically around helping people find a job.

Let me know if you're interested which steps into the empathy of like the reason behind what you're doing. Which is this, did you bring up this example because this is a real example of how you messaged me about coming up. I think my question was, I think I responded first. I'm just a mess just when I think it was good, right? It was like, hey, it was, I just got lost and didn't respond to it. So I figured if you were calling the only on the front of all these people, it's just making me cackle, by the way. I love it. I love how real this is.

I love your life. Yeah, Bill, these messages are my favorite real conference boosters, knowing I'm a great fit for something I've never done. Yeah. Mac, you're just going to go ahead. Yeah, I wanted to shout out that comment actually. Can you go back to that? Yes, absolutely. Yep. So there we go. It talks about work environment of eight years simply by making and developing my LinkedIn profile after months of grinding and James's channel. Someone gave me a reference to my first web developer job. Yeah. Thank you for like appreciating the content I'm glad that it's valuable for you. This is the stuff that like makes content creation so much fun for me is seeing people have success based on anything that I'm able to create for them.

So this is super special, mega congratulations to you. But those are the, by far the best kind of messages I can get as a content creator. Steven comes in over the great question. What do y'all think about balance between full time working and creating projects on the side? Yeah. So work life balance is my number one thing. It's the thing I don't sacrifice on whether it's working for myself or for a company. It's the number one thing that I want to know about with a company. Money is like right up there with it, but like work life balance is number one for me. So I'll tell you a couple of different things.

I have gone through periods of my career where I was working a full-time job and I was doing content as I did for several years before this. Even before that, I was learning. And I was learning a ton of my own and I was spending hours outside of my 40-hour week job learning and trying to build side projects to kind of, but just because it was something I was super excited about. Now the benefit of that is like, I walked into a team at FedEx that was doing web development that didn't really know anything about modern web development. I'd only been learning about modern web development for three, four, or five, maybe six months at the time, but I walked in and basically became the lead web developer because I knew more about that stuff from the stuff I've been learning about and building than anyone on the team.

And so that helped me find a niche on that team of like immediately earning people's respect. I also then continued to work on projects on the side and then would walk into job knowing how to solve a particular problem because I saw that the other night with a project that I was working on. Are there benefits to that? Absolutely. Do I think that that should come from a place of passion and not a place of force? I have to do this to X, Y and Z. Yes. I think it should be from stuff that you're excited about. I think your work-life balance is super important.

I think you should be paying attention to family and friends and making sure you're not sacrificing too much of that or at least finding that right balance for you. But the other thing I'll give you that I think doesn't get talked about as much is Like assuming you're creating these projects for learning opportunities or using it as learning opportunity, your employer should be giving you time and resources for learning. Like this is not a very common conversation, but your employer should support you for learning new things. They should support you for taking trainings, maybe going to conferences, taking an hour or two a week to learn something that's not directly related to your job because it's going to make you a better employee and a more well-rounded developer.

It could be something like speaking. you could go take an hour speaking class because you wanna be a better communicator and leader for your team. So if you're looking at this for like, I wanna work full time and then create projects to continue to learn more, see what you can get out of your job first. And what most people don't do is they don't ask for time and resources. I ask a lot and I get a lot. They're a have historically gotten a lot more than other people because they didn't ask. So I would ask the other last aspect of this, if you're creating like projects because you want to build a SaaS platform or something or start your own product or have your own company or whatever it is, then yeah, that's something you gotta do outside of work.

And that's super fun, it's super exciting. That's the epitome of being a developer is we have the ability to go out and build whatever we want. And that's really cool. But if you're using it as a way to also learn, see if you can get more of that learning time and resources from your actual full-time job. Here's the big question that I get a lot. And I'm interested to hear your take. And James, you're such a wonderful person. I can't believe the time's already up, but I appreciate your friendship more than you know. DCC. Networking or side projects. Networking or side projects? If you only can pick.

I've never had a choose thing. And I can definitely go down the cliche route of, you can do both and why wouldn't you do both. But it depends on what you're looking for in your career, right? Like if you feel like you've got a strong network, then that may not be your focus. Like if you feel like you have a strong network and then you wanna like take your technical skills to the next level by building something hands on, that totally makes sense. If you're in a position now where you're hearing us talk about the uncertainty of the job market and you realize like if you were to get laid off and you don't have a network to lean on, it's time to start building that network.

Like that should be something that you should be focused on. But again, the thing that I'll cheat a little bit and say like there's no reasons those should be mutually exclusive. So this idea of building in public to me is like a game changer. So if you're creating a side project, go and create that side project and just tweet about it. Like just tweet everything that you do, everything that you learn, everything that you mess up, which will be a lot of stuff, just tweet those things, be consistent about it because people are going to catch on to what you're doing. They're going to catch on to you as a developer in the community.

They're going to learn from you just by creating a tweet saying how you solve this problem or this problem that you came across. So I would say don't let those two be mutually exclusive, you could obviously like focus more on one versus another, but use it as an opportunity for content to share with people. Yep. I love that. I love that. Jesse comes in and goes put in more quarters to add more time. I love that. Yeah. I mean, my thing is, as I would always go, I would always air if you could only pick one, I would always air on the side of networking.

You know, but I understand kind of keeping up with your skills as well. All right, James, So let's wrap it up here three questions rapid relatively rapid fire The first question it was my birthday like two months ago not two months ago to two weeks ago. Sorry Your birthday February 21st. We're like close remember. Okay February 7th for my favorite 7th. Yeah Yeah, we gotta get together and go out. No, I know we should have we should have we should have got together No, what is your favorite cake? Like like like if you could pick out your ideal birthday cake. What what would it be?

Give you two answers first one is like chocolate everything just like chocolate cake chocolate ganache chocolate Yeah, just all chocolate the other thing I really like it I never had one of myself as a kid and I remember being super jealous at other kids that had the metho birthday parties was a cookie cake Delicious. Yes, love cookie cakes. It's my favorite. So good. I see we're friends. I know wonder why we're friends Second question what tech tech trends Are you researching, working on right now, that you want to share for others to check out? Yeah, here's a great plug for me. I've decided on the topic for my next course.

So my goal now as a content carrier is to kind of go through these six month chunks of like diving deeper into a technology, creating content about it along the way and ultimately create a course at the end of the day, like as the big tangible asset at the end. And so the topic right now for me is Astro. This is what I rebuilt my personal site with Astro. Yeah, several months ago, I've been doing more with it. They just shipped Astro 2.0 with some really cool and exciting features. And so I'm going to be working on our course and launching a course on Astro over the next couple of months.

So people are curious for updates. The domain is Astro course.com or .dev, but there's nothing there yet. So if you're interested in updates, you can subscribe to my newsletter at jameshewquick.com. And, uh, Azure is a ton of fun. It's a framework for building applications that are cheaper from performance. It ships zero JavaScript by default. So it's going to be fast and it has all the, all the extra things that you could want in a, in a framework to build really amazing websites. So Astro supership. We're cool. I love that. I got a shout out to Marie American American cookie company. Yeah. Yep. Triggering. Um, last, last question here, um, to wrap it up.

And again, thanks, James. again, thank you all for showing up. The dialogue has been tremendous. And, and, you know, I always tell people, please connect with others. If I were you, this is a jam packed episode with a lot of people commenting, I would literally try to connect with every single person that commented on the show and just say, Hey, I saw you on guidance couch 2.0 would love to connect right? That's the start of the networking that James and I are talking about. So I call Russia has a big big one in the chat by the way. Oh, yeah, here we go. Miss that.

Thank you. My content creation win through my blogging when an opportunity to write paid articles for Schikimos out on Twitter. They already knew my work until May on board. I've written. No, I did that for a while with scotch.io, which is now a friend of mine, Chris. They got acquired by DigitalOcean. But for a while, I was writing an article for every video that I did and doing a YouTube video and then writing an article for a scotch and scotch. And that was like one of the big reasons why I continued to do content as much as I did at the time. I love that.

I love that. So this show is called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have them. Now we have to do that. Yeah. What is your biggest piece of advice, career advice to your younger self? Biggest, biggest piece of advice I have and something I speak a lot about is like, now I get to do exactly what I love, but most people don't think that's an option. Most people look at, they look at jobs, not careers. they look at jobs is like, I have to do it and blah, blah, blah.

So I would just say pay attention to the things that make you happy and see if there's a way that you can work those into what you get paid professionally to do. It doesn't happen overnight. It's something you can work towards over the course of years. You may never get to like where you want to be, but you can have that as a goal and something that you're working towards. And I just think you're going to be a lot happier if you're doing stuff that you're actually excited about. And some people debate about this trade off of like, Well, I want to do this because I want to make more money.

And that's great. I'm all about, like, if you talk to me about money, I'm all about people getting money. But I think the reality is, like, you can find, you can marry up making money and doing stuff that you enjoy and have the best of both worlds. And that's the thing that I always look for. And I recommend to people, it's like, or I say to people, is I can almost guarantee you there's a job out there that you would enjoy as much as the job that you have now, but you can make a lot more money. more money. You just have to go out there and kind of figure out what it is.

The one other thing I'll add is a little more specific to kind of what you touched on here of the networking of where we are, like in this stream and people joining from LinkedIn and other places. I give a lot of like panels, I give a lot of talks and stuff and at the end, like everyone else, I say like if you're if you ever need anything, feel free to reach out. What's wild to me is like people don't do that. It's just, it's like silly. And like every time I say this to people, I kind of call out the ownership. Like I'm offering this and that's like my time's very expensive.

And so for me to offer is like kind of a big deal, not to be like to egotistical, but like it's a big deal to have people offer advice that like get paid a lot of money to give advice. And so if people give that offer, take advantage of it. So from here, here's my offer and I have not unlimited amount of time, but if people have a question or something, I can answer, feel free to ask. I'm on LinkedIn. If you want to add me on LinkedIn and ask a question or something, do it. And if you don't do it, that's on you. But anytime people offer that sort of thing, like 100% go and take advantage of it.

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, y'all. Thanks again, James. I appreciate you staying real quick so I can say bye to you off air. But you all thank you again for tuning in. Appreciate it tomorrow morning. Unicorn Finders, with a guy can't have too many podcasts. We are catching up with Aaron Decker. He is the founder and CTO of a content creation company called Bounty. They actually work with UGC user generated content. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. And then Friday we are back with recruiters anonymous, diving into the recruiting world with my guy Vincent here in Nashville. So jam pack for the rest of the week.

See y'all tomorrow. James, thank you my friend. And y'all have a good one. Peace. See ya. Thanks. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it.

So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com at Tdaston on all social media handles and I hope you have a fantastic day.