🚀 Boost Your Beginner Tech Career 2026 - Day 1

Uh, new events live. Yay. Okay, we're just about all there. Everybody's coming in. And this is the beginning of the 2026 beginner boost. Um, this is Oh, wow. Thank you for all the gifted subs. We're getting some gifted subs here. Um, we have a lot of people in the chat have been waiting around uh for us to get going. We're going to be here for three hours today and every Sunday uh for as long as it takes uh to get people through. So yeah, it's good to see everybody in the way of say hi. Uh you may notice I have a little bit of a different format going on. Uh we're going to talk about how I'm doing this. By the way, this is I'm using a a Mac actually and I actually we're going to talk about best computer to get for a tech career, etc. So um and we have we have a number of people already in the chat. you can go look at that. Um, so if you are seeing this for the first time, there's a good chance that you're seeing it on YouTube. Um, so YouTube is going to be where the playlist is and uh you can see the link in the top there. Make sure you go check out linkree/bxro and um particularly find the GitHub and we're going to get into that and the YouTube link. The YouTube is going to be the place to go watch these videos. Um, there's also mods on Twitch and they'll be saved and you can do that. Uh, those of you who know Twitch, you, you know, encourage you to make as many clips as you want. Uh, if you make a good clip, um, I can actually post it as a short. So, if there's, you know, a moment, uh, that you you see here that you find interesting, please, please feel free to to clip away and I'll go through that. Um, so, how are we going to get started? What's the beginner's about and everything? I do sort of have a structure to this, but uh if this is your first time and you don't know me uh yet, I've been doing this for a very long time. Uh and many of my videos have been taken down because they were out of date or other reasons are too personal or something. So, just know that this this is going to be the same content like some of it's going to be rehashed. You might even rewatch some of the old videos. But you're the first thing you're going to want to know is what the hell is this thing and why am I here. So the beginner boost is a it's a quick start into the tech world as it says here for absolute beginners. That means people who have never used a computer for anything other than browsing cat videos. We no judgment. I like cat videos, too. We may look up some cat videos. Uh, I mean, I'm into the memes just as much as everybody else. Um, and so let's let let me introduce myself a little bit before we get into this. Um, so I'm Rob. Uh, my last name is Woostein. If you can spell that, I'll give you bonus points. Son of an immigrant, Mormon pioneer. Uh, oldest of eight kids. And, uh, started teaching coding after being badgered to death by my scouts. I was a scout master for 5 years uh to teach them to hack and to teach them coding. I I've been doing tech stuff on the side for a long time. Tech careers uh really work out for Mormons a lot because you know they have the traditional idea of like you know being the guy working and a girl not. I I'm no longer Mormon. I no longer think that's the way it should be. That doesn't matter. In fact, I want to be really clear. I really don't care uh about your background or your politics. Uh, I have my own opinions obviously and they're going to come out. There's just no way around that. U, I do not believe in harming other people. And if I had I I've actually debated about whether I should do this or not uh uh based on that like should I be doing a beginner boost for anybody to learn? Am I you know inadvertently like empowering people that morally I'm objective to what how they use it. That's the problem with technology is it's very powerful and it's going to make you powerful and when you know that power can be used for good or evil. You can become a Sith Lord or a Jedi, right? So, so that's me. Um, I actually started a company uh in 2013 called Skill Stack uh which we're going to go look at the remnants of that which ran successfully for about 10 years before COVID and other things came and it stopped me from being able to do it. So, a friend of mine said just you should stream that and so I started streaming it and this is what we have. this is what's left. Um, and yeah, so my my personal take on education is it should be very personal. It should be mentored. I have it's really easy to get me go. We have a lot of educators in the chat right now. By the way, we have educ, you know, professors. We have, you know, we have elementary school education people. We have a lot of people. And I I owe a lot of my my focus on education to educators who took me under the belt. I remember really quickly just to get to know me a little. I remember the first time that I taught any kind of tech topic was after my first divorce. I I I was in a kind of a singles group and this really amazing friend, she's still a really great friend. I just talked with her last last week. She works on the farm now. And uh she invited me. She goes, "Get out of your apartment and come help me teach game development to this summer camp." And and I did that. I went ahead and I uh taught Game Maker actually uh to a bunch of mostly teenagers for uh seven days and we had a lot of fun like doing things on the side. And it occurred to me then that that could be a business model like teaching game development and then turning that into more could be a thing. It could be a way to get people to actually learn more. And I'm very proud to say that that business model did work. Uh, and then I have people who started out wanting to make Minecraft servers who are now coding and assembly and ordering their own circuit boards from China over DHL. So, you know, it just depends on where you start. Um, if you if you really want to know more about me, we're going to talk about this because I'm going to share my landing page. Uh, I do want to I did want to show you really quick u where to find that. So, if you could if you click on my socials, this is up in the this is the link in the top uh left of the screen, but if you go to my socials, you can follow me. But specifically, there's GitHub. Uh there's there's my Spotify. GitHub. Twitch is the other one. And then there's uh YouTube. Where's my YouTube? Is YouTube not on here? I thought I I thought I had it on there. I guess not. Well, it's all the same. YouTube is uh is here. YouTube is rdxro. youtube.comrswxrob. Where did my name come from? My name is related to Unix and you're going to be able to see that really soon. I'm I kind of surprised that I dropped my YouTube peri. I must have forgot to add it back. Anyway, I'll add that. Uh and then this is where the the long form videos are going to go. And we'll come back to that in a second. So, what was the other thing I was going to show you? Okay, so the the main website to go to, this is pinned in the chat in Twitch. The main website to go to is github.com uh slash uh rwxroboost and synth wave, how you doing? And this is going to take you to the beginner boost uh GitHub repo. And we're going to talk about what GitHub is and why you need it and all that in a second. So, but right now you should go there and I'd appreciate it if you would, you know, click on uh star or and if you want you can watch it. Um eventually you can decide about sponsoring. We'll talk about that in a second. Uh and yeah, you can follow me on socials and say hello. Um uh there's YouTube playlist which I just told you about. Please go like and subscribe to the playlist and follow that because that's where these three-hour videos are going to go. Uh, and they're going to be long form videos. Uh, just know that there are a number of other videos that are not going to be long form. Yeah, my voice is shot, Mark, because I have a cold. If you So, another thing about me, back to introduce myself. So, I've lost my front teeth in a bike accident three years ago. I'm finally getting new teeth uh sometime this month or next. So, you might actually see me transition, have teeth again. Uh, that actually was captured live. There's a there's a video of that happening. And um I also have a cold today. So on top of everything else, I have a really bad cold, but I've been promising I would start the boost uh today. So this is going to be tough for me because I got to talk for three hours. Uh so we we'll get into the like the organization of the of all that in a second. So let me give you some things you can do while you're listening to me talk. Uh the first one is go file go to the playlist and follow it. The other one is go to the GitHub repo and check everything off there. Make sure you're following it there. Then uh hey Misha, how you doing? Uh and then click on the discussion forums and join the discussion forums and yeah that we're I've already I've already pinned it Mark. So yeah uh thank you mods. So here's a welcome. So if you click on discussions, please take a moment uh even right now while I'm talking and introduce yourself and you know you can be anonymous, you can be non anonymous, it's up to you. Uh I encourage people to be more or less uh not anonymous. It doesn't mean you have to dox where you live and stuff but uh it will be more beneficial to you in the long run if you want to get a job. Uh then I have said this before to here I got a job by somebody who offered me essentially a job on Twitch while I was streaming. So this is a very real way to get a job. Just a reminder that beginner boost is primarily above everything else about getting a tech job in 2026. That is the reason it exists. And every single conversation that's not related to that, every single decision about what technology to learn or what to not learn is based on that. And I'm telling you that now because inevitably I'm going to have veterans who are in our chat. There's lots of them. Great people here. And uh they are you know the people that are here are here to help but a lot of them are very experienced veterans. Some of them have consulted with the government and the president. Some of them are are are you know lifelong cyber security professionals working for the banks and all kinds of people. I have all kinds of people in this community including a bunch of people who are just starting out for the first time have never even you know heard of Linux for example. So, having said all of that, those veterans, a lot of them will say, "Well, you should do it this way or you should learn this and blah blah blah." And I got no problem with you with people sharing their opinions about what they think people should do and why. But I'm going to ask everybody in the discussion forums and in the chat to number one, be respectful, and number two, if you have an opinion, don't just give your opinion. Give the reason you think that so that other people can evaluate your opinion and make their own decision. And I am speaking to myself here. Anybody who knows me knows that I have strong opinions. And if you catch me, if you go back and watch some of my other preparing videos, you'll hear me say randomly flippant horrible things like, "Oh, you'd have to be an idiot to use this or you know, blah blah blah." And I talk like that because my generation unfortunately if if if has has been it's in our DNA. That's how we talk. It doesn't mean I really think you're a [ __ ] for doing that. It does not mean what I what I think. Uh we just and if you don't believe me, just go read anything about Linux for Walds uh or the people who invented Linux. That entire community is one of the most toxic by today's standards as ever. Um and I don't support that. I I want to do better there, but I'm going to ask that we be as welcoming as possible here. Um, and you know, not tell people that how, you know, ask people how they could possibly have been born being so stupid for picking a thing, which people have said. Lister has literally said that. So, uh, that's all. Oh, hey, there's Miesa. Misa just joined. Yay. Hey, everyone. Rob is with Oh, that's very nice. Thank you, Misha. Uh, I do want to shout out Misha. Misha is one of the best uh online instructors as well uh who has focused primarily on DevOps and Kubernetes from what I can tell and uh has publicly said that I was at least some some factor in there deciding to do this stuff to help other people learn and there's been a number of other people who have have done that. Uh Tannis is another one Scott um and this I want to put this out as a call to everyone. uh we very much want everybody to be able to say I am willing to stream and streaming is I want to I'm going to go into this deeper later but live streaming and sharing your learning process you might think you need to know it all before you do it and the truth of the matter is that we need more people to stream who are learning they're in the process of learning and are willing to share their learning and their failures and their struggles so that people who are teaching as well as other people who are learning can can go through that and can change how they approach things. Uh some of my my best friends that I met on the live streams have gone on to create their own streams. Uh and some of them started out as beginners and everybody kind of grew with them. And uh I I really hope that that continues. I hope that people choose to share. Not everybody is a streamer. Not everybody wants to do it, but for those of you who do, you could, you know, stream to Twitch. Uh, who knows, you might end up making a little bit of money on the side, uh, by other people and you can stream to the co-learning category where you're just literally going through working on things. Uh, Slyborg comes to mind as one of the Twitch streamers who's working on cyber security right now, and we have dual streamed before uh, while I was setting up a Minecraft server. Uh, so yeah, I know everybody everybody's telling me to take care of my of my throat issue. So I'm going to be taking periodic breaks here. Uh, if you stream niche stuff for a hobby, you can do that, too. Yeah, absolutely. And u, so yeah, so these are all I'm just taking a moment to read the chat. Uh, and the style of this video, these videos is going to be like that in this long form video. It's going to be us having a conversation, me periodically reading the chat, responding to the chat, and then making recorded live videos while we're here that summarize a topic. Uh either after we've talked about it or before we talk about it. And then that video will will go in uh in in an actually more of a a an outline form that then you can kind of follow along with so that these videos can kind of be you know coalated and put it where you need them. But if you just want to like put the the the stream on and I I I have a Fire TV an Amazon Fire TV. I really love it. Amazon privacy issues aside. I'm able to flip through a playlist and just put it on and make lunch or do the laundry. And I do hope that that these streams become uh something that people can do for that. And for to that end, by the way, uh I'm going to try my hardest to keep these videos, very specifically these videos, suitable for work. And uh a quick story there. I actually violated that once and I said I think the f-word once and I had somebody in the stream say there's children watching and I was like oh my god because I'm you know a foulmouth heathen pagan you know so uh I had to take a break there how you doing how you doing everybody so okay so here we go uh so please take a moment to stop by and and introduce yourself It would be really great if you took a moment to kind of consider what you want. Now, you can just say hi for now, but eventually eventually you should should be able to articulate what you want and and and that kind of is a good segue into u some of the first content for the day, the actual like recorded content. So, let's get into that. Let's turn to philosophia. So if you if you prefer during the course of this to write in French or Russian and you just care that I read it, I'm happy to translate for you. So I happen to speak French and Russian and I'm working on Spanish. So if you feel more comfortable in another language in Russian or French uh but you can understand English please uh go ahead and write if you want to if you have questions you can write your questions in those languages and for the most part I think I can I can manage that. So I just want to put that out there. Uh professional RBX viewer right. So uh this is a terminal. We're going to talk about all of that. So right now the only thing you should know about is the boost. You click on the boost here on GitHub. So and we're going to finish reading the page here. So the discussion forums dive into the content. You go to the overview. Uh we'll go back to this review the list of relevant technologies. So, if you want to jump ahead and what I'm going to do is what I do in yoga class when I teach yoga. I'm going to give you the overall, you know, format and outline for what I hope we can accomplish. And then we're going to fill in the blanks as we go. So, that way you know what's coming. You know, kind of where we're going to go and you get a sense of your bearings before we get into it. And that that does include things like how deep we're going to get into everything. Um, so if you I the reason I mentioned that is because if you're going to jump ahead and you just want to know what to learn right now to get a job and you don't want to hear any of the other stuff, you could go to the list of relevant technologies and that'll take you through that. We're going to read that in a bit. Uh, we're going to be doing a lot of Linux so and we'll be setting up a boost container. In fact, this repo is a container. Uh, you can create a container with it. What is a container? We're going to get there. Container in short is just a way to run sort of a computer inside of a computer. That's not what it is, but that's kind of what it is. And we will be doing this so that you can use Linux, which is the number one enterprise operating system. Uh on anything, a Mac, a Windows box, another Linux machine, whatever. Uh understanding containers and Linux if you choose to be an engineer in technology. And we're going to come back to that. This boost is not just for engineers who want to code or play around with Linux on the command line all the time. A good percentage of this, particularly the first parts today and next time are going to be about landing a tech career understanding tech in general so that you could get a job in tech without even knowing how to code a line of code. Now, you probably should learn how to code anyway. It just makes you a better person. So, we're going to go ahead and do that. Um, create a GitHub account. There we go. Uh, we're on GitHub. If you don't have a GitHub account, you should just go do that right now. If you have any questions of how to do that, let me know. Be very careful. The only thing I'm going to tell you about creating a GitHub account is make sure you pick a name you want forever. And like, you know, Creeper Creeper 9000 is a bad name. First of all, most people would even know about Minecraft. We have some French people in the YouTube today. Love it. Uh, okay. So, uh, then we have create a GitHub account. So, everybody needs a GitHub account. No exceptions. You cannot work in tech without a GitHub account. I don't care if you're a salesperson or recruiter. You have to have a GitHub account. I don't want to hear anything about hating on Microsoft. Doesn't matter. You need one. Okay. Use your real name on GitHub account. It's a professional asset. I agree. Thank you for that, Misha. That's a good reminder. Uh your username can be something interesting. The whole decision about what username to use as your brand is is a huge conversation. I personally am RDX Rob everywhere any everywhere I can be. And I the idea of managing your brand uh is a big thing. Now some of you have gamer tags and I'm I'm thinking of one in particular uh and you this is how everybody knows me on the internet. Do you want your professional counterparts and peers to know you by that tag? It might be time for you to think about another thing to name yourself. And it will be tough. I know it's hard. I have I have stood in front of people who have been seriously traumatized by having to pick a username for their professional career. But now is the time to put the time into that because you're about to make contacts with it. You're about to set up, you know, uh, you know, accounts with it and all of that. Uh, yeah, that would not be appropriate. So, uh, so pick a name that you like. Pick a name that that is is relevant. Uh, names that refer to people that are not you are probably not a good idea. Pe names that refer to specific things in games that are that are edgy that are really cool to other gamers, you know, are are probably not okay. And uh and if if you want, you could just use some variation on, you know, if you want to be boring, you can use some variation on your actual username. Uh and just know that when it when you get a job, they are going to pick a name for you. Mine happens to be, by the way, R molest. So some people just have really bad names. My last I've already told you my first name is Rob and last name is Mstein Mulestein and and so my first name so every company's different they will smash your names together. For many years it was Robba R O B M Uh for me uh and Amisha chooses to use his entire name. My my name is pretty long actually. I think Vandenberg is pretty is pretty close to mine. Mushine. I think I'd have a big old one. And uh so yeah, so my so they decided to cut off my my last name at the T. So it's R moleste. And yeah, I don't know. That's like they picked a certain number of and I have a fun story about this. So there's going to be a certain number of irrelevant stories. That's just my style. Uh I was in the DMV. This is a true story. I was in the DMV uh in North Carolina sitting in a packed room waiting to go up and get my whatever my driver's license and I mean there were there had been 80 people in the room and over the PA when they were ready for me they say would our molest would our molesting would our molesting please come would Robert molesting please come to the front desk? They literally said molesting and said, you know, I mean, it wasn't just like Bolstein, that's usually what they'll say, or millstone or something. They said molesting and then as if there was a champion. I had to stand up and walk and everybody like, who's our molesting? And like I got it was the most embarrassing thing. Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty rough. Anyway, that was a fun little joke. Uh, okay. So, back to the thing the list start and follow this repo. Um, and while you're at it, uh, one of the few things that I get out of this is, uh, you know, your stars. So, I appreciate you doing that. That's like one of the things that can help me. Uh, and this is a new repo. I have another repo that's got way more than that. And by the way, as you meet each other in the discussion groups, take time to go out and meet your fellow person and star them. We're going to do we're going to specifically talk about this later, but hopefully you'll take the time to do that. Uh and and you know, make that really count. Uh how many stars you have, things like that on GitHub actually matter towards visibility. And I uh another word about GitHub. I had an executive vice president over technology whose kid was with me uh tell me point blank about something I don't think she was supposed to tell me about honestly. But she told me about a service that their company used. you know the company by name to evaluate new hires and there was this this as I understand it there was this uh organization that had these complex AI and stuff that would be that would evaluate uh people's repos on GitHub and they would create a score and that score was then put into a report and then these companies like hers would paid top dollar for these reports and they would get these direct reports. They take the report and then they would uh hire straight off the report from GitHub. They'd reach out to people. Some of them they make offers to directly. So uh your participation on GitHub and that's not just that's just how much content you have that's like how willing you are to interact with others and stuff like that. It is a direct factor in being hired to some companies and I have that on first person report from an executive vice president that I can tell you the name of uh and you know we I was I was mentoring her child so that's why I know we she actually shared a lot with me uh about their operations internally. So don't don't know when you're creating your GitHub. So we're going to talk a lot more about GitHub either now or later. We're going to go into how to make your landing page, how to create your first repo and stuff like that. And we'll probably do all of that before the day is over today. But as we do that, uh just keep that in mind that your perception online uh really depends on what you want to do and what kind of career you want uh and how far along you are in your career and all of those things. And we're going to get more into that next. So, but let's finish this list. Create your own GitHub repo and start taking notes. We will get into this quite deeply later today. And contribute. Contribute is an easy one. I'm gonna I'm going to show you this really quick. So, uh, financially get up sponsorship's the best. If if you choose to if you find value in any of this content, uh, I'd really appreciate the GitHub sponsorship, which is the best way to get money for anything. Uh, it's way better than Patreon. And uh I'm just going to mention I'm actually going to in every video I'm going to mention it because I found out through hard experience that if you don't do a call to action people don't know about it. Good people who meet well just don't know about it. They don't follow you or whatever. So um there's $2, $8 10 20 60 120 180 and 240. So, this is the first year I'm trying something new that I am going to be doing private 1-hour sessions with people during the boost and afterwards. So, this obviously you can you can sponsor me without necessarily needing a private session. If you live near me and you want to meet in person, which I'm going to do with one person that's already signed up, uh I could I'll do what I did for 10 years, 8 to 10 years for Skill Stack, which is private mentoring. And I've helped people get under $1,000 starting jobs, could get a job in psychology degrees, stuff like that before. And if you want to know why you should do that, please go click on my nice things file and I'll go show you that so you can get other testimonials. Uh this all that's all the gripping I'm going to do if you this is the best way to support me financially. Uh there are lots of other ways to do it. My goal is to actually bring in enough money to cover the hours that I spend doing this which is three hours every Sunday prime time weekend time. And at $50 an hour that would be 600 bucks a month. If I can pull in at least $600 a month I will keep doing this. If not, I will stop because I I I I'm Who am I kidding? I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm going to I'm going to lose my voice before the sun is over the whole thing because I the reason I'm doing it primarily is because nobody's doing it and it's a good way to change your your stars. Okay, so this is the old skill set beginner boost. If you click on start your career, every one of these goes to a video that we made last year. >> Before you can change a job in tech, before you can start a job in tech, before you can >> and some of these some of these videos are actually relevant, some are not. Uh I will be reorganizing those videos into uh a better format. Uh but if you want, you can go jump ahead and go look at those. A lot of my other content has been unpublished that I'm known for. So, all right, that's enough. I need to take a break because my voice is cracking and stuff. Uh, it's been a half an hour in. Well, the background was of all my mics. Yes. So, feel free to ask questions, help each other out for a second. I'm going to take a quick break. Uh, I'm going to put the fish on. So, actually I'll I'll I'll put let's put the fishies on. Then we know we're on a break. No, I did not get lost. All right, anybody have any any questions? Uh, okay. So, by now, if you're wondering what you should have done, I'm going to re I'm going to play it out for you right now. You should have a GitHub account by now. You should pick a name. You can't change your name, but you should pick a name that you're going to use. We talked about that. If you don't have a GitHub account, you should have gone to the GitHub for the boost and followed it so that you get notifications about it being updated and stuff. I'm going constantly working on it. So, that's how you can keep up to date with what's changing. You should have gone out to the YouTube playlist and followed it so you can see the new videos coming. And um you should have introduced yourself if you want to in the discussions in the in the discussion list. uh communication is going to be uniquely through uh the discussion board on GitHub so that we have a record of it and and that can you can directly link to content and all of that. Uh as we get into this, you'll see that using GitHub as the GitHub repo for all of this instead of a website is going to be far more effective because people can actually contribute. Uh they can put the they can put their own information there. They can add an issue if they see something wrong. They can even correct uh stuff. So So that's going to be uh the preferred way to do that. Um all right so let's let's get into some of the tougher topics now uh to get going pins not staying pen I do not know. So let's go into the overview and if you're asking yourself already where is the tech content when it's coming. Okay. But again, I I'm going to say this so many times as going to, you know, the reason for this beginner boost is for you to get a tech career. Okay. So, and usually I'll spend an inordinate amount of time dedicating the the beginner boost to Aaron Schwarz or uh who is, you know, there there are many reasons that I that I believe in the beginner boost. And I I usually spend a lot of time on that, but I I want to skip over that today. I will probably make videos on it and move those videos in into place, but just I've already told you why I'm doing this. I'm doing this because I honestly think that most people can change their lives by learning tech skills. And I've seen it. I've seen it happen. I've seen people go from waiting tables to $100,000 jobs and overnight their entire life changed. So, uh, you know, this this is a thing. It's it's a way and I given the status of the world I already said this I'm going to say it again but given the current state of the world this is this is my opinion about how you can best contribute to the world and and make it better. Okay. So this is the over the overview here is designed to be a sort of uh so this one whoops how do I point my my camera's backwards. How about this one right here? So, wait, does I do that? How about that? How about that? Does that work? Okay, so this one right here. So, understand the tech industry. Wait, like that? I could do like that. There. That one. That one right there. Understand the tech industry. So, the culture, the lifestyle, companies, and jobs. And I have to I have to tell you I have been really uh inspired by Learn with Leon who no longer streams. Uh I was once raided by 30 300 or so 3,000 or so Learn with Leon followers uh on Twitch. Learn with Leon still has an account on Twitch and I don't know what he's doing right now. He's one of the best uh educators out there in technology. He focuses primarily in web development. I focus primarily in others, you know, operations and cloud native stuff. if you don't if you know what that is, not so much web. The point is that he did one of these he did this a massive like online thing with education and and uh homework and certifications and everything and it was really amazing and and he he rated me once and I I'll never forget because I couldn't I lost all my regulars. I could not I've enjoyed having a small time kind of kind of following. Uh, at I think the biggest I ever had was like four or 500 people at a time and and I I love that. I like the smaller group that I know you by name. I'm looking at my stream right now. I know everybody almost by name. Uh, and learn with Leon. So Leon Leon shared something during one of his his his sessions where he talked about choosing to want to be a part of the tech lifestyle. And I want to talk about that right out of the gate. And I feel like we need a video about this, but I'm just going to kind of free form it and then then we can decide if we if we want to talk about it. Um, so what does it mean? Right? So what does it mean to have a tech job? And I'm just going to put out to the chat. Is does anybody out there in the chat you participated in the first cohort? Oh, now you work in tech after the first cohort. Fantastic. Fantastic. I love hearing that. Um, so are you doing web development? You my asking. I'm just curious. Somebody in the chat was sharing on YouTube. Um, so I'm going to I'm going to put it out to the chat. This is this is a hard part about me with live streaming. I'm a very interactive guy. So, normally I would be sitting down with one or two or three people and I would be hitting you with questions. I wouldn't just be talking. So, uh, Lenn GRC. So, here for more hands-on. I see. Okay. Uh, okay. So, the tech industry. Let's talk about I I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. If if if we spend any time on these other topics, it's today only and then we have a lot to cover in terms of technical content, but I want to spend at least an hour on the decision-making process that you need to go through right now before you waste a single second on pursuing a tech job. And I cannot overstate this. I cannot overstate this. And I'm going to tell you a story right off the bat. Um, and uh, we're becoming more and more obsolete these days as we go by. Yes and no. And I there that's kind of implied conversation about AI, which we will get into. But, uh, I'm going to share a story. This is a true story from a guy. Many of you have already heard the story a million times, but I really love it. So, there was there was this this brilliant kid. He was a kid. He was 18. Absolutely gorgeous. He was like a state champ uh athletic uh track runner and uh and and he was obsessed with crypto. This was back when Bitcoin came out. And I mean he was really obsessed and he would constantly cocking crypto and had his own thing and he was managing those portfolios and stuff. In fact, the the kid actually wrote some code to check on his portfolio in Python at the dinner table from his phone. True story. Uh but he didn't he didn't really put in a lot of time uh in his coding. So he he came to me about the same time as his buddy. also beautiful specimen of a of a guy who's unfortunately died in a a river accident was he was the son of a of a of a CTO for a company a financial company that you would know immediately I have a fun story about that but I can't tell you because you know who it was uh anyway and and uh so I I mean I I'm just I'm seeing them in my head while I tell the story they were so much fun they were they were these sexy dudes like 18-year-olds sexy kids. I was like, "Dude, you need to I'm going to give you my t-shirts for free so you can go like advertise for me and everything." They were really fun kids and they were, you know, full of life and learning to code and everything. And I tell you about this friend because he would he was making a lot of progress learning how to code in Python on his own, doing a lot on his own behind the scenes when he went home. But this other guy struggled. He didn't want to do anything. and and he would come in and every time I say, "Hey, so, you know, can I help you with entering your Python this week?" Because the way I do it is it's like, you know, you tell me what you're what you're working on. I don't I'm not going to push you. You work at your own pace. And he he had a hard time. He never Python. He took me aside one day and he said, "Mr. Rob, I'm really sorry, but I hate coding." That's exact words. And I was like, "What are you talking about? you're so good at it. He's like, "Yeah, but I hate it." Like, and nobody was around. I couldn't hear. And I said, "Well, there's nothing wrong with you if you don't like it." I said, "But now you know that." And he's like, "What are you talking about?" He's like, "Yeah." I said, "You can still work in tech and not have to code." And I confessed to him. I said, "You know what? I don't like to code either." Might be a surprise to a lot of you. I I write a lot of code for a lot of money right now, but I don't like it. And and this is kind of this is kind of relates to the AI question coming up because the act of writing code I I'm a writer too. I I mean I'm not published but I I like to write but I mean I I enjoy you know terminal stuff. It's all good though but at the end of the day I would rather be climbing rocks or you know on my bike or something. I I would rather not be writing code. There are many many many people who enjoy writing code for the sake of writing code. They love it and they are all over on YouTube and Twitch. I I'm I'm I'm vision I have one person very specifically in mind who who is obsessed with coding esoteric weird things for the hell of it for fun. That is not me. And that is not that was not this kid. And so I said to him I said you know you you're a very attractive guy. you you would be totally fine in tech as a recruiter, in a salesforce, uh as a project manager, as any number of things. The lead coders, yeah, you know, there are lots and lots of careers in technology that pay technology salaries, by the way, uh that are not coding and they are not, you know, hacking. And he's like, "Oh, huh, okay." Yeah. And so, you know, he stayed with me and but when he came, we started to change. This is the this is the the the beauty of running your own learning community, which is what I had to call it because school is is a special word you can't use unless you fulfill certain things. For example, you can't say the f- word. So anyway, my learning community, we would have all these people around and he would uh he would work on a little bit, you know, what he was going to do and everything. Now eventually, you know, he just grew out of it and we kind of we kind of fell apart and like as as happens. But uh but yeah, that story always always reminds me that there are many ways for you to work. Uh uh because I've been doing it for 30 years. I don't that's a good question because I I coded I coded I remember coding things in 1988 on an Atari under keyboard. I coded D and D. This is very Stranger Things kind of story. I used to I remember coding when I was really young. I had to have been like 11, I think. When did the Atari owner come out? I know I'm kind of dating myself here. But I my my mom sent me to a coding camp and I was at coding summer camp and I coded on these and they bought me an 800 Atari 800, but they didn't have the money. I don't know where they came up with that. Anyway, I started writing uh other things. cuz I wrote I wrote like Dungeons and Dragons character generator programs, you know, charisma, dexterity, and all that, which I did wrongly, by the way. Yeah, I'll give you guys a little challenge. Write me write me some code to generate a Dungeons and Dragons statistic. I guarantee most of you will do it wrong. I wrote mine wrong, but I didn't know it until way later. I'll give you a hint. To generate uh to generate a Dungeons and Dragons characteristic, you roll three d6 there. Some of you can maybe have fun with chew on that in the chat and see guess how everybody does it wrong. This is actually one of the coding coding projects we're going to do later. Uh just a little one to kind of have fun with it. Um, so anyway, so the takeaway of that story is that the most important thing you can do today is start to think about what you want out of life. I know that sounds philosophical. willfulness said fellow SWI in Russian this I actually used to have interviews with the people coming in whether they're adults or children and their parents and I would evaluate whether they were going to be let in not uh just because I wanted them to assess their motivation but also I wanted what do you want to do and the question I would ask them I'm asking you this question right now what do you dream of doing and and I I want you to take time and write that down. And you know what? I I have mine right here. This is my personal journal. And I think I of course I was raised Mormon, which means we all have journals. But this is this is my personal journal. I strongly recommend all of you start getting how do I find out what I want in life? That's a good question. Let's talk about that. The first thing you need is you need a way to start processing your thoughts and looking back on your thoughts. Even if you never share it with anybody. And I tell everybody, everybody that I start to mentor, I say get yourself a journal. A journal that you write in and and you can save it. Why? Because, you know, a lot of hackers out there already know about the black book, the infamous black book. They write their hacks down on the black book and that's where it would go. Um, you can do this online digitally if you want, but I strongly believe that there is yet to be yet to be discovered scientific evidence that is that if you have something that you write in that the physical act of writing uh actually processes something different in your brain. Uh, the first generation in history to have lower cognitive scores uh this year. This is this is overwhelmingly scientifically uh proven across the entire world and one of the things they're blaming is the lack of of tactile interactions with the things. So it's the screens they're blaming and and that's not just that's not just because they're a bunch of young people and they're like, "Oh yeah, screens screens are bad." That's not it. There's actually scientific evidence suggested it's something more than that. So, I'm telling you, get away right now to just start writing and thinking about things. And it'll do a lot of things. It'll help you deal with with depression or whatever your neurological divergences are or processing relationships that dissolve or new ones that be formed. I I can't over emphasize this enough that how important it is to start processing your own thoughts. And I we're going to get into this a little bit later, but let you know I'm also a licensed yoga teacher. Uh surprise surprise, right? Uh when I left the Mormon church, I needed something uh that helped me stay grounded. And yoga has always been that for me. So not everybody, that's not the same thing for everybody. Maybe for you it's horseback riding, maybe it's, you know, who knows what. So find your thing. Uh and you know, somebody asked in the chat, "How do I know what I want out of life? It's a huge huge question and unfortunately this is this is one of those areas where I really really regret not knowing you in person because when I got I formed lifelong friendships with the people that I mentored in person and I mean I I got to I was able to share their hopes and dreams and get them jobs and help them find jobs what kind of job they like they didn't like this one they like this one that or there help them increase their confidence some of them were autistic so it meant spending uh time, you know, just playing Minecraft with them and helping them be social. And uh I really miss it actually. I I strongly strongly miss it. And uh in fact, I I seriously thought about not doing another beginner boost and focusing on uh more in-person contact. And that's why I added uh the higher tier sponsorships because I'm I'm legitimately hoping that I can meet more people in person and create those friendships that that I cherish for a long time. So, I personally think this is the one true form of education. I've actually played around with business models where all the teachers teach one-on-one and it would actually work financially if you change some things around like, oh, I don't know, didn't pay the high school football coach more than the principal and every teacher. Uh, so anyway, background I'd like to be willing to do the research team for that. Yes. Uh, I believe the science on focus note-taking, understanding, and memorizing is already there, especially people with ADHD and other mental health and developmental issues. I think you're right, Dilla. I think that's right. Um, can't learn how to read on a computer, unfortunately. You definitely, and the thing that's really sad is that cursive writing has become an art form. And that I I I share my journal with friends all the time. And they're like, "Oh my god, you're cursed." I'm like, "That's that makes me sound really old." But I got to tell you, I find I used to be made fun of because my handwriting was so bad by teachers. Teachers would hold up my handwriting and make fun of me in class. I don't know if you can still do that today. Uh like, look at how bad this guy's writing is. I had a teacher come up to me once to like massage my shoulders because I was all stressed about doing it. It's probably why I do it now because I had so many hang-ups about being made fun of. I also started typing when I was eight years old because of it. And I was a kick-ass typist. Nobody else did it. That's a true story. I actually have my typewriter somewhere. I I always share that story because it's a my mom saw an opportunity and she gave me she took a typewriter in my face at 8 years old and and I was typing on that Royal. I still have it. There's a there's a short of me with it actually. And uh all of a sudden I was the one kid who was typing his papers like eight or nine years old. I'm so proud of that. and my typing skills went on to, you know, help me in other other ways. So, what we're talking about right now is understanding uh the lifestyle but and understanding yourself kind of at the same time. I can't if I can figure out how to do it. There we go. So, we need to figure out this one and this one. And they kind of go together. Uh because then the third one here is like what are you going to do with it once you have it, right? And then and then down here, learn what your ideal job is and what you can do to prove it. Most of the beginner boost is going to be this right here. This this one. This one right here. This one. I can't point. I don't know what I'm doing. Just Just stop, old man. Just don't try it anymore. So, uh, so learning what your ideal job is. Cursive handwriting. The system to write fast before typewriters. Yes. What is Pulber writing? You're 24. Really? First Christmas is like encryption for young people. Yes. Um so discover your ideal job and the company that needs it. Right. This uh learn learn the job uh learn what you need to do for your job. Okay. Most of the beginner boost is going to be this. Develop the specific skills, knowledge, and abilities required by the job. Most of it most of the beginner boosts over the year that we do is going to be this because this is the hardcore skills you got to learn. Uh and then we'll we'll follow up on that by managing and maintaining your tech career. Uh lots and lots of things to talk about here. But you might be wondering, well, why these other bullet points are here, but they're not super big, but we need to cover it. So, uh it is 12:30. It says another 30 minutes past. So, we're going to take a quick little break. Uh, and when we come back, we're going to talk about the specifics of tech culture, uh, the specifics of a tech lifestyle, the specific companies, and the specific jobs that exist and what their growth rates are, where you might want to go and and that. And we're we're going to start by talking about that because in the process you may hear something that triggers an interest in you. You're like, "Oh, that sounds fun." And so you might actually learn something about yourself just by going through the work that you can do. Uh and this all falls within the career counseling kind of kind of space that I was very fortunate to have had a lot of as a kid. I'm going to take a break, give my voice a break, drink some coffee, and I'll be right back. So, what I'd like you to do right now though while I'm away is I want everybody to go to this site, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.gov. Govbls.gov. Uh before you judge it, the Bure of Labor and Statistics is one of the the leftover, you know, still funded organizations of America of American government that actually publishes data about job growth and uh did I yeah uh and yeah, boy, I had strong fingers for my typing. So go here and look just start studying this place, okay? And you can you can find your way around this website. I want you to get really good at understanding what's on this website. This website is used to make decisions uh at every level, corporate and education, uh and can help you make a very found there's lots of ways to make a decision about what job is growing and what job to get, but this is one of the biggest ones. uh and then at school they'd have you look at the BLS. So, while I'm on break, go ahead and start browsing this and see what you find and then when we come back you can share what you find. Okay, I'm back. Um, be the institute. Oh, thank you for that post, Barrett. Instant. I want to move to Spain. Did you know that? Did I tell you that already? I I I spent a week obsessed with moving to Barcelona to Valencia and then I discovered Sevilla. I discovered Sevilla. I was like trying to become an expat and move over there. I still am seriously thinking about pursuing that. So I really love America too. I mean certain parts of America, but I was Barcelona. I speak French. I want I want to go to Europe and in retirement. I don't know. Anyway, let's talk let's talk later about that. But yeah, I very seriously wanted to go. Um I think if I moved it would probably be Sevilla though because it's like so classic Spain. Yeah, I know. See is like crazy hot. It's got a big time night life though and it's got, you know, really classic from what I hear. I don't know. I've never been. I I'm definitely going to visit. So I hope you'll, you know, help me out. Yeah. One of the reasons I do want to move to Europe is is I have a lot of friends in Europe through the stream. uh not this year. This year I'm going through another move, but um the year after that or something like that, I'm very seriously thinking about Thursday since I'll be over on the east coast. I'm going to fly over to Europe and do a little tour over there and possibly do some miniature RWX cons where we just meet and you meet and greet kind of thing. I I I really want to promote this this personal uh networking where you get to meet so and so and someone gets to because that's that's how people get jobs. All right. So, how many of you did you find some stuff you like over here? Let's actually go find the tech careers and we'll talk about that. We're we're doing okay on time. Uh, today is largely going to be about these, you know, non-technical things. We're going to talk about the industry, what the life is like, and where you can find your place in there, and then how you can find out what your place is. That is the focus today. Um, if you don't take anything away from today as the goal, the goal is for you to think about by the end of the day like like up to maybe five potential positions by name that you would like and and over the before the next week, it'll be your homework. Find five companies that you would target based on that. Now, you can change this at any time. you're free to change it, but this is going to help really laser focus your plan. And without the plan, you'll waste time and money trying to figure it out. That's why we're hitting this the first day. So, let's do it. We're Let's go. Let's go into u the different subjects. So, you can search for like computers, right? We'll just search something simple. So, computer programmers, occupational helpbook. Okay, let's go look at this. So, uh, you can already tell that there's a bunch of stuff here. I I mean, I have my own opinions on this, but I I want to pretend like I'm you. So, let's see. What do we got? What do computer programmers do? Well, they do this and that. Uh, a lot of you might not know what a programmer actually does. What's the difference between a programmer and a software developer? Well, you can go here and figure it out. In fact, uh, I'm trying to find there's there's a category here that I happen to know about. I'm kind of cheating because I know about it. There is a similar occupations. There's uh here we go. A list of occupations do similar to computer programmers, uh computer information scientists, uh computer information systems managers, computer hardware engineers, uh database administrators, and I'm going to pick out a couple of these because we can't read them all right now. We probably should, but I want you to read them. Okay? So, this is about you. You need to go through here and read about what these different jobs do. Even even if you don't ultimately find a job through here, uh, this is a really great place to get a sense of what the jobs look like. It's very, very well written uh, and stuff. And median pay, this this is 2024. This has been the funnest uh, the most entertaining statistic. It's interesting. It hasn't been updated since 2024. It's probably because it didn't get funded. Yeah, I I have been following this number since 2013 every year. In fact, I wish I had been recording the numbers. Uh W3 text is probably a good one, too. Yeah, let's let's go look at that, too. W3 text. That's that's W3, though. That's that's uh Yeah, this is web web technology. Yeah. Yeah. This is if you're if you're going to get into web development, which is just one thing. Uh, okay. So, we're going to break that down too into like where where are the subcategories of jobs and everything. I have a a diagram of this somewhere that I can't find. So, uh, I used to make a tree. So, the thing to consider when you're looking through their hair is how much education is normally needed and whether you need medium pay. And that's a really good segue into the question, should you get a university degree? And the answer very simply is yes. Unfortunately, if you do not and America, in America, in America, and this actually goes for Germany, too, because I know Bosch, I actually spoke with a representative from Bosch about this. uh in America if you do not have an uh a degree you can't get through the door in most large organizations. There are some that will take a break on you and Silicon Valley made a big deal in 2016 about hiring people without degrees but fundamentally they still require certificates and stuff. Uh but the truth is that almost no no country no company's getting there there's a a great video from uh a while back uh from uh god he's what Adam ruins everything it's really dated video but in that video it says should I do a degree or not and in that degree they cite a statistic that that through all all points of their career people with degrees no matter what the degree was made 30% more than people who didn't. So, but then the question, well, what degree do you get comes up? Uh, yeah. So, even if like I have a Russian degree and and I'm working as a high performance machine learning engineer making gobs of money to me, I'm actually very low paid compared to people elsewhere. Uh, but uh but yeah, I'm completely selftaught. 100% 100% selftaught. I I took a couple classes at GCS 101. I learned Pascal useless and uh other than knowing what a procedure and a function is and what the difference is. Do you know the difference? Uh and but yeah, I what can I say about that? I you know, I switched majors like six times in college. I I was a French major. I was I I taught French and Russian labs actually. Uh I was a big linguist. I I really love linguistics actually. That this is another thing. And so we're going to get into the know yourself thing and and I I I really want to spend a solid hour on that because um so many things uh that I if I had known when I was in my 20s now uh and I had the courage to act on them, it would have changed my entire life's trajectory. Everything about my life would have changed. And I want to believe that I'm speaking to some of you that are starting out live right now. And I want to me and others in the chat, I I I want to be here to give you permission to take control of your life right now and to make the decisions that are going to be in your best interest for the rest of your life. And that means doing what you are going to want to do for you. And I I know I know I sound like a whatever, but this is just so freaking important and and I I'll get into it a little bit later. So, let's talk about the degrees. So, which of these degree which of these kind of occupations knows to you? You do you need a do you need an entry- level education? Do can you get an associates? I happen to know that one of the one of the highest paying jobs here for the least amount of education is wind turbine technician. It's like $100,000 a year. and they they go to like a training center and they nearly die and drive around to all the places they need to fix wind turbines. I know about this because I crossed America. I did a a cross country uh live stream and there were no hotels in this one area because they were all booked up from all the people that were doing wind turbine technician work. So, who knows? Maybe that's a, you know, it's a tech job. Something else I'm gonna take a pause pause to talk about. A lot of careers in technology are not listed here and they would be considered bluecollar. So I really really want to hit this point home. I think it was Minnesota that has a program that will pay you $20 an hour to learn electrical engineering uh to to become an electrician. And then they guarantee you a job at 70 bucks an hour as an electrician and it's backed by the government. There are so many bluecollar jobs that are technical. Plumbing is one of them of course but that are not being filled because people don't want to do it. And that one came to mind because there are so many things if you if you like the hardware side of technology and you know computers you like hands-on sort of things and you like the Raspberry Pies and playing with thing uh making your own circuit boards then you know becoming an electrician and getting paid to become an electrician and then getting an automatic job is a great segue into some other computer engineering job. So, you know, pointing for a PBC. So, what I'm trying to tell you is think outside the box, people. It's your chances of getting a job by going to college for that thing are very low. And I don't think I have to say this. People who get degrees in computer science is one of the worst things you can do to get a tech job. Worst things ever. And I'm not the only one saying that. You can hear that from tons of other people on the internet who have actual jobs in tech. The reason is because computer science teaches you the science of computers. It doesn't teach you how to use those computers to make money for companies. Unless you're Google who's making their own computer languages or something like that. You know, there there are companies that value computer science degrees because they want to hire super smart people for no other reason than they're super smart. But most of the companies have lots of unfilled jobs doing the you know sort of grunt engineering work like running a Kubernetes cluster or keeping their these $15,000 GPUs Nvidia GPUs running instead of sitting idle. These are tasks that that require less technical skill and less you know raw intelligence but are fundamentally the most important skills to have. And I'm actually quoting an engineer from Facebook actually who said that in a code.org video that I used to show people back in 2013. Most of the tech jobs that are out there, including the the hard tech skills, are not as hard as you think they are. They they just take time and you got to learn them and they definitely don't require a CS degree. So so many people will say, "Oh, I need to get a masters in CS or I can't get a good tech job or I can't get a software engineering job. You know, I I there's there's actually one guy, one YouTuber who went through an entire computer computer science program and didn't learn to program once in the entire thing. In fact, he chose to make an app as his capstone project because they didn't teach him programming in the entire thing. I couldn't believe it. So, you know, I guess part of the moral of the story is not both. Yes, you have to go to college, but the degree doesn't matter. That's overwhelmingly statistically verified. If you want to get a math degree or a CS degree or quite honestly my language degree I think has actually really helped me pick up languages. You know I I speak probably 15 computer languages because the understanding of syntax and organization of thing I was you know 300 level calculus student as well. So math computer science is fundamentally math. So, learning how to organize your thoughts and create an algorithm and think logically, those are all really core hard uh tech skills and you can have them in any in any number of ways and be good at it. But there's a bunch of stuff that doesn't require that that is more about like, you know, fixing things or managing things and and and so there's there's lots of different careers there. Uh so speaking of which before we leave the career topic uh in my mind this is where I would love to draw a diagram. In my mind there are basically three huge uh areas of tech of the tech industry. I'm not talking about you know Silicon Valley kind of stuff. I'm talking and we're going to talk about specific companies in a second. I'm talking about there's operations. In fact, if you go to like a college or an enterprise, they will generally have what they call a knock and a sock. And the acronyms don't really jive, but the network operations center and the software operations center. So, the biggest division in technology and tech careers, we're talking is is the hard skill division. So you have software applications development people who are making stuff with tech and you have people that are keeping the stuff running and those are the operations people. So you have ops and apps. Remember that ops and apps. Ops is operations. That's whether it be hacking to test, whether it's secure, whether it be setting up new servers for people to run their databases on, you know, keeping the [ __ ] running. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to swear. That that is your job, right? And and then you have apps, you know, there there is a tiny little niche between that and that's actually my job. I really love it. It's called as a a systems development engineer. And what they do is they develop systems that enable simply call it DevOps. It's really not called that anymore. But they enable systems to allow the software applications people to better use the stuff that the operations people maintain the computers the data plers and stuff like that. Okay. So, so you have the two major divisions in the software in the technology world for hard tech skills. When I talk about hard tech skills, I I this is a bad term, but it's so commonly used. It's probably because you know it. So hard skills mean I know how to code. I know how to build a computer. Hard skills. Uh soft skills are I know how to manage people. I know how to manage a project. I know how to sell [ __ ] I know how to, you know, uh connect people. Uh I know how to communicate. Uh those are unfortunately called soft skills or very very real skills. I have I have so much uh I'm going to tell a story. I have a buddy who works for a company that you would absolutely know in New York and we were up there visiting uh brilliant brilliant manager and this is a person whose skill set is not hard skills. He dabbles in hard skills, you know, like coding and and building little Raspberry Pies or whatever. But the main skill that he has is identifying talent and connecting talent in comparable ways with other talent. The guy was a genius at this and I mean I'm like bowing down to his genius. So he he told me he just randomly talking about u this association that he created between an engineer who I think had autism who could code like a mother. you know, it was just so good at producing and so good at turning code around, but had zero ability to close, to finish, and to make things good and to to talk to people and communicate everything. And he he ident this this this manager identified this guy and he also identified another guy who was a closer. He his whole thing was probably ADHD a little bit, but he was really good at taking the thing and and making sure all that stuff was taken care of. And he paired these two people together and he told me stories about them producing value that was insane because this guy's skill was bringing together talent, complimenting it together and hiring that talent in addition to, you know, vetting it. He wasn't the HR person, he was the manager, but then bringing them together and getting them to pair well and then getting the maximum out of them. So, you know, I really I really love that. So, in in the software world, you get this a lot. In fact, just last week, I I I regularly I'm a I'm a communicator. I'm a you know, sometimes overly so. and uh and I I've been pairing just spontaneously with a guy on my team who is very soft-spoken and doesn't talk very much on the team, but produces some really great ideas. In fact, I have championed some of the ideas he had to do some testing that didn't impact our our test machines as much by localizing the test environment. I was like, man, this is a really great idea. And I took his idea and I made sure everybody heard about it. So this idea of teaming and identifying opportunities for people to team, those are real skills even if they are called soft skills. The ability to read language, the ability to read a person's face, the ability to to sense uh a business deal going down, to negotiate, uh to be an agent, to be a recruiter, to be a salesperson. These are all very real skills and they pay exceptionally well. In fact, there's one last one last story. There's a guy I used to work with at actually at IBM and he was indirectly related to my wife and at the time and his he was a project manager and a salesperson and his entire team would sell one mainframe computer per year and that was their entire goal and they they would they would bring in multiple millions of dollars into the company on that one sale. And so he was so good at sch smoozing people and marketing and bringing them in and showing them the technology and making them feel special and and that was a very real skill too. So uh I probably overly emphasized that this year but this year I have made a lot of friendships with people who are in need of work who quite honestly have not considered tech jobs because they think it's outside of the scope of their possibility. they think, "Oh, I can't code. I can't build computers. That's not my thing." There are a lot of other jobs in that space, right? So, don't don't count them out. And they are listed here, by the way. So, and and you can go look at them. Uh what kind of jobs are are web designers, software de people who make uh those apps that you use, network people who keep everything communicating. Uh and then we have of course the AI ones. uh the information security analyst jobs used to be the fastest growing the last time I checked this a year ago it was growing at a rate of 32%. It was the fastest growing job in the entire list of jobs. So I am going to I am going to list the top three fastest growing tech jobs that I know of. Uh one of them is hacker security information specialist. Uh the other one is the AI people. the AI people uh community for research social sciences I think they are Nope that's one of them continue uh yeah so I mean I don't want to do this right now can I not do this right now you're going to make me do this why are you making me do this where's the button to stop it there it is Okay. Please take rest. Yes. What? Uh yeah. So 20% faster. So uh here we go. Occupational information research scientists. This is going up. Um I I do want to say a couple things. So uh the security the security jobs are going to continue to go down in my opinion. This is my personal opinion. I have nothing to say about this. The the security industry is going to be severely impacted by AI more than most of the other tech jobs. We will talk about AI in general later but uh most of the work to analyze a system and discover all of its vulnerabilities can entirely be done with AI and much better than a person. So I do believe this is going to be a thing and kind of even enjoy working with people. Yep. Yeah. If if you're partially technology, if you're partially good with tech, you're a perfect project manager because then you can speak the language of the people that you're managing. So uh so there you go. So that's so there there is another um uh so so just to give you a sense look at this system engineers are in decline systems are in decline. Yeah this and they're not even making that much money. They barely crack 100 grand here. This is not this is not s is such a new is a new job so it's not even listed here. Uh, by the way, there are other places. Please post your your ideas into the chat. Post them to the forum. Other places you can go look for jobs. Indeed comes to mind. Uh, you can look at all those places for for different jobs and what what's getting posted. Software developers are still That's actually faster than it was. It was only 10% last time I checked. That looks like it's going up. Uh, digital designers. That's average. I hate LinkedIn, but we'll talk about that later. Uh network architects architecture is good. Data are the data analysts going up 4%. No, these are people that made these are not data engineers. These are people who maintain databases that have stuff in them like static data. See, computer information systems managers. Managers are always going to be high. uh research scientist. I think this is the AI one. Actually, no. If I remember right, the the this got me last time. The uh ones that make do machine learning are listed under not listed under tech. I had this problem last time. Yeah. Uh data scientists. Okay. Data scientists are not strictly machine learning people. Uh let's see this. Check this one though. This is really growing. Yeah, this job is growing faster than hackers. This job was barely on the map two day, two years, three or four years ago. Uh DevOps, cloud engineering, software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers. It depends on what you mean by DevOps and cloud engineering. Uh DevOps is a term that I really hate and I made videos about this because nobody knows what it means. It what you know it it's better for you and we're going to know thyself. We're going to talk about that in our next break which I need to take now. Uh yeah. So it's be you need to describe the activities that you're doing so I can actually find the job that it that that the title goes with and such as like building hardware or you're logging into GC Google cloud platform and doing things uh using Kubernetes using whatever. So, let's let's let's look at this last occupational book and then uh I'm going to I'm going to tell you about an exercise I want you to do like right now while I'm on break and then and then I'll come back and we'll talk. So, you can see this is this is R growing at 34%. And it only requires a bachelor's degree and the median pay median pay is 112 grand. That's the middle people. the middle. And the people I know who do this are making way more than that. If you're working in Silicon Valley, you're making over a quarter mill, some of them. And and I, you know, this just so it really depends. And then we're going to get to this next. Whether you want money or you want to have your hand you one of the frustrating things here is the people that actually are hands-on with the hardware make very little money in tech because it's it doesn't pay as well. It's like teachers uh computer hardware engineers check them. So this they're making $155,000 median pay but the growth I guess I take that back. I I think Oh, I remember the the growth rate is is slower. But I didn't realize they made that much. That's great. Computer hardware engineers. [ __ ] 155. Really? You know what I think's happening? I think I think they're they're their pay is going up because of all the data centers that are going in. This is be interesting to figure out. You're just like computers. Yeah. All right. So, okay. Next, I'm going to tell you about an activity I want you to do uh to kind of figure out yourself. And I'm going to put this in here as well. Uh skill stack uh no skill stackd. All right. So this is a technique I call um know your skill stack your skill stack. Uh so the first thing you get to do is ask yourself uh so what activities what activities do I like doing uh specifically? And what I'm talking about is uh spelling correctly for example. So this would mean like hey pimp do you like to uh do you like to type? Do you like to be with people? Do you like to talk? Do you like to be left alone? Do you like to listen to music? Do you like to work anywhere in the world? Do you like to you know what are the things you envision doing? You know uh so this is this is kind of like you can almost kind of way to say this would be like imagine a perfect day uh on the job what would you do? What would you be doing? Would you be to talking to people? This is super important. This is the most important thing you're going to do and you can revise it. This is going to take you more than a week, if not months to figure out, but this is the most important activity to do because this helps you determine what you want to do in life, who you are, what do you want to do every day. And and I'm I'm going to come back with some ideas for my life uh after we get done. I don't want to jade you on this. I want you to come up with your own ideas. Uh and then so once you have those things then I want you to start begin to identify uh jobs that uh involve those activities. Okay, that's that's the next question. Answer the question which jobs which jobs involve those specific activities. And that this is hard. This is hard. We're going to start today, but you're going to be doing this for a while. And then the last one is uh which uh which companies have those jobs? Okay. Sleeping. Sleeping. Sleeping. Bed tester. All right. No, that does not count. All right. Figure that out, friends. I'll put the fishies on down below. Wait, why isn't working? Why does it keep doing all caps? Because capsuck is on. Rob, my T-book has gotten so bad. Oh boy. There you go. All right, I'll be back in a bit. Little sisters are lowle. A lot of people like lowle stuff. my friend that he got a job for Garmin. My friend learned as he's working for Garmin, working on firmware. So, there are tons of jobs out there. Get me gets me stuff at wholesale all the time, by the way. Yeah. So, Yep. I got to be back up. Okay. So, I got rid of my fishies. Um, we're doing okay. It's taking a long time, but we're doing okay. So, what what activities do you like to do specifically? So, I'm gonna I'm going to tell you some some revelations about me and just you can go ahead and talk about your own. Uh, first of all, if if I had done this before, I I have learned that I went into tech, but I actually really love being outside. I really love talking to people. I really love communicating. I really like sitting there and like listening to people's stories. I love that. That's like my favorite thing. It's probably no surprise I ended up being a live streamer. Um I really really get into that and if I if I could take back everything in my life I would have become a journalist and I you know I love languages uh coding I probably would have learned to code uh or something like that but I probably more I would have I would have become a writer and a journalist and I I would have I would have written books I would have written non-fiction novels and and fiction novels and and and travel the world and probably not had uh a family in the traditional sense. I would have probably adopted people and helped individual people and and chose to do that. That's the life that I would have lived had I had I had I been able to make this decision without any apologies today knowing what I know about myself. So, you know, but here I am. You know, it's never too late to be what you could have been. And I believe that. I believe that no matter how old you are, it's never too late to be that person. So, it really depends on how much you're willing to sacrifice. Um, the decision I made to get into the tech, uh, you know, when the internet came out was because I was a young father with a baby, no car, who had just been told by his wife was not going to ever be able to work in Russia. She would never go back. So, my entire degree was useless. And I walked into an internet service provider, Fiberet, which I ended up helping to found. and ended up getting a job there showing them the web page that I had taught myself how to build because there was no books on it. The point is I took that job out of necessity because I had a family. had young children and I made that that choice because, you know, my belief at the time and and I went ahead and did what I was told and I got a really great job uh you know, eventually doing technology in the internet, which which I was excited enough about, but you know, I I completely dismissed the possibility that I could have ever done been a writer or done any of those other things because one, it didn't make any money. Nobody ever makes money as a writer. I have a baby. I can't I can't do that. Uh and we have people in the chat right now who have gone into elementary education and other things like that who have made a conscious choice uh to sacrifice in order to do the job that they want even though they're not making a lot of money. So as you think about these things, really really think about what's going to bring you joy. You know, somebody in the chat said that they really love hacking and another one said I and they said that they were screwed, I think. and why, right? So, you could do what you want to do. You just have to make sacrifices in life. And it's better that you know them now uh before you get married and everything goes on. I my second marriage died because the person I was married to realize what they wanted and I helped them realize that and there was no way we could stay married after that. That's a true story and I'm not I'm not bagging on anybody by saying that. that sometimes you will come and that's true love by the way. True love is to let is to let the person become what they discover they can be or want to be in my opinion. So yeah, so you know and maybe and maybe that's that's an elementary school education teacher who sacrifices every day works their butt off and has to get more certifications than the average IT person but makes one sixth the money. But if that's your thing, you know, find it. Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell says, which is not like a selfish thing. That's like the more people who realize what they're truly good at, what people tell them they're good at, what people what they realize they're good at, the more people who actually fulfill themselves, the better the world will be. Because by making your best you, you're making a better world. This idea that you have to sacrifice your own wants, desires, and fulfillment so that you can make the world a better place is [ __ ] in my opinion. And and I think the best way to to make a better world is for you to discover to truly discover through trial and error what it is that you want to be. And you can't do that without trying things out, without doing a lot of talking to different people. Talk to people. This is part of your homework. You need to like so what activities do you like? Imagine a perfect day. Start to survey this the people. Go on the internet survey what the VLS gov is a place to start. But go on and follow different people. Say hey what's this job about? What is this job about? Blah blah blah. People that you know people that seem happy. Talk to all those people and do your own research to figure out what you want to do every day. Notice I didn't say anything specifically about technology because none of this has anything to do with tech skills. Tech skills and tech jobs just happen to be the place that some of us will want to go. And the reason I'm harping on this for nearly 30 minutes total is because if you don't want a tech job, not even a soft skills tech job, you can't stand there. There are people among you who have such principles they cannot stand to work for a company that you know I I have a buddy who is one of the salt of the earth's most amazing human beings I could ever tell you about and he works for Elon Musk indirectly but but the stuff that he's doing for the neural network and I'm not push boy I'm not pushing it but the stuff he's doing for the neural network uh thing they're actually working on uh remediating handicaps and people and So he really really really believes in that. You might not believe in Elon Musk might hate his guts. Doesn't matter. So he works I work for a company that's producing an amazing product which I will not please don't share. I don't I don't do that. But my company produces a very specific very amazing product. I might not believe or agree with a company on a lot of other things. So, you have to assess what your level of of tolerance is for working for a company that may or may not be, you know, uh, in in line with your your ethics. And a lot of people these days are choosing not to work for companies. And as you're Okay, I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. So, we're going to start to try to find companies next. So, let's let's talk about that. Um, so so which jobs involved in specific activities? Okay. So, let's talk about more about activities. Do you do you like to work outside? Do you like to be with kids? I think I talked about that. Do you uh do you like to be adored? Do you like do you like attention? Do you not like attention? Are you a good performer? Uh can you make people laugh? I mean, these are all things that are relevant. Uh getting a job on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube. Uh content creation. Uh yeah, we we'll talk about that. We'll talk about ways to get a job. And uh that's actually in the list of things that we're going to go through. Content creation, live streaming, that kind of thing. I actually got this job from Twitch because I am a content creator. That's how I got it. And if you knew the company I worked for, it would blow your mind because it has nothing to do with content creation. Uh you like documenting stuff, old old electronic parts. Yep. Some people really like making other people's stuff understandable. So anyway, enough enough time on that. Spend some time this week doing this. I can't do it for you. You got to do it. Okay? You you got to do it. You got to take you've got to take it on. Make the decision to go do it. Uh and you got to go find out what those jobs are. Okay? We already looked at a number of the hard skill tech jobs. Okay? And then what companies have those jobs. Okay? The one thing I'm going to say about let's get into the companies thing for a second. Uh the number one caution I'll give you when you're looking at companies is to not look at just Silicon Valley fame companies. I work for a company that you would definitely know by name, a multinational that has probably the top five computing power in the world that you would not even know because they don't they don't brag about it. The power and computing power, high performance computing power of the company that I work for makes Google look like a tiny little baby in kindergarten. But nobody would know because they don't brag about it. They don't walk around saying, "Look at how awesome I am. What I'm trying to tell you is do not discount companies that are boring. The stuff I do for my company, the team, the when you're looking for a company, first of all, the the best thing about a company that you can find is the people you're going to be working with in my opinion. And you can't know that unless you're working there. It's kind of sad. I wish I wish I don't know the answer to that. If somebody has a suggestion, you can't really know the people you're going to be working with and get a sense of them. But I will take a $20,000 loss in payment just to work for a company where I I love all the people I work with. And I've been around the block long enough to know how much of a toll working for a team or a manager takes on you physically and mentally. Uh and to me, it's worth at least 20 grand. So, I I worked for absolutely horrible managers before. I personally had to launch at a a thing to get a person fired from our team because they were taking our entire team down. It was horrible. It was some of the worst moments of my life. Uh, and I work for a team right now that I'm very happy to say makes me laugh every day. We're always having fun together. They're all brilliant. Everybody has nothing but respect for each other. In fact, we're so close, we end up having our manager say something like, "Don't make me stop this car and come back there. Don't make me turn this car around." Because we will argue like children sometimes because we're so familiar with each other. Like I literally put in a chat once, "Why are you being such a dick about this?" And it was, "Do not do that. Don't do that. You're not supposed to write like that at work." Because I knew him so closely. One of my one of my co-workers. I'm actually reviewing his writing on his personal book and some other stuff and and uh yeah uh so hey thank you. Oh that's really great. >> Anyway, so you got to be careful because you get you get so close with the people you work with. You know that familiarity can get you in trouble. You know when I was at Nike fun story when I was at Nike everybody was sleeping with everybody else. I was married. I was that married Mormon. I was Nike's web master. If you want to read my my CV, you can go read it. I don't need to brag. Uh I cover the Olympics and I went to Phil Knight's place, the CEO to cover the Olympics and learn, you know. So I I have stories. I've been around the block. Um but you know, enough about that. So So if you you know, just be careful about that familiarity. Point is when you're looking at jobs, look for non-traditional jobs. look for long traditional companies, companies you might not expect. Uh, and open your open your eyes a little bit. Um, if you want to work for Netflix and make, you know, whatever, 300,000 a year doing writing JavaScript for 10 hours, 25 hours a day, then fine. And maybe you'll burn out by the time you're 30 and cancel that job and move to Minnesota. Uh, who knows? I mean only you know you do you want to be in a high electricity you know high energy place. True story I was at Nike uh working for the Nike.com project. I made their their their uh cart software uh to check out uh for Nike and uh everybody was getting burned out. We were getting so burned out because we were I had young kids at home. I barely saw him and I was working 20 hour this I'll give you the whole story here. I was working 20 hours a week uh off the clock pretty much. So a total of hours I'd say I was probably working at least 80 or 90 hours. In fact, we were working so much that they would joke and they would they would they would put police line tape on our chemicals to lock us in and then they would bring us like salmon locks and caviar and all kinds of stuff cuz we were their you know premier tech team and we needed to deliver there. Bill Knight was promising all the news stuff that we were going to deliver on days and we're like, "There's no way we're going to make that." And in fact, it got so bad that my wife at the time on Sunday, I was Mormon and my we wanted to go to the family. We had to drive from Beaverton to aggression, which is quite a drive. And our car was, you know, bad. We I I was only making 30 grand. Can you believe that? I I don't mind telling people this. That's how bad Nike was. Nike gave me a raise to 35 grand. I thought I was making crazy money. This is in 97. No, it was after Y2K. So, it was right right around it was like 98 97. Anyway, so they were working me to death and I was making pennies compared to other people in the industry and I didn't know it. So, I there's there's a a reason I'm telling you this. I promise. So, my my wife, she stopped to drop me off. I was going to go grab something at work. And it turned out that that all of the rest of my team was there. And I was like, "What's going on, guys?" Like, "Well, we, you know, we've got this deadline. We got to push through it." And I was like, you know, maybe they tried to contact me. Yeah, we I think they did say that actually. I don't remember. But anyway, so my manager, who I absolutely love, huge YouTube fan, by the way, she would go to every concert I remember. And she said, "We need you. We got to stay here. We we got to have you, Rob." And I'm like, like, "I just got dropped off. I can't stay here." She goes, "We really really need you. You need to like really stay here." And and I I I was like, I thought my job was on the lineup. I didn't stay. So I went out to the to the minivan, which had a bad transmission, and I said to my wife and to I said, "I can't I got to stay. They they had a deadline and she lost her [ __ ] and that's a technical term. She came out of the van, walked in and started reading everybody a new one without swearing. Yelling at them, saying things I can't repeat. Uh not because they were profane, but because they were like so harsh, like you don't know what it's like, blah blah blah blah. It was horrible. And I was terrified because I thought I mean all the stress my my wife had been raising two young toddlers by herself part pretty much and I was never home. I was constantly working. So you know I thought I wanted to be all immersed in it and everything the So anyway she ended up uh she screamed at everybody. I mean she was I mean she literally she personally attacked everybody. One person said but I have dogs. She goes you have no one like having kids. blah blah blah. And one of them and one of them said, "But I have dogs." And she goes, "You have a dog?" Blah blah blah. And she was like yelling at her. It was so ugly. I thought I was going to die. And so she stormed out and she told me, she goes, "Look, if you want to stay, fine. I don't care." And she stormed out and she went in the car to get ready to take off. And I sat at my desk. I sat at my desk and I was I thought I was I thought I just was going to get fired. I was so afraid of getting fired. I had no idea because I was so paranoid about getting fired that I was not only underpaid, but I could walk that day and get a job that money anywhere else. I didn't know this because I was too young. And I was terrified. And I I said I I said to I I remember sitting in my cubicle. God, I'll never forget. I I looked down at my desk. I put my fingers on the desk and and I was morbid, you have to understand. And I said, "Fuck this." And I walked out and God is it's making me emotional a little bit because I thought I was I had just walked out of my job and and I I I w I went I went and I I stressed all day at our in my in-laws, you know, doing Sunday dinner or whatever. And then uh you know the next day I went in, this is true story, all of it. The next day I went in and and rather than losing my job, my manager called me and I like, "Okay, here we go." And uh the manager said, "We understand that you're something came out. I think my ex said something about a transmission." And so I sat, this is this is totally true. I sat in front of my manager and the manager says, "We understand you need a new transmission for your car." And I said, "Yeah." And she goes, "We'd like to buy you one." I'm like, "What?" She's like, "Yeah, we we appreciate your work here and we we really we would really like to have you uh have you be happy." So, this whole thing apparently got reported to my manager and rather than getting fired, they paid for me to get a new transmission for my car. But, but uh but then, you know, it never got any easier. It was just as bad. It was continued to be just as hard. And so this is this is where the story started. They got everybody in a room and they they had a Thank God I wasn't there. I I I got to tell you, I wasn't for some reason I wasn't there. They had a meeting because they were having a they were having a dilemma and they they brought the whole Nike.com team together and they put him in a room and they had uh a senior executive I can't remember who it was basically deliver the message this is a do this is before the.com crash by the way if you know how that's relevant I promise. So this is a dot. You need to treat it like a dot. That means that we have to make sacrifices and that we need to all dedicate our time to it just like any other.com. And rather than apologizing for all the work that they're putting us through and compensating us and giving us some other kudos, they basically said suck it up and get out or get out. And I am not kidding. next day 20% of the team quit including the guy who told his recruiter about me who recruited me in to IBM and I I was talking to Chris said I can't talk he said can you do can you double my salary and he said absolutely can you be here in Dallas next week I went in I interviewed doubled my salary got an $80 pdeium for a month of training in New York and started a new career at IBM so the moral of the story is You have to know what your tolerance is for work. A lot of people I I told you I started teaching game development to get people into the industry into tech uh kids in in particular and so many of them are like I want to be a game dev. I'm like are you sure just go just go do a search for any of the the the abuses that happen to game developers in the industry. They are some of the most abused employer employees of all time. Now, some of them make good money, some of them don't. All of them work 90 to 100 hours a week. Uh, if you're young and healthy and don't care, uh, you only want to do it for two or three years, fine, you can do it. But you, it's a part, this is a really, really big thing. And I'm glad I told you the story. I know it took a long time, but I'm speaking to a lot of young people right now who are making really important decisions about what they want in life. And I'm telling you, if you choose to do one of these highly intense, high paid things like maybe crypto even, a lot of people went into fintech, made a lot of money, and all of a sudden they're unemployed, but they don't have kids to pay for. So, just really really weigh these decisions heavily before you you do them. Uh there are IT jobs everywhere. There's accounting, marine, shipping, banking, water treatment. Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. So, the takeaway from this is know what kind of job, know how much time you're going to be willing to put in. And quite honestly, uh well, that's one last thing I'll tell you about about me. Uh how long we got? Let's see. 12. We have another hour. I got to take a break. Uh I I am a big outdoors person. So, after when the internet came out, I right right from the get-go, I wanted to be a remote employee. And I'm very happy to say I have been a remote employee since 1997. So, I kind of laugh at this return to office stuff because there I'm like, I've been working remote since the internet came out. But here's why it's important. I very specifically pursued jobs that allowed remote work from the beginning. And anytime a job would try to bring me in, I would alter the parameters of the job I was seeking so that I did not have to go in. And I am very happy. this. Put this on your activities you want to do. I like using my daylight for daylight. Today is daylight savings time. You've been pulling remote since 28 2002. I have a I would rather have the quality of life. My my my in-law my brother my father-in-law used to say, "Hey, you just got a raise. Gas prices went up, right?" Uh I mean just the cost of going into work is a good 10 20 grand a year. So I determined very early that I was not going to accept any job that wasn't remote. Now to do that is tricky. You got to get in the door. You got to produce value and then you got to make sure that they trust you outside. And I had a lot of ad adjustments to be made from working remotely with my family, which I can talk about another day. But I decided early on that I value my daylight. I want to be outside. I was a triathlete and Nike. I I want to be running. I want to go on a 2-hour, you know, run on occasion. I want to go on bike rides. If you know me, I want I value my daylight. So, I wanted to work in an environment where it was more or less flexible. I still had to be in meetings, but I could use my daylight for daylight and I could use my darkness for work in the early morning hours and late evening hours. And I still do that. And you know, it doesn't make any sense to me that all of us knowledge workers who don't need daylight have to work during the day. This is like this message from old school workplaces, right? In fact, you can't even make the argument that you have to be around the in around the same time as everybody else anymore because most of my team is in India or Europe someplace. So, it doesn't matter. And that quite honestly should have continued through co but a bunch of idiots are making a bunch of hor decisions about forcing people to come back to work. I won't do it. If they were to try to tell me to come back to work, I'd walk tomorrow and go work someplace else. Probably make more money. So, you have to know that. You have to know, do I want to work remote? I I worked for an entire month with a Starlink from my Subaru in the middle of southern Utah. And that's a value that I have. That's a thing I I value. I want to be able to do that. So, those are things to consider if you want to get into tech or whatever. Uh if you want to be around people, you want to be in education, you got to do all those other things. So, just consider all those different companies. Make sure you're considering a company that's got the same values as you when it comes to remote work, especially uh we lost three people from my team last year because the company I work for, I almost said the name, uh forced everybody to come back. It made big news. If you do a search, you could probably find it. Uh and they said no. They said absolutely not. And they left. They went to work for Nvidia. Now they're making gobs more money. So, you know, pay attention companies out there. If if you do this right, if you get the right skills, the company will bend over backwards to let you work for them. Interviewed with a company uh a different company at IBM and uh at different with when I was there and they said, "Oh yeah, uh our our our our team culture is that we do better when we're all in person." I'm like, "Okay, great. Goodbye." And I said, "I could find I'm no longer interested in this job." And they went, "Wait, wait, what? What?" And they're like, "Well, why why did you like shut us down so fast?" And I'm like, I don't want anything to do with you if you're going to if you actually think this job can't be done unless you're all screwing around in the water cooler. That cuz that's not how work happens. Some things happen that way, but usually no. Uh yes. Okay, I have to take another break. My my voice is gone. We're going to end at three. Uh so what am I what I'm going to cover? So for next, if you're not looking for the jobs, uh let's go look at uh the Okay, so understand the tech industry, uh the culture. Okay, I have a couple other things to say about that and then we'll leave this particular bullet point permanently. Okay, so we've already talked about lifestyle and culture. So, the one thing that I I want to say right now and I want you to think about and write down in your journal or whatever is how much time are you how much do you like to study? Because depending on the tech job, part of the tech culture is including softskll jobs like sales is that you have to spend an extremely large amount of time keeping up and you're not paid for it. Sometimes you're lucky you can sneak it in during work. Sometimes they'll give you a Friday. So that's what I want you to think about. Okay? And that's kind of a part of the next bullet point. uh how fast do you learn? Are you a slow learner? Are you meticulous? Are you uh focused on quality? Are you OCD? Are you ADHD? Uh how much time do you need to learn things particular things that involve logic? Think about that really, really well. Okay. And besides that, I want you to start I want you to write this down while I'm gone. for this 10 minutes. Start a list of everything you can remember, anything anybody's ever said about you that was nice. Like, you're really good at this or you're really good at this or even you're really pretty or you're you're really good with people or write all of those things down. Okay? because we're going to make a self assessment about you. Like you have to figure out what those things are and along with that write down what are your hobbies. This isn't this isn't the activities you want to do every day but it kind of is right. So if you if you could do anything you wanted to during the day what would you do? And if it's sleep seriously somebody was joking about it but hey I like my sleep. I take a nap anytime I want to during the day because I work remote. It It's a factor and I'm older, so I need them. So, what do you like to do every day? How what what has anybody ever said about you? Uh what do you feel like people could say about you? And then what are your challenges? What do you really struggle with? I cannot do math. I hate sitting in front of a screen. It drives me crazy. I have to be walking around to think. Are you a pacer? Are you the person who has to walk around to think? Are you a They have a name for it. Think about all those things. Okay? Spend a moment writing this stuff down. And I mean it. Write it in a on a piece of paper right now. And you can move it to something else later, but start right now and do that. Can you guess my favorite snack today? What's your favorite snack? Yeah, it's almonds. It's an almond. What kind of almond is it, though? What's your favorite? Anyway, wasabi. Wasabi almonds. They're so good. I can barely taste them. I probably shouldn't be eating them with this cold, but oh well. All right, friends. Uh so by now you should have a list of what you like to do, what comes easy to you, what's hard for you to do, what what you struggle with, and you're going to be building on that list um a lot over the next week. Okay? So, um, this next week I you really want to dedicate yourself to that. Uh, and so for this last half hour or this last hour or so, um, we're now going to dive into, uh, the technical stuff related to, uh, more of the hard skill jobs in technology. Okay. But before we do that, I want to put a real solid delimited line under this because, you know, a lot of people might think that these decisions and understanding yourself are irrelevant. I I think I've overly emphasized how important I think this is at this point. You you definitely need to know thyself and and if you don't, you're going to waste time. You're going to be you're going to find heartache. It doesn't ma mean that you can't change your mind later, by the way. So, uh, Bas Lurman, uh, with a sunscreen song. I'm dating myself. If you, if you haven't, go go look up Bos Lurman. Ba, I think it's B as Lu Hr m- an go look up the sunscreen song and listen to it. It's full of great advice that was dispensed back in 1986, I think. That song still holds up. It's an amazing song. Bas Laurman also went on to make Mulan Rouge and uh a bunch of other really great Romeo and Juliet Caprio uh a bunch of other really great movies. So the point is it's just a really but one of the lines from the song is uh you know do one thing every day that scares you uh and you know know who know what you want to be. Some of the most interesting 40 four-year-olds still don't know what they want to be, right? So, you can change. You know, I don't if some of you OCD people out there like me are going to they're going to take this challenge and they're going to say, "Oh, no. I can't figure it all out. I don't know exactly when I want to be." And they're going to be overly stressed about not having the exact answer. And, you know, try not to do that. Just know that you can change. You are in charge of your own destiny. And I don't need to give you permission, but I am. I'm going to give you permission. You You have permission to be what you can be. Be what all you can be. What is that? Like an army slogan. God, I'm pulling all the slogans today. And just do it. Yeah. All right. So, uh, let's think about this for a second. Make sure we covered all the bases there. I've done this so much I can usually remember at all. I don't have to go refer to any notes or anything. Um, we talked about companies. We talked about the type of companies. Uh, we talked about the salaries. We saw the salaries we're looking at. I don't know if you saw, but there was only one job in the entire list that was under 100,000 a year. Uh, the music is reversible, but time isn't interesting. Yeah. And this is coming from somebody who's had a very eventful life as well. Uh Mark Mark and NC is gonna help me put my couch in my apartment when I move back in September. Uh so somebody I met on online by the way. I can't stop talking about it. How awesome it is. Uh let's just pause. What What are we missing? Is anybody have any How about this? Could anybody wanna want to suggest some of the thing? I mean, if you feel comfortable sharing, uh, it's not on the screen, but it will be saved with the video on the side there. And if there's anybody comfortable sharing what it is that they that they're that they like to do, what they're good at, and their own challenges, it would be fun to do this. And I' I've toyed with the idea of actually having somebody eventually over the boost period of the boost to be, you know, on mic and I can talk to to to do this. But if there's anybody who wants to take a shot and actually talk about what is it that you actually want to do, you know, what what are the activities that you see yourself doing? Uh I know I'm kind of reaching out there and if there's nobody that's fine. We'll just we'll just move on. I know it's a very personal thing. This is one of, again, this is one of the things about mentoring that I prefer in person mentoring over this, you know, blasting it out to the internet live stream thing because people are all, you know, they're all nervous right now. It's the first day of school. They're all with each other. They don't know how they're going to be judged. And so, it's it's it's a little bit harder uh to get people to to do that and to trust one another. I do hope, by the way, that by the end of this that at least one or two of you have made friendships with one another that allow you to trust each other with your career goals because that's really the point. Uh I think Daniel says, "I've recently started to self- teach myself ice skating." Cool. Uh which is getting me out rather than playing games at all. That's a very I'm going to say a very Gen X thing, but you know, that's what we did. We didn't have the internet, so we like bruised up our knees learning how to roller skate. I still to this day I love roller skating and ice skating. Uh it gets you out rather than playing games all day. That is another thing. Uh how much activity do you require? Are you if you if you get a sedentary job like I have and you want to stay healthy, uh you you're going to have to add an additional hour a day. So, let's say you had an average job like walking around a store, I don't know, stocking shelves at Target or something. You know, you you wouldn't have to supplement that job with exercise. I mean, you probably should a little, but for me, I literally wake up, roll out of bed, and get on my computer. And people people wonder all the time why I spend two hours a day, you know, either doing some cardio or yoga or whatever, because otherwise I wouldn't do any anything. I would have like 10 steps a day. So, you know, you had to force yourself to go outside. Pink rubber boot says, "I've been a Fisher, electrician, childcare worker, cleaner, production line technician, computer teacher, software developer. Uh, you can change your career. I promise. Absolutely." Uh, and I have I have very much the same story which will come out over time as you get to know me. I I do hope a lot of you will come back and when I stream and I'm not here, whether I'm IRL or doing other things so we can get to know with each other. Uh, okay. So, I think that about covers it. Uh, let's get into the actual hardcore tech skills, right? So, um, once you kind of know yourself and you've identified a job, and by the way, I want you to write down the specific companies and the specific job titles. I'm going to I'm going to pause there because I understand me here. Okay? If if you were with me and I was mentoring you, we would not proceed until those lists were finished. And the reason I'm saying this is because it is hard to commit. You can always change it later, but you right now you need to commit. You need to commit to what jobs sound like the kind that I want and what companies sound like the companies I want to do. Okay? Now, that's going to take a lot of research because you're going to need to know yourself enough to know what are the activities that are done on a job. What are the jobs that go with those activities? and you're going to have to then go out and like do research and this this is probably the best time as as any to bring up AI. So, uh before we get into the tech stuff, let's have a little break in between there to talk about AI. So, uh AI is impacting the entire industry. We're going to talk a lot about that. Uh, this beginner boost is largely been motivated by the fact that everything I did in every other beginner boost has been royally changed by AI. In fact, so much so I took the videos down because I don't want people to waste time doing it wrong. The number one tool you need to get into tech education or any job is some form of AI. I don't care which version you want. We're not going to fight about the best ones. I I'm gonna open a thread about this in the discussion group. Okay, we're gonna go go look for a discussion group about AI and I'm going to strongly encourage everybody who's listening to me, who's following along in the boost to pick an AI and potentially pay for it. And I currently use Chat GBT because it's more personable and I like that. Some people use Claude, some people use the free Gemini on Google, which has gotten a lot better. Uh my issue with the Gemini on Google is that it doesn't remember you. Uh I I it's just to me having the thing it's it's kind of scary and creepy, but at the same time it's extremely useful. When my AI my AI who I've given the name Chloe, she knows me so well that when she makes coding examples, she uses examples from my life like rock climbing and cycling and all kinds of stuff. She's gotten so used to me that my approach to coding, my approach to jobs, the way I do things, if I were to ask her today, what jobs do you think I would go for? She would know. And uh Llama's good. If you want to do your own thing. So the takeaway is AI is impacting all of technology. It's impacting everything. It's the single greatest technical innovation that you will experience. way more valuable than the internet. And it is going to change everything about all of the way we live. And there's going to be those who take advantage of AI and those who don't. And those who don't are going to be left behind the same way your grandpa, grandma who never learned the internet and how to use a mouse are going to get left behind. And I don't that's all I'm saying about that. I don't I have opinions about what that means for humanity and impact on the world and the environment, all that. It doesn't matter. That's the reality. The reality is that AI is here to stay and it's not going anywhere. And you can either use it to benefit and profit from it personally or you can be left behind. And I really mean that. So there is no greater learning tool ever to have existed than AI. I you'll watch me when I'm doing coding. I have coded 14,000 lines. I call it vibe coding. And I coded 14,000 lines to make a complicated overlay with current weather uh distance to the next target uh rotating maps uh and and a and a popup pump fax thing that's tied to my chat. I didn't write a single line of that code. I adapted the code. And you still have to learn how to code to be able to read it. We're going to get into that. The point is that I could have written another thing. Another thing for my $20 a month for Chat GBT, I regularly talk with her on my car trips while I'm going to see family in Russian. So, I practice my Russian and I have all the Russian of our conversation printed out. I started a scholastic aids uh company in when I was in college to assist with language learning. There is no better tool for language learning short of immersing yourself in the foreign country. There is literally no better way to practice conversational language instruction than an AI, an interactive AI that has personality. And for me, that's Chatbt. So, I'm not pushing ChadB. Have nothing to do with him, but I absolutely love it. I can switch and start talking to her in Russian and French like that. And she has kept my my language skills on top, on par, and I really really appreciate that. Uh, she's helped me plan uh I know I'm anthropomorphizing, right? But she's helped me plan bike trips. She's done like all the statistics. She's like, "How much is this?" Yeah, she helped me organize this move in like five minutes. Uh, hey Bran. She's helped me do all kinds of things. And I just want to say now is the time. Don't wait. Right. So, if you're going to if you have an expense and you don't think it's worth it, at least try it out and find an AI that you're comfortable with and start to make an AI a part of your regular life. That means asking it for, you know, waffle recipes and and doing all these things. uh unless you are somebody who is so radically concerned about your privacy and hasn't accepted the fact that there's no such thing anymore. You know, you know, do you do you uh AI is absolutely the new web search engine and it Google is catching up. Thank god it's probably going to put chat GBT people out of business if you ask me because they they have to have it. They have all the data. So, who knows? Anyway, you either are going to be leveraging AI and this goes for everybody. My my ex-wife used to tell me she would use AI to soften the the tone of a letter and to give her suggestions, not to write it, but to to help out with that. Writing a letter recommendation with AI, nobrainer. And you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's perfect." And you're like, "Alterate." It's changing the way we do things. And I don't think it's removing uh it's definitely influencing us all. And it's but so is so are search algorithms. So that's the world we live in. You either use it, benefit from it, or you get left behind. So figure that out. Uh I' I've said my piece on that. Uh I sort of show sorry counter arguments. Absolutely. Uh why should I use Rust? Why should I not use Rust? Why should I use Go? Why should I not use Go? Uh and by the way, you know what I would I would this let's do this as an experiment. After you have the list of interests and strengths and challenges, punch those into your AI and say, "What do you think are the careers that I would be most interested in?" I would be super interested in the the discussion forums. If you haven't gone there, go there now. I'd be super interested to hear what a your AIS have to say about your the choices for you because this is a really great way to use AI. You could you can give it the stuff and it because it has knowledge of like all the stuff, it can kind of make summations for you. You can say, "Well, I really don't like this blah blah blah." And you can like interact with it. It's pretty damn cool. And uh that doesn't mean I'm I don't think we're all going to die at a horribly, you know, horrible ball of fire that was generated by an AI drone that went rogue. I do think that's going to happen. Uh but you know, whatever. All right, let's go. We've only got a half an hour left. Let's now talk about the tech skills that you can start getting into today to start getting excited about the technology part of it. Okay? And as we do that, uh, let's talk about point four, five, and six. So point four is learn what your ideal job requires and how to prove it. Okay? And to that end, uh, I'm going to go ahead and share with you another list. So that is relevant to, uh, most jobs. Remember we said about soft skills versus hard skills. Uh, I said I I always say we for some reason. I don't know why I do. All right. So, uh, again, all this stuff is on on the site that we've already covered. Um so assuming you don't want to go into the soft skills category for tech you know sales recruiting project management uh then the hard skills and the soft the hard skills which include you know hard ops and apps like we talked have a lot of things in common and I want to talk about these technologies from a high level and then we'll dive into them from a low uh over the course of the next weeks or so. So, the number one thing I just told you about is AI prompting and web research. If you don't know how to do web research using an AI, whether it's Claude, your your company's LLM, we have one, uh uh or you know, whatever, you will get left behind. So learning how to interact with an AI is number one the most the important tech skill you will learn. I would suggest it's way more than a tech skill. This is a job skill. If you can't get a job today and be competitive without having the knowledge and an AI behind you to back you in that job. And I swear to God if you don't do that you will be left behind no matter what your job is. Unless you're serving tables or something, waiting tables or any number of of jobs that don't include any kind of knowledge at all. But for all knowledge work, knowledge work is a huge category that includes technology. It also includes education and writing and news and journalism and all kinds of things like that. It does not include, you know, the serviceoriented jobs. But even mechanics can benefit from AI and things like that. So learn that. You've got to do that. Do it today. Start today. You know, if you're going to drop Netflix and pay for chat GPT for God's sakes. Seriously. All right. So, you've got Linux, Unix, Terminal, not desktop. So, we're going to really dissect this one a lot. Uh, but I'm we're going to come back to this bullet point in the final minutes. So, we're going to I'm going to show you over the weekend another thing you can do that's fun to get ready to start using a terminal like I am using today. Uh and and we'll talk about what Linux and Unix are. So, uh the Unix operating system which was invented in something like 78 I think uh by MIT is the most substantial operating system in the planet. Yet most people don't know about it. This operating system is on traffic lights. It's running on your dashboard of your car. It's running in your phone. It's it's running all over on servers. Every single website you ever go to is being served almost almost 98% by a Linux machine on the back end. A lot of people don't know about it because it's when they think operating system, they think about Windows and Mac. And Mac actually is Unix. Uh my my command line prompt I know this is actually based on >> it's a unique system. I know this. It's all the files of the whole park. >> That is not a unique system. >> That is by the way that is not a unique system at all. Uh that's why my the title of my name is I know this. So, isn't that fun? So, use FSV. Okay. So, there's BSD. Yes. Last Miles. Absolutely. Last Miles. Is it BSD Unix? People People are going to ask, "Well, what's the difference between Linux and Unix?" The short answer is Unix came out first. It was $6,000 a seat in the 80s. It was too expensive for everybody. And so a bunch of people fought to come up with VML. Yeah. A lot of a lot of people fought to come up with alternatives. One of them was BSD Unix which created by the Berkeley people. Uh another one was uh Linux which Lun Waltz made up in Finland in college. And you know we could have huge arguments about which one won. Uh in general BSC Unix is used for stability. It's in routers and things like that. uh because it doesn't change very much whereas Linux has become more commercialized and is the basis for all almost all enterprise technology uh specifically Red Hat Suzie are the primary Linux distributions of the enterprise. I say that because all of the decisions about which thing to use when it comes to Linux are based on enterprise scope arch. So we're going to talk about Linux distribution. This is a thing people have made entire channels about. There's massive holy wars about it. We're not going to get into that uh for now, but you're welcome to do that elsewhere. Uh and so you'll notice very specifically it says no desktop. And the reason for that is because when you go search on YouTube or wherever for Linux, you're going to get overwhelmed with videos about awesome Linux desktops, about Linux for gaming, about Linux for this and that. It's super cool. The great thing about Linux is that you anybody can run uh whatever they want. So you can you have so much flexibility in your interface and you can it's really really fun. It's also completely irrelevant for a job. So the only thing that matters to get a job is can you run Linux services write and run software on it and administer those services. That is it. You don't need to do desktop. There is not a single job that requires you to understand a Linux desktop. Some jobs allow you to use a Linux desktop to do your job in addition to a Mac or a Windows machine, but but none of them require Linux as a desktop. None of the main jobs out in the world. Uh enterprises use BSD for licensing. That's a big reason. Yes. Uh okay. So we are going to but the reason I have it listed here is every single tech job hard tech job pretty much everyone today enterprise level tech job has some amount of Linux or Unix in it and we're this is true for machine learning people we're starting to see a kind of interesting phenomenon where I have this problem at work all the time we have these like absolutely brilliant PhD machine learning data scientists who have no idea how to use a command line. This is a true story. I have a true story about this. So there was there was a machine learning person giving a presentation on something and I can't remember what it was and they had to rename a file. They were on the command line doing all their stuff but you could tell that they were an absolute noob on the on the command line. They had no idea what they were doing. They had spent their entire life studying machine learning, data algorithms and uh you know model submissions and creation really important heady high-paying stuff but they never actually learned the command line and they were presenting to there was 400 people on this call I kid you not and they went to rename a file and they left the command line they went out to their their guey finder thing or where I can't think it was Windows I don't remember what it was and they renamed the file file by clicking on it and changing the name of the file that actually happened and I on the back channel I was like what the hell so we are seeing a moment in history where data science people are coming into the tech industry it's not even under the computer and science category on the on the Bure of Labor Statistics it's under the math category and no they didn't pipe it to GEP they renamed They renamed it by clicking on the icon, changing the file name. Yeah. And then they promptly went back to the command line to do the rest of their commands. They didn't know the move command. Thank you for the follow. Run out of my voice. I'm going to I'm not going to be able to talk here pretty soon. So, I mean, I I don't have to belabor that point. uh Git and GitHub. What are these things? GitHub you already know about. It's a place where you put stuff. The stuff is usually source code. That means code that is in software, but not always. Sometimes it's documents. That's what we do. Sometimes it's a container that contains Linux. That's what we have. So, you've got to learn this. You got to learn this. Everybody has to use this. Right now, we have people who are struggling because they can't update our documentation. They're non-engineers. These are project managers, and they can't update the documents because they don't know Markdown, which is the next thing, and they don't know how to use Git. So, I don't care if you're non-technical, you need to learn these things. You absolutely positively must learn markdown. You are looking at markdown right now. This is Markdown. It's a format for writing documents that translates nicely into a web page. So this is here's the overview that we were on. If we go back to the boost uh we can click on read me here and you can click on relevant technologies and you get this. This is the document and you can actually edit markdown live on GitHub without a terminal. You click on the editor button over here. You go in here and you can edit it up. You can write an entire book on here if you want. All right. PM Susie markdown compost to SharePoint. That's what yeah we're we're fighting against. So why markdown? Because markdown is text which means it works everywhere. It works in Discord, it works in Slack. You can see the differences if you make a change. So like if I go back to docs uh you know you have a source management. The reason Git is so popular for everything is because it is the way to know what changed. It is the way to know what changed. So you go click on blame. It tells me what things changed and when they changed. I can say I can go back to the uh where's my main document here? Where am I? I'm kind of lost again. So I go back. Let me show you. So if I go see this document here, if I want to know every time it changed and how it changed, maybe you want to see how I've changed stuff here. You can go click on this uh you click on the code, you can see the code preview, uh or you can go to the commit history and now you can see every change that was ever made. So I added legal stuff recently. You can see that I added these lines of code. The reason markdown is important is because it's a textbased system, not some freaky binary crap for Microsoft. So I can see what changed based on this very easily. This is why all of our documents are in markdown. You can see every change that happened when it happened. Not only that, you can be notified in email of what changed and you can take those changes as DIP files and apply them elsewhere. That is called source management and that is a really fundamental uh change management source management are really fundamental parts of any technology. You can use this whether you're an educator or not. Uh so and learning markdown specifically GitHub played markdown which we'll get into. Uh and then you can go from there. Uh you also need to make a static website. So this isn't very hard. any of this this my entire boost up is already a static website. I didn't do a single thing because I just activated it. I can go to rbx robskll stack. Let's go to the boost. Okay. Slashboost. So here's the overview. There's a website and I didn't have to know anything. It but if I if I wanted to read about it, I would want to inspect. So you need to know basic web stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Most people's they call them static websites. That means they are just plain content. They they they're just readable text. And if you if you beg me, I'll give you a huge rant about static versus dynamic websites. Uh but yeah, so I'm talking about static website creation. That means they're basically documents that are online. Why is that essential? In an AI world, if your content is not available as a website, it will not be consumed. If it is consumed, then you might show up on a chat GPT query and you can do something like this like who is RWX Rob? So it's not just for publicity, it's also for exposure and any other thing like that. So the reason that I'm known here is because of my YouTube content where this is going to become part of a conversation about why putting yourself out there and streaming and stuff is a part of of I think tech tech network networking in technology. So uh learn by doing. I love I love that it totally nailed me too. It totally did. I don't even know where I got this stuff from, but it's perfect. Uh, okay. So, anyway, uh, coding fundamentals, he use markdown. So many people do. I am a I do not like MDX, but it is a thing. So, uh, yeah, Markdown is what everybody uses. Markdown's got really powerful. You can actually put very complic complex calculus uh figures and stuff in markdown now using uh latte latte uh like the age will debate about how to say that by the way. So okay coding fundamentals every single technologist needs to learn coding fundamentals including the ones who think AI is going to take their job. Why? Because when you vibe code, you need to be able to read the code. You can't just vibe code and not read it and see if it does what you want. That's a recipe for disaster. So, but you can have AI write all your code for you. I I don't I very very rarely write code now, but I alter code that has been written. And I use Chat GPT, which is not the best tool for this. Cloud is better. Claude's kind of an [ __ ] though. I have to say uh he might be better at coding but he is not good at people anyway. So uh bash, python, go web. So these are the languages you need to know. Bash is the shell scripting language of Linux. It's the official language of Linux of all enterprise Linux systems. I don't want to hear about Zshell being used for this or that. It's irrelevant. It's not on Red Hat. It's not on Suzie by default. Uh, it's not on Mac by default. Actually, that's true. Mac switched to Z recently because of some problems that we'll get into. Python, as much as I hate Python for reasons I'll get into, is everywhere. Configuration management, PyTorch, the entire machine learning, all of it is Python. Go is the language of cloudnative development. everything that runs at enterprise scale. Docker, uh, Kubernetes, Helm, uh, console, God, I could keep go on and on. All of them are super duper important. Uh, web to a degree, you need to learn this. You don't, as I said, you need to learn enough to make a static website, maybe a little more. Uh, I actually really love JavaScript. It's one of my favorite languages. I just don't like what's been done to it over the years. Uh it's a really uh expressive language for a non-strictly type language. We'll get into that. And uh and then we have AI vibing. So AI vibing means knowing how to use your favorite AI to write the code and to be able to interpret the code and see what's wrong with it. Okay. So we will be doing coding fundamentals in the beginner boost. Uh I'm going to try something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. I've written a lot about called polygot programming. Polyglot is somebody who speaks multiple languages at the same time. So we are going to go we're going to try uh I've tried this only one other time and it didn't go so well because it took so long. But we're going to code the same things the same basic concepts in Bash, Python, and Go at the same time. Possibly JavaScript as well. So and I'm not talking about big ass coding projects. I'm talking about small things like let's make a for loop. Let's you know iterate over you Alexa go through all the letters of this person's name. Let's you know create a random uh dice generator application. And what I what I want you to see is how each of these languages has a different use. They are all different tools in the toolbox. We will not be sucked into an asinine fight about what language is best. Anybody who fights about those things is showing you how little experience they have in the industry because nobody cares about the tool. People want the thing that the tool gives them and they want the best tool to get them there. If you're doing if you're going to create a machine learning model, the best tool for the job is Python. If you're going to create a micros service, it could be potentially Python, Bash, TypeScript, or Go. If you are going to create a single binary that you want to be able to run everywhere and embed really cool static, you know, resources inside of it, Go is your language. If you're a hacker, Go is probably the depending on what you're doing. If you're doing a large number, a lot of parsing, pro might be your language. Even though it's old, Rust is the language. If you're doing very specific low-level firmware stuff that requires very high performance and has a team that has steeped themselves in learning Rust, which which has the biggest learning curve of any language on the planet. In fact, I'm going to skip ahead. I put I put Rust under the list of hyped but hardly used. I have a reputation on the internet for hating on Rust. In fact, they made an entire Reddit thread about me. Uh, which I mean that that video is no longer there, but it was my first experience with Rust. And I was like, why would anybody use this? And boy, did I get the hate. And then I made another video about how I was right. Four years later, everybody started hating on Russ. And all these people were writing blogs about getting rid of Russ because it was costing their project teams too much and it was depressing everybody. and it was not delivering on the on the demand of what they wanted. I personally think rust for firework firecracker and for I think docker should have probably been written in rust personally. I'm not anti- rust. I I use western which is written in rust. So I'm not anti- rust. I just think it is a very very esoteric edge case and you cannot find a company that is deploying enterprise applications at scale in rust. You can't. And there's a few people they're going to try. They're going to put hate comments in the thing. They're going to tell me about Amazon using Rust, which is absolute BS. They're going to tell me about CloudFare, which by the way, Cloudfare took down the whole entire internet because of a Rust bug with the unwrap function. So, I don't want to hear. And you know why? Because it was overly complex and their engineers. You can make mistakes like that in any language, but because that language is so complex, you have you have engineers making mistakes that they shouldn't be making in a simpler language like Python or Go. That's all I'm going to say about that. The creator of Go, by the way, also created Unix and Unicode, which is where we got all our emojis. So, anyway, the guy who created Rust. It was some side project working for Firefox. And so it anyway I'm done. I'm done. Engineers are human make mistakes. Absolutely. Virtualization. Okay. Virtualization is uh running running something in something else. So a virtual machine is exactly what it sounds like. It's a Linux machine that runs inside a Windows machine. virtually. It's a a Mac that runs not usually, but inside of another machine or a Windows machine using Fusion that runs inside of another machine. Those are called virtual machines. They're super important to the industry. We're going to focus on containers mostly. In fact, we're going to use a Linux container to do all of our stuff. and and uh we're not going to have time today to get into that it looks like, but uh I will point you at the directions you can try. A container is you can go look on the internet. I I'm showing you what you need to learn. You can go do the research on your own. Uh a container is not a virtualized machine. It containerizes an application which might look like a machine running by itself on a computer a bunch with a bunch of other containers. Uh if you've heard terms like Kubernetes, that's a container orchestrator. Uh we live in the era of containers. Everything is containerized in 2026 to the part where it's kind of kind of becoming a problem. Uh shall we define hypervisor? That's a really good Yeah, we're not quite there for hypervisors. There's different types of virtual machines depending on the hypervisor how low level it is that we'll talk about that when we get to talking about virtualization. The only reason I mention it now is everybody needs to know virtualization including non you know soft skill people. You want to run Windows on your Mac learn VMware or Fusion or whatever that's a virtual machine. Okay. So it applies to people who aren't necessarily using it to code or develop or whatever. Um uh yeah, which is totally stupid. Yeah. Yeah. The whole rust first from the government, it's a total joke. It's not real. Nope, it's not. Those containers on Windows, they run inside of VM. Yes, you Okay, this is kind of a a caveat, but it's worth mentioning since somebody said it. You cannot run LXC containers, Linux containers. You cannot run containers. When people say containers, they mean Lex Linux containers. They don't mean anything else. You cannot run containers without a virtual machine on anything but Linux. Containers only run on Linux. If you're using a container, but Mr. Rob, I'm using a container on my Mac on my Windows machine. Sure, but you're underneath the hood. You can't see it. you're running a little miniature Linux virtual machine that's running your container. Containers are Linux technology only. And I I really want to hit that part home. BSD uses its own technology. It is not a container. It's called jails. I've actually asked Dennis last miles to create compatibility layer between BSD jails and the Alex containers, which would be freaking awesome because if we could run containers on BSD Unix, I would switch it tomorrow. But that's you you have to have Linux to run containers. Therefore, Linux is the dominant o operating system for enterprise. That's just how it is. Uh networking, you need to know how when you go to a website, you type in whatever, how does that even work? Where do those how does the data travel? You got to know that the basics of that. And I I have added this recently. I don't think you can work in technology without knowing how to create content. And hear me out on this if if the other day somebody was doing a presentation and they would probably not consider themselves a technical person but they had to share. So every day, my entire day is broken up with huddles in Microsoft Teams of us sharing screens with each other. Sometimes we're sharing cameras with each other. Those skills require to a certain degree knowing how to manage your content creation, knowing how to not share overshare the wrong thing, knowing how to set up a little bubble head in the bottom corner, knowing how to use OBS potentially, and knowing how to edit files, uh, potent these these are fundamental skills that I believe go along with knowing how to write, you know, a business proposal or something. So, or type. So, I I really think that knowing the basics of live streaming, whether it be privately and internally over Zoom to your potential next employer or it be MS Teams or it be putting content online or it be streaming to Twitch so you can join me and knock you go knock on me on Twitch and come join my stream and we can do this together. Live streaming, especially now when you can flip through the channel on your fire, your 60-inch Fire TV and watch Twitch, has become the way for sharing personal knowledge with everyone. And you may not be comfortable being super public. That's fine. you definitely need to learn it anyway because you are going to have to share and use these skills uh including video editing of minimal video editing with your team. So there you go. Uh okay. So I I created a list here. We're going to end with this. Uh yeah, you should knock say absolutely please knock. I'd love to have it. Uh yeah and enterprise specific. So these skills up here relate to any any tech job whether it's a big corporate enterprise or not like it could be a startup Silicon Valley startup or whatever these this lot of list of skills are enterprise specific and quite honestly you want to consider enterprise for two reasons I guess it's a part of your own toler tolerance. As I already told you about the dot thing, enterprises bring two things to the table. Lots of money and for the most part, lots of stability. So most people watching this video, hey, look, I did I forgot I that was a reaction. Most people want those two things. And the downside is enterprises tend to be five years behind. So, anytime somebody comes into my chat and they start preaching about NIB or, you know, Nyx or or whatever or or or even Arch, I'm like, "Okay, great. Talk to me in five years. Show me an enterprise that's using it." The beginner boost is specifically focused on enterprise tech careers. And by enterprise, that that could be education, too. uh large universities qualify as an enterprise. Um, so you know, if you want to be on the bleeding edge and work for oh, I don't know, uh, what's uh, Gabe doing over there? Gab's got Archie on Streambox, right? Maybe you want to work over there and you want to like push your desk on wheels because it's all matrix managed over there. Maybe that's your jam. I don't care. But this is about getting a stable enterprise job that will pay you the big bucks and often let you work remote doesn't guarantee your job. But these are the skills that enterprises cannot fill. And before I list these skills, I just want to say this. I have had my recruiter contact me about once a month about opportunities to give him people to hire jobs for real jobs that are going unfilled. I have a manager this week who is putting in another person who's hiring another person to our team because we cannot fill these jobs fast enough. Any rumor you've heard about there not being jobs or anything does not apply to enterprise technology skills. And I encourage you to ask people like Misha, another streamer who was in here earlier about this. Ask Het Tannis, another streamer about this, Dennis who works for Noah. This is an enterprise. It's a government, but it's an enterprise. So these are the skills. And by the way, your best place to learn these skills today is het tannis t- n i s over on Twitch has a very organized free uh you know sort of uh learning group with a with a discord and everything. So I strongly recommend please somebody shout out antennis if you're watching uh please I appreciate you shouting them out. Uh, but you know, uh, Dennis, I'm not Dennis. Dennis, Dennis and, uh, Scott, uh, Scott is Scott, I'm sorry, I screwed up. Dennis and Scott's names. Dennis is the real name of Last Miles. Last Miles is a hardcore BSD Unix guy and a coder, a phenomenal coder on Twitch and a good friend. Uh, but yeah, different style completely. Uh Scott is a college professor with multiple certifications and uh you know a job in tech who loves helping other people. So Misha is another person who's a freelancer who does Kubernetes and the these are all people that I am very proud to say are in the knowledge fellowship with me uh who are dedicated to helping people learn these things. My focus I get asked this all the time. when are you going to teach me Kubernetes and SLM and stuff? And my answer is when I finish the beginner boost. So my sort of niche in this world of enterprise education and tech education is absolute zero, you know, knowledge tech beginners and getting them started, boosting them to the point where they can decide if they want a tech job and if they do, putting them in contact with the next people and I just gave you those. So if you're trying to decide which technology you want to target long term, learn Kubernetes. Uh you can certify, there's lots of paths of learning it. You can certify it or not. Just build a home lab. Uh I have videos of that by the way. Anible which is configuration management. This is all written in Python. Uh YAML. Slurm which is a relatively newcomer. I think I'm the first YouTuber ever to recommend learning slurm uh for to get an enterprise tech job. I think I'm the first. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. The other day I put a short out there. I am in the middle of rapidly trying to migrate our existing Pearl codebase so that it will run slurm jobs and PBS jobs. both of which are batch technologies that run really really big jobs for a very long time that cost a lot of money there. These are running on systems like I said 15 $25,000 GPUs and they use that GPU for two days and you know wasting so Kubernetes uh is a way to make sure that those GPUs are not sitting around. So say same same with slurm uh anible is a way to keep everything updated and configured and deploy stuff. React is a web technology uh yeah anible for devops that's that looks good. Thank you for the recommendation. Uh, React is the by far the leading web technology. Uh, they walk in and get a job in that if you if you actually learn it. Uh, and you want to do web stuff, you want to do web apps. This is usually for people who want to spend their time in the in the graphic world. Uh, if you want to spend your time behind the graphic world making all the stuff that the graphic world uses, then you need to learn REST. Everybody learns this. This is a a protocol that's behind everything. So, uh all of GitHub, for example, is just one big REST API and all the graphics you see are on top of that API. My job as a system development engineer is to create APIs that fulfill the services provided by our high performance machine learning organization, job submission, stuff like that. So, abstractions, things like that. So I write code that keeps our operations working. So it's kind of in the middle of all that. It's it's a really fast growing job. It's really a fun job. I really love it. Uh PyTorch is for people who want to work in machine learning and data science. Uh that it is specifically for machine learning. So if you want to create your own models of AI for any reason, large language models that like chatbt or you know image models that that are used to like build you know whatever you want uh I have I the company that I work for I I want to share some of the stuff they're doing so badly but it was be a really bad violation of IP law for me to tell you they're doing things with AI that when it comes out, I will talk about it. I absolutely cannot believe the stuff that they're doing. So, it's all about AI. It's about using AI, but it's also about facilitating AI. If you want to get a job that will pay you crazy good money, way more than any fintech job ever did, learn how to enable AI and high performance computing for a large corporation. They those people are making ridiculous gobs of money. They and they are getting picked up and they're getting head-hunted out of every company all over the place. Learn if you want to be that person, learn PyTorch. Learn the theory behind machine learning models, learn how to make them, and learn the other stuff so you're not embarrassed by not knowing how to rename a file on the command line. So, and you'll you'll you'll you know, when I list this looks like a nice happy list, right? Just to get the base skills to even understand the language of Kubernetes and what it's about requires you to master and I'm not talking like a little you have to master all of this first. If you don't have any of these skills you cannot even dream about understanding Kubernetes or Ansible or slur. So I'm not going to teach you the enterprise is math heavy. Oh, yeah. ML, that's why it's not listed under computers. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics listed under math. ML is a math thing. If you're really good with math and PyTorch and you want to help with models, you can do this one. Okay. Uh, Kubernetes, Anible, Slur, REST. Uh, these all combine well. If you want to like do a bunch together, if you're me, this is what I do. You add all these together. Yeah. And you can do pretty much anything. Uh systems development engineer able to write rest APIs can make easily over 200k per year in the industry. That's yeah. Anyway, so this these are jobs that you can have there. There are jobs. It's just you got to start somewhere. Where do you start? You start here. All right. I'm going to end now because I' I've gone over time and I'm I'm hurting myself. I'm pushing pneumonia, I think, because I can feel it. I got it. It's in my chest now. Yeah, I hope I I hope I hope I'm okay actually tomorrow. Um, so anyway, uh, it's not fever. It's not CO. Thank god. I thought it could have been, though. I wonder if it's a light form of COVID. Is that a thing? I don't have any fever, though. Anyway, this is part of All right, let's wrap up. I'm go take a nap. Uh so what do you need to do? Do all of the the self-evaluation stuff. It is a recent job title. Yes. Uh do all the stuff I said about finding your way. Okay. Do these you know this stuff. Understand yourself. Start to look for those companies. Get on the get on the path. Go look at those companies. Look where they are. Look for the job postings. What are the listings of the job postings? what are the what are the technologies of this? Okay, come back and share it. Write about it in the discussion group. Uh learn what the jobs and then then then learn what that job requires specifically and then how to prove you can do that stuff. And we're going to talk a lot more about that. how to prove it. Whether you need a certificate, whether you need a home lab, whether you need to hack somebody and surprise them, whe you need to show up on their doorstep, whether you need to, you know, and then what are the specific skills you need? And we we we broke those down, but then we're going to actually dive into those skills. And the rest of the boost uh is more or less going to be that common group of things that everybody needs. Okay. And and then we're going to go from there. Manage and maintain a tech career. This is like how to write a resume, how to how to get yourself out there, all of that. Uh we should probably cover that next week instead of here. It kind of goes at the end and the beginning. So right now you should already start networking. The reason you need to do this other stuff first is you don't know where to network. Should you go to the local Linux meetup? Yes. Should you go to the local Kubernetes meetup? Maybe not. Maybe that's not what you want to do. So, you need to figure that out before you start. But then when you do, then you start networking with all those people. You start to follow the Twitch streamers who are streaming about Kubernetes or who are streaming about C++ development or not or streaming about hacking. So, but you're not you don't know enough to spend. Now, if you want to see if you want to do that job, maybe maybe lurk and watch those people and say, "Hey, what are they doing?" But what somebody's doing on Twitch and what their job actually is is radically different. Hacking is one really good example of that. People think hacking is going to be, you know, breaking in and doing all this cool terminal stuff. I do more stuff on the terminal than most hackers. Most hackers are spending 52% of their time writing documents in Microsoft Word. So, make sure you know what the actual job. I didn't know that until I had uh the owner of a cyber security company in my stream tell me, "What do you think this job is?" Well, I don't know. I'm going to hack I'm going to hack all the things. And like maybe a bug bounty, but but not most jobs. Most jobs you're writing boring reports for enterprises about you found vulnerabilities unless you're finding zero days or something like that, which is a different thing. So, make sure you truly know the jobs that you're looking for. And you're going to be doing this through the whole entire boost. But, uh, let's start now. That's my main play to you. I am not going to cover the container because I don't have time. But, uh, next week, that's what we will do. Next week, we will cover the container and we will start to run a container. So, that I'll give you a little preview. You can be on any computer. You can have a a thing like this. Uh a command line like this and you'll be able to do uh podmad start uh a boost. I think I need to do boost there. Oops. Uh I think I need to do dash a and you can boom. Now you have a boost. And you can run your own fishies and you can run your own sunrise and all kinds of fun stuff. You can write your own programs and you'll you'll be able to run this exact program. If you want to jump ahead because you're advanced and you just don't want to wait around. Uh go read the instructions about that by clicking up setting up the boost container and this tells you what to do. Get admin rights, install the software, install western, install podman, build and run boost. So there there I told you where to find it. If you want to do something fun and technical over the week besides the figure out who you are stuff, do this. Go try to get the container started. We're going to start with this next week. So, next week we're going to start with how to set yourself up with Linux so you can get running right away uh and start writing code and practicing Linux and all of that. Okay. uh from Kubernetes learning. Uh Misha Vandenberg is a Kubernetes person, but also Het Tannis. They're both Twitch streamers and YouTubers. So, in fact, I'm going to go look for Winter Raid right now. Uh somebody shout out Misha as well, Misha Vanderberg. Uh and so we're going to go uh Raid. I'm going to go Raid right now. I'm going to look for something if somebody's not completely obvious. I I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this in this video because this is going to go up online, but uh same category. Uh how you doing? Thank you, Ellie Daniel. Um hands off security learning. Cool. Offensive security learning. That looks cool. I haven't raided them before. Let's rate them. Who else is is streaming? Somebody I know. If head If head or streaming, I'll automatically raid them. Yeah. There's Ask the Aquarium that has it over yours that they they made that after I made mine. I know. No, I need to take care of myself. I hope I get better by next week. I really, this is really poor timing on my part to get this cold. I've been talking up starting the boost all month and then all of a sudden the cold hits so I had I had to go through. I didn't want to leave people hanging. Just thank you for your thank you. Uh yeah. Yep. Yeah. The understanding intertwining is cool, right? Yeah, there's a lot of lot of guys on there. I I'm not seeing anybody that I know. So, I'm going to raid a cyber security person. So, for the record on Twitch, the hackers all stream to science and tech and the coders stream to software and gamedev. Just so you know. So, we're going to go ahead and rate a hacker. Hackers have the most in common with what I do because they're usually on the command line and they're usually using Linux or BSD and stuff. So, all right. Thank you, Landra. start raid. Please say hi to whoever this person is who has hackers traditionally have really hard to pronounce names. So, please please pass on my my my art belt thanks to them and tell them I can't talk because I've been talking for three hours. Take care everybody. Bye. This is, by the way, this is an example of why you need to get on Twitch. This is a way to network. I'm going to meet this person for the first time. I don't know them. This is an example of that. So, and they're going to say things and stuff that I'm not going to be able to hear. >> Oh no, we just got raided again. >> Yes. Thank you for the raid. We were just about to >> followers only chat. You kidding me? >> We just finished the boss. >> Don't ever do that everybody. It's a bad idea. It's a really bad idea because when you get raided, all these people that just raided can't say hi because they're not following and they haven't decided if they want to follow yet. This is a lesson I learned the hard way. I learned this lesson the hard way. You never ever want followers only chat. >> You don't want that. >> Streaming again on uh on Wednesday. This was a >> So, for all the reasons I just said, "Okay, I'm gone." >> To do the the box >> because when you raid I got raided by 3,000 people and I was followers only. Nobody could say anything. Well, thank you very much.

Today we focus on understanding the tech industry and your potential place in it. Do I even want a tech job? Can I work in tech and not be an engineer? What are the best companies to work for and how would I find out? What can I learn right now that would apply to any tech job? What specific technologies are hot for enterprise careers in tech? #techjobs #livestream #mentoring