Why Good Developers Still Get Paid Poorly

So, I know this guy who is actually a pretty good developer in terms of his skills. I give him a solid a solid seven, seven on 10. Um, his design skills are very high. I'd give his design skills an eight. And he has his inclination of working with different packages. So, his technical coding skills are not, you know, I don't know. I don't It's been a while. I don't think they're super high. I think those are maybe down to a four, but it doesn't matter. He's a good implementer. Here's the problem. He's having a lot of difficulty. Now, the reason he's having a lot of difficulty is not because of lack of skill or opportunity. It's something far more profound and deeper. Something that you probably would not expect. One of the biggest problems that people have in terms of their career, in terms of life really, is um is not intellect. Most people are smart enough. Most people are smart enough. The problem is psychological. the problems psychological self-confidence um emotional turmoils and anxieties. Um that's where tutorial hell comes from. People are just so insecure about their abilities and they keep doing tutorials and tutorials going back to school going back to school. This guy wants to go back to school. By the way, shouldn't. The root of all this is psychological insecurities. Imposttor syndrome. another example of all this. And the solution is not what you'd expect. The solution is not learning more. Once you know your fundamentals, you should get out there and start uh doing jobs. And you learn as you go. You get paid to learn. I got paid to learn. I got paid uh the equivalent of would be today maybe $25,000 uh for a one-month job. And uh I was learning much of what I was executing on for the client. and they were super happy with my work because I just I did I did the time I put it I put in the effort. That's the thing about development that has always been the case is that you learn most of development on the job. So the key to being successful in the game is to just get uh knowledgeable enough so that you can get your foot in the door. You can start building things. Anyway, back to this guy. So this guy, he's been struggling for at least two, three years now, and he just keeps following the same pattern. I've seen himself, I've seen him fire himself from a job. He fired himself from a job. It's true. He had a job and his boss was happy with his work and it was going really well and he was producing good product, but he felt like he wasn't good enough, so he fired himself. And his boss said, "Why are you firing yourself?" So he he quit. He said, "I'm not good enough." He fired himself. So yeah, so this guy back to this guy his problem like so many other people is not technical. His problem is well more precisely back here lizard brain stuff insecurities. That's why in my mentoring program I created a whole module on there. I call it lizard wizard which teaches you how to reprogram your brain so that all these insecurities just don't happen. Now it's not about uh affirmations and that you know expose you have you have to expose yourself to good influences. You got to you got to help help yourself understand how making mistakes is part of the process. One of the problems with modern education and as you may or may not know I've been supplying classroom management tools and curriculum tools to schools for about 15 years now. So I know them well. Um but and I come from a family of teachers. That all said uh so the schools they teach people to be you know I call it learn helplessness because in schools if you fail a particular exam or test it could change the trajectory of your entire professional life. It's crazy. It's it's silly. It's dumb. It's stupid. I I don't agree with that because the most successful people try and fail. Try and fail. But you know, you've been conditioned for 10, whatever, 15, 20 years in school that if you try and you f up, you're done. So what happens? People become very nervous about doing anything. Not a good thing. Like for a person, I would restructure the school system and how they evaluate and how they how they teach people. That's just me. That's another sub. So back to this guy. So his major problem is not with his career and getting a job. He's getting underpaid. That's the chronic problem. He does gigs, but he gets paid. He was saying he makes you would make more money slinging uh putting together subway sandwiches. That's not good because as far as I last time I checked, making subway sandwiches is far less complex than putting up web apps and websites and putting together digital workflow systems. I use that term now. I just coined that term as we speak now because in the AI age, uh you become more of an orchest orchestrator of systems. uh as a developer, you're not tinkering with the code as much as you would uh just a few years ago. Anyway, so his problem is psychological. So, you can do all the stuff I talk about in lizard wizard, retrain your lizard brain and so on. I won't get into here, but here's the other thing that people don't talk about enough, perhaps I don't talk about enough as well. Um, you have to get your body in shape. Amazing things happen to you when you get your body fat percentage below 20%. When you start working out twice a week, when you start eating healthy foods, it literally changes your psychology as well. So, if you're overweight, you're sedentary, buddy. Trust me, I'm I'm in my mid-50s. I'm heading out and I'm heading up there. And um as you get older, your body's sensitivity to your uh habits in terms of health start to really increase quite a bit. You can get away with it in your teens and your 20s and your 30s. Starts to hit you in your 40s, starts coming on hard in your 50s, and a lot of people pass away. I know a few. And it really hits you hard in your 60s and 70s and so on. So, this dude is out of shape. He probably eats crappy food. He's at Subways. Um, not good. Not good. So, if you got himself in shape, lost body fat, uh, trained uh, and ate healthy food, that's super important. You have to eat healthy foods. In terms of consumption of foods, uh people are looking for the special power food, that special food that's going to unlock it's got all kinds of super nutrients. No, it's much more about restricting, removing crap food from your diet rather than what you eating a very particular power food. So remove the crap food. This all natural foods. Your mood will improve, your cognitive capacity will improve, your confidence will improve. This dude would be making huge amounts of money if his body fat percentage was below 20. He was training, was in shape, his because his confidence would go up. He wouldn't fire himself from jobs. He wouldn't allow himself to be underpaid. Like if somebody is if you're a developer and you have experience and somebody's offering you less than a Subway uh making sandwiches at Subway money to do the job, tell them to f off. You don't need them. They're taking advantage. You might as well go work at Subways. No pressure, right? You make a sandwich, that's it. But when you build software, you have a lot more responsibility. The skill set is a lot harder to acquire. I I'm I'm guessing that making Subway sandwiches can be you can learn that pretty quickly relative to maybe building a full stack web app. Um you know so that's the story. So don't ignore if you're a developer one of the things they ignore is psychology and health. I'm not talking about intellectual capacity here. That is overrated. The biggest pro I've been mentoring people for years now and I've been dealing with schools for like 15 years now and I can tell you mentoring people a lot longer than just years. The biggest problem that people have is not intellectual. It is psychological

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