 What's up team, it is your biggest fan, the real Casadero, and in this video, this video is for anybody who's thinking about becoming a web developer, like you, you're interested in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, front end development, back end development, whatever, web development, you're interested in that stuff. You want to get a job as a web developer, or you want to be a freelancer, go out on your own, do your own thing, set your own hours, start your own company, maybe even grow it to like a big agency where you have other developers working for you. This is the video for you because I am in that process right now. I've been in that process. I've gone out and I've applied for the web developer jobs. I got the web developer job. And then I also worked as a system administrator prior to that. And I worked in sales prior to that. Before that, I was in the military. I went around getting shot at shooting at people and setting up tactical communications networks. But anyway, that's that's that's enough stuff about me team. This is for the people who believe they want to do this thing. But they're I believe that they're getting a lot of misinformation. And there's a few YouTubers out there who keep it real with you. They tell you exactly what's going on. And so this video was inspired by one of them. And I wanted to come on and tell you tell you my story and sort of my mindset. Based on my experience, looking for a job as a web developer working as a system administrator and then going out and starting my own business, none of this stuff is easy. Getting a job at a big tech company as a web developer is hard. You'll see some people out there and they're like yo, like I did this in two months, three months, whatever, right? Some people do, right? That's the exception, not the rule. Less than 1% of developers end up in those positions. Then you have these people, they shoot these day in the life videos, right? And the day and they look just glamorous, right? They got nice desk, they got nice computers, they got not all this nice stuff. They're eating gourmet lunches. When you see them, they just show up, they go sit down at their desk, they go to work and then when they're done, they just get up and leave. This is not the typical experience. Most of you watching this video, you will not experience that. And I'm going to share some stuff with you that not a lot of people talk about. Number one, these jobs that we're seeing online where they're posting for most of them are for junior web developer or senior web developer, junior web developer, we need three years of experience in, you know, building REST APIs. How in the hell are you going to have three years of experience building REST APIs as a junior web developer? If you have three years of experience building REST APIs, I would believe that you would be classified as a senior developer. If you got three years of experience doing anything, then you're definitely senior to everybody else out in the world. Here's the thing, right? You are competing. If you're here in America, you're competing with people who've gone to school and they've gotten degrees and they are in massive amounts of debt. They are like, yo, I need a come up. I need a better job. Software development, web development seems to be the way of the future. They go and they start studying just like you and me. They're a little less passionate about it, some of them, but they go out and they study, right? Some people go into even more debt. They'll go out and they'll go into a boot camp. Boot camps have been like the craze for like the last four or five years. You are competing with people who have degrees and they've been through boot camps and they're applying to all the same jobs you're applying to. But nobody has the amount of experience that these companies are asking for. Just apply. Just apply to every job. It's a numbers game. I've said this in the past, like you look for, you look for, you know, three or four places you want to work and then you email all these people. I have learned that that is, that is, that is not the case. If you can get in and make friends with somebody, then yeah, you can do that. But the thing is, is it takes, it takes long, it takes a long time, right? So you have to spend months building relationships with people in these companies before you even get an opportunity to ask for a job. You just don't show up and be like, Hey, you know, I thought your YouTube post was cool or they hire me. I want to come work at your place. It doesn't work like that. That's out the window. When you're applying for these jobs, just apply and apply for hundreds. I'm talking hundreds, like you would apply for hundreds of jobs a day. You'll get a lot of interviews. You're gonna, you're gonna fail a lot of the interviews because they're gonna stay junior web developer and you're gonna show up and they're gonna walk, they're gonna want to walk you through some sort of whiteboard interview. They're gonna ask you questions that aren't even related to web development, binary tree search, reverse lookups and all kinds of stuff that you will have no, no experience in. I'm not, I'm not saying that you shouldn't have experience in these things. At some point, you want to get this experience. But if you're trying to go from whatever it is you're doing now, I need to come up to being a full-time web developer in the next six to 12 months. You won't be able to learn that stuff well enough in order to go out and do what, do one of these whiteboard interviews. It's possible. Some people will do it, but most people watching this video, they will not be able to accomplish that. And that's not saying anything about you as an individual. It's just this is, this is difficult stuff. And unless, unless you're doing it on a regular basis, it's difficult to retain the information. But enough, enough about that. The next thing is the actual freelance route. I'm gonna get this job and then I'm gonna go out. I'm gonna be a freelancer. Being a freelancer is hard. A lot of the stuff that we see on YouTube is complete nonsense. I've espoused this too. So I apologize. Go out and you message all of your friends. It depends on the friends you have and what they do in their caliber of connections. If all of your friends are working nine to five jobs at random companies, they probably don't know anybody who's gonna need a web developer. And you're gonna run across a lot of friends who are like, I have a business or I'm starting a business. And when you say, Hey, I build websites, let me do your website. They won't want to pay you to build a website. They want you to do it for free. And you can do it for free just so you have some stuff in your portfolio. But that is again, this take this all takes time. And if you're trying to get from point A to point B in a very short period of time, I need a come up. That isn't the route to go out starting your own business. There's only one thing you need customers, clients, nobody talks about the actual process of getting clients, you have to go out and you have to sell people you have to get in front of as many people as possible. It becomes a numbers game again, you have to convince them that your product or your service, which is web development is what they need. That is extremely difficult. You have to make cold phone calls. I'm talking about calling people you've never talked to before, and trying to convince them to buy what it is that you're selling. That's freelancing in a nutshell. At some point, you get to a point where people are just coming to you. But it's not just it's not right away. Like you just don't build a website. And I was naive about this. You just you don't just build a website and put the website on the internet and people start showing up like, Hey, we want you to do this thing. Even when you build a website and you send the website to all of your friends and all of your family, very few of them are going to come back and say, Hey, like I have this opportunity for you. It just doesn't work like that for most people. Some people. Yeah, of course. But for most people, that's not the way it's going to go. So I'm just I'm just being realistic with you. And then it's starting your own business. It's the same thing. You have to you actively have to go out and find customers. When you find a customer, you then have to deliver the work. If you're delivering the work, you can't find more customers. So you end up on this cycle where you go like this, right? You make some money and then you're broke. You make some money and then you're broke. And you make some money and this this this continuous thing and it goes on forever until you either seek out the information or somebody brings it to you and they say, Hey, look, right? Like this is you can't you can't operate like this. Like you can't make a living like that. How every business exists is customers come in and they buy stuff and they buy stuff at a profit. And then the customer uses I mean the customer the business uses that profit to pay you to do some sort of function inside of the business. They keep and they keep a piece of the profit. So they'll sell something. They keep some of the profit. They take the rest of the money and they invest it back in the business. They're paying you to do stuff. They're paying the light bill. They're paying the phone bill paying for all of the stuff that we don't that we don't see. So that's that that's the that's the business route route of things how businesses work. If you go out to start your own business, you're going to have the same problem. If you're working at a company now, you don't see the sale side of things. Somebody in this business has to be out selling something somehow some way. It could be an outside marketing team. It could be a inside sales team that's called that's calling people. It could be the company sending emails out to past and future clients, whatever it is, somebody selling something. If you're going to go out on your own and do this, you have to be selling something like we we hear about you know, you grind nine to five and then you come home and you work from five to two a.m. Whatever, right? What are you doing between five and two a.m. You could be building something, but after it's built and you put it on the internet, it has to be sold by someone. Someone has to go sell this thing. The best thing to do is to go sell it first to figure out if people want, if people want to buy it. But if you're doing that between five and two a.m., right, like you have to consider the people in your area that you may want to sell this thing to, they're not at work anymore. You can't call them. So now you now you have to think about time zones, right? What time zone can I reach out to between five and two a.m. where people are at work and I can reach people. Here's another thing about that. You can't be calling people in the middle of the day. They're working. They don't want to hear from you. You got to call them either early in the morning when they get into the office before they start their work day or you have to call them when their work day is over. So when they aren't dealing with customers, when they aren't actively making money in their business, that's when you that's when you have to reach out to these people or you're reaching out to them in places where they see what you're talking about at their convenience. But most of the time we send these messages all wrong. We send the emails all wrong. They get a lot of these messages and emails wanting them to buy something. And so as soon as they see you they're like oh this is another person that wants to sell me something. They just delete the spam box and they never they never hear from you again. I'm here to tell you the truth. The stuff you're seeing on YouTube is not real. It's not real stuff. Most of it isn't real stuff. Now some of you've come across some real people. I've come across some real people. For the most part the things you see these jobs where people are showing up at 10 and they're leaving at 5 and they're getting these gourmet lunches nonsense bullshit. The jobs where you have to have two to three years of experience in some sort of technology in order to get into that job and be effective nonsense. Like nobody has that amount of experience especially if they're just starting out. And don't put yourself on the path of like learning all this stuff so you can get a job at this particular place because you can potentially make more money doing your own thing. But again when you look at the freelancer videos it's nonsense. Nobody's talking about selling. Nobody's talking about the fact that you need customers. They're all it's all woo woo nonsense bullshit. They're like yeah like I don't even know team. From here on out what I'm going to deliver you my experience like what what I'm going through right now. I'm out. I don't have a job. I'm in my own business. I got to get my own clients. I got to get my own customers. I have to deliver the products and services. It's a it's a roller coaster. I've had people going yeah let's roll and I send them an invoice and I never get a reply. They stop answering the phone. I had one one company we need a new logo. I go. I designed the logo. I send them the mock-ups and they're like yo we don't want logos anymore. We decided we don't want to do any of this. I can't get paid. This is send me an invoice. I send them an invoice. I start the work. The work is done. They haven't paid the invoice. I send them the comps. They say we don't want to do this anymore. There's no there's no obligation or reason for them to pay me and these are things that that that I already understood. Here's the deal with all of the knowledge that I have from sales and service and all these different things and in the military. I decided to go out and listen to what this this this garbage that I was seeing on YouTube about like these fantastic jobs these big companies you know working as a web developer and your graphic design and you're building websites and you know you're changing the world then the freelance side of things you know message all your friends and do some free websites that's all crazy crappy nonsense garbage so I'm going to give you I'm going to give you the real deal along the process that I'm that I'm going through right now the stuff that you're seeing out there is garbage people are lying you're being lied to you and you're being like you're not it's 90 it's it goes far beyond web development. There are some things in this world that if you want to be successful and make a bunch of money and live the life you want to live you could be doing but you have to have a certain mindset and you have to have a certain skill set and the skill set isn't HTML CSS JavaScript and these web technologies that we let these companies tell us we need we need to know we need to know sales marketing and coding it even goes beyond that because once we get enough clients we can't write all the code we can't do all the work we have to get somebody else to do this stuff for us but anyway team that is it I just want to sit out keep it real what you give the real fact about web development out in the real world for for self taught developers or people who are just looking to get started share subscribe like I will see you in the next session team