by YK Sugi

Why I Left My $100,000+ Developer Job at Google

Do NOT follow your passion

I worked at Google in Montreal as a full-time software developer for about a year.

I liked working there, but then I decided to leave the company to focus on my YouTube channel instead.

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My computer science education YouTube channel — CS Dojo

When I told my friends about it, some of them said: “Wow! You’re following your passion! That’s awesome!”

But, that’s not what I was doing, really.

I liked making YouTube videos for sure. But I didn’t quit my job just so that I could follow my passion.

If passion was what I was following, I would probably be pursuing stand-up comedy right now. (Yes, I love stand-up comedy!)

But when I left Google, what I was following was this gap in the market I had found.

A gap in the market

A little bit before I started working at Google, I started working on CS Dojo, my YouTube channel. It was mainly about software engineer job interviews.

It started growing fast, and I got more than 100,000 views and 5000 subscribers when I had only 10 videos on the channel.

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A gap in the market (visualized with some high-tech equipment)

Around the same time, I also started coaching people on how to get through software engineer interviews. And they actually started paying me for it.

Through this experience, I realized that I was starting to fill the difference between what people wanted and what they were getting. It was a significant gap in the market.

Because I was filling this gap in the market, I was able to grow my channel quickly. And through my channel, I was able to help thousands of people.

Being able to help so many people and getting positive feedback from them just felt awesome!

Why I left Google

Then I thought, if I focus on my YouTube channel full-time, maybe I’ll be able to help a lot more people, a lot faster.

And that’s why I left Google.

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The awesome Google campus in Mountain View, California

I’m making a lot less money now, but it’s just amazing to be able to directly see the impact that I’m making on people’s lives.

This was actually something that was sort of lacking in my engineering job, even though working at Google was amazing.

I’m not really sure how my channel is going to go from here, but I think there’s still a lot more potential here and there are still a lot more people I can help out there.

So, I promise you this — I’ll keep doing this as long as possible so I can help a lot more people in the future.

If you want to get a better idea of what my channel’s all about, watch a couple of my videos: