State of the Studio, 2025 Edition

1. Wowsers, a year!

I started setting things up for the channel in December of last year. I didn’t actually start streaming until mid-January but December is where the idea started to become reality. So let’s talk about the state of Studios.

This might be a little confusing to people that aren’t me, so let me clarify real quick.

Mongoose Studios is a vehicle for my ideas/ventures/brand. Streaming is one thing that Mongoose Studios does. Software development is another thing that I do, even if a lot of it is on stream. If I were to branch out into anything else I would try to bring it under the Mongoose Studios brand in some way that made sense.

This is more of an update on the Studios side. Stay tuned for an anniversary retrospective on streaming itself next month (because that’s when I started). So, let’s talk about where things are in general, and where they are going.

In short, I’m looking for more ways to double down on betting on myself in the next year.

2. In long

As anyone that watched my channel update video knows, earlier this year I packed up and headed East for a new job opportunity. It’s not a job in tech, and I’m not terribly thrilled with it, but the bills must be paid. Unfortunately with the general slowdown of the economy I’m not making as much as I would have even just a year ago. On a good month the bills are juuuuuuuust about covered. On a slow month, I burn more savings.

On the upside, burning a little bit of savings is a vast improvement over burning a lot-a-bit of savings. I have also learned that I’m actually really good at this job, despite it being WAY outside my historic wheelhouse.

On the flip side, the pay isn’t amazing and I chafe under the management decisions being made. I’m also irritated at the lack of upward mobility, despite promises to the contrary. In addition, having a day job has drastically slowed the growth of the channel. I have fewer hours that I can devote to streaming, and those hours lie much later in the day than I would prefer for the sake of being a coworking stream and for the sake of my European viewers.

Also, I’m bored to death. If anyone reading this is in a leadership role, take heed. Don’t let the people that you value get bored. If they are skilled enough to perform well, and bored, they will likely find someplace else where they can be more engaged and grow. Right now the job market is very bad, but it will not always be so.

3. Define the problem

I hated college. I didn’t particularly like the guy that ran the CS program, who happened to also be one of my professors. One day he stood in front of the class and asked what the first step to problem-solving was. After everyone threw out their answers he declared them incorrect. The first step, he asserted, was to define the problem.

Fueled by equal amounts youthful arrogance and a healthy dose of experience solving problems in the real world, I privately pronounced this answer idiotic. After all, how would you know you had a problem if you didn’t define it? As an older (and hopefully wiser) Mongoose, I’m sorry I thought that.

One of my quirks is a mind that naturally seeks to define problems so that solutions can be sought, so I didn’t realize how many people actually DO skip that step. In hindsight, it was a good answer. And a good thing to talk about. I still don’t forgive him for making me take the basic MS Office course though.

So, let’s define some problems, as usual I am at least partly the problem. In my mind, anything that I know how to do seems trivial, and I’m so very aware of all the stuff that I don’t know within any given domain that it makes me feel legitimately like I have no real skills. All of this despite the fact that I’m pretty sure that I can learn almost anything I’m interested in, and I know that I’m pretty good at figuring stuff out.

The problem is, when I hire someone to do a job, I don’t want them to figure it out. I want them to know what the hell they are doing. The part where the success rate on getting that person is kinda low fails to register in my mind when I consider being that guy. This leads directly to me being forever riddled with self-doubt and imposter syndrome.

I also generally seek a degree of measurable certainty in everything that I do. I struggle constantly with the fact that at least some of literally everything is “art” over “science”. In some fields they would call it experience or intuition, but it’s the same intangible thing that lets people accept that things may not be millimeter precise, and that it won’t matter in a lot of cases. I fully realize that this is also generally invisible to anyone except people with deep expertise and/or the creator of the thing.

The good news is that this helps me strive for greater craftsmanship. The bad news is… everything else.

4. What do?

I’m just not built the same as all the people that can say “well I’m bored and using a fraction of my skills and barely making ends meet. But at least I have a job”. To be sure, having a job is an extremely good thing. Any job will do when the alternative is starvation. But I’m not built to be content with treading water.

What HAS been working so far is growing my channels, and growing my skills. I want to continue to do that. I want to try my best to ensure that I can make at least the same amount of time for streaming as I have been, and ideally more.

I spoke to an old friend last night on unrelated matters. He reminded me that I do have an eclectic mix of skills that are still valuable. And expressed a great deal of confidence in my ability to figure out a path forward. This is someone a few years older than I, that knows me very well, and whose opinion I respect a great deal.

It was accidentally the exact thing I really needed to hear. I haven’t settled on a path forward just yet. But I’ve been working on it and evaluating some options. And the longer I work on this the more clear it becomes that this is something that needs to happen.

Currently, I’m looking around and trying to come up with a solid plan that I can throw my energy towards. It likely means that I need to skill up on a few things, which may involve working for someone else long enough to learn enough. I’m OK with that. But the end goal is to escape the increasingly awful corporate world. Nothing there is working, for me or for anyone else really.

I’m fairly interested in building things in the physical world again. I tend to like varied tasks much more than a routine. I would like to find an interesting way to combine my tech skills with this if I can. If you have ideas, or know of any opportunities, please let me know. I’m very much in the exploratory phase of all of this, so I’m considering lots of options.

There’s also the potential that I could try and land some consulting roles, but I’m actually leaning away from that idea. I’d still be fighting the sort of corporate make-work mentality that I’m so terribly tired of. I’m happy to reconsider if you happen to know of anyone that isn’t terrible to work with who is looking for someone to solve their problems.

If I can somehow swing it, I would love to find a way to combine content creation with whatever it is that I decide to do in a way that’s a virtuous cycle. Creating engaging and hopefully at least partially educational content that helps generate more work. Obviously if I am doing proprietary work that won’t be possible, it’s just a thing that I’d put in the “nice to have” column.

5. “I’m only here for the coding streams though”

This is still just a studio update, but I want to address this now so that nobody gets the wrong idea. None of that is planned to change. I still love to code and make things, and that’s what I plan to keep doing!

The plan is that whatever else I end up doing, I plan to keep doing at least as much code streaming as I am currently. Ideally more, time permitting.

6. Closing thoughts

Everything sucks right now, for a lot of us. But “woe is me” won’t get me anywhere, and it probably won’t help you either.

I have always gravitated towards working for other people because it offered a sense of stability (and health insurance). That is increasingly not the case.

Nobody wants to pay a decent wage, everyone wants to post record profits and still cut jobs. Silicon Valley bros are bragging about their 996 expectations. Every job posting these days seems to say “you need to be the kind of person that would run our competition to work here”.

Well, message received. I’m now working on becoming that person. I think I can figure this out.