hi everyone kevin here a little while back i sent out a survey to all of you my viewers asking what else you want to see me cover on this channel one area of feedback that i heard is that some of you would like me to host a question and answer session on the community tab on youtube i posed the question what questions do you have for me and it turned out 133 questions came in first off thank you for submitting all of the questions and today i’m going to run through and i’ll share my thoughts on the different questions that you have and i’ll simply start at the top and work my way down and we’ll see how many we could get through today the first question is from king raj if one’s preparing for a job at microsoft what tips and suggestions would you give and i think this applies even beyond microsoft and this is something that satya the ceo of microsoft really pushed within the company and he always encouraged all of us to have a growth mindset so you don’t want to have a fixed mindset and what that means is and i’ll give an example when you go into a meeting let’s say people bring up ideas or maybe they have suggestions to be open to them and to build upon them and not to shoot them down one thing i found is that when i behaved in that way it led to better output and also just a better outcome for any projects that you were working on also you want to just be a pleasant person to work with so just kind of be a fun person usually when i worked on projects you want people who you know deliver good work and they do what they say they’re going to do but you also have fun while you’re working with them so just a few tips as you’re starting a job at a company and another question do i like mrs fields and we all know that the kevin cookie company has the best cookies the next one this was a popular one this is from naveen many others asked this as well but is your youtube income already better than my salary from microsoft and all i’ll say to that one is you can earn a pretty good income on youtube once again another income question one thing that’s interesting about income on youtube so you can make income from a lot of different places you can make income from ad revenue you can make income from affiliate links from merchandise sales so there are a lot of different ways you can earn money on youtube the one thing i found is that when you pull together tech content tech contents a vertical that tends to pay better than some other verticals like let’s say you’re pulling together say kids content and i found that generally you could make anywhere between six dollars all the way up to eleven dollars uh per every one thousand impressions and there are different sites like socialblade.com you can look up different youtubers and you can get estimates for how many impressions they’re getting on a daily basis um so you should be able to get good estimates for what different youtubers earn so i’ll share that this one’s from rprem please give your suggestions tips for starting a youtube channel while in college and having a job now i personally started my youtube channel while i was working at microsoft it’s a pretty demanding job i also have a young child at home and then i was working on this channel really the the biggest tip is to prioritize your time and also focus so i would focus at microsoft and i would put all my attention towards microsoft once my work day was over then my son would come home from daycare and i’d spend time with him uh he’s my biggest priority then once he went to bed at around 8 30 or nine that was my free time to work on my youtube channel so every night i would have two to three hours to come up with video ideas to produce video content and one thing i found myself doing is i cut out all the what i considered poor uses of my time so say watching movies watching tv shows reading junk articles so just being really focused with your time if you want to build a channel you’re going to have to devote time to it and that’s one thing that i found worked really well so you just have to be really disciplined moving on here we have kev kelly what’s the best video editing software for low end laptop mine can’t handle davinci resolve davinci resolve is very good editing software i’ve recently been using that as my main software but if you have a lower end machine i think shotcut works as a tremendously good video editor i’d recommend trying that out uh the question google verse microsoft those two companies you know the the funny thing now is i used to make all my income from microsoft and now working on youtube that’s owned by google or alphabet so now i’m making my income from google uh so i i have kind of a soft spot for both companies uh really i think both companies have fantastic products i use a lot of microsoft products i also use a lot of google products um so i like both companies i think they both have a lot of quality products i i’m not going to say i have one favorite company versus the other it really depends on the product what is your favorite application in microsoft 365 so in microsoft 365 i really like onenote i use that to organize and manage my youtube channel so i’m going to go with onenote i like that application a lot you know 30 of your views are from india i do get a lot of views from india and that’s why recently as part of my website tutorial we opened a location in hyderabad i just have to give some love back to india it’s a great country did you join the microsoft like which year did you join and why you left i did a whole video on why i left microsoft i joined back in 2006 i joined microsoft right out of college and i stayed there ever since then so that was the one company i worked at since graduating college until recently i left to work on my youtube channel uh what was your wife’s reaction to starting on youtube and this was from ofic yay and my wife’s reaction i think initially she thought of it more as a hobby she used to joke that i i actually spent more money on my camera gear and my lighting than i actually made from youtube but i stuck to it i i saw growth and so i thought there was a lot of potential there and so i stuck to it and then once it started making you know more and more money i think my wife was like oh wow like this you could actually make money on youtube so i think initially she was more skeptical and now you know she she sees a lot of opportunity there um so i think i i was able to convince her by proving that there there was opportunity the next question from uday what was your role at microsoft uh so i was a program manager the best way to think of what a program manager does is it’s like you’re an owner of a business uh you make decisions on where you should invest uh what features you should build uh what the product looks like how customers are responding to and how customers are using the products so basically a business owner is the best way to describe it but that was my role and i in my last role i worked on office.com and also the office app the office app comes with windows 10 if you search for office it’ll pop up so i worked on those products hopefully you enjoy them let me know what you think in the comments how is the environment uh in the company so i i’ve been at the company for 14 years and i have a lot of friends from the company i thought it was a very positive environment um i think having satya as the ceo i think he really drove a very positive culture i really think it’s a model culture and i think if more companies modeled themselves after the way kind of microsoft operates i think that’d be a good thing game development i haven’t done much game development the last time i did game development was back in college i took a c plus course and i wrote a blackjack game but that was the last game that i created here’s another question on google products apple products or microsoft products i think here again i use an iphone i use a lot of google products use a lot of microsoft products so i think all companies make great products i don’t think you have to choose just one company as being your favorite they all have i think good product teams they have good developers they have good designers so i’m impressed by all them and i think having competition in the industry is a good thing it forces all companies to up their game and to make sure that they’re getting good products out do you miss microsoft i i think the one thing i miss the most when you work on youtube it’s a little more of an isolated job when i worked at microsoft you’d have meetings you’d have a manager you’d have co-workers you talk to different customers so you definitely engage with a lot more people so that’s probably what i miss the most about the job also just kind of being on the cutting edge of seeing what technology is coming out before the general public knows about it i also enjoyed that quite a bit how do you go full time on youtube it’s a dream of mine i think like with anything in life just start working on it start building the skill set and then so at least me i took a very kind of conservative or cautious approach i wanted my youtube to be able to earn just as much as my microsoft salary did before i left uh so i probably could have left earlier but i’m just more of a conservative or i guess cautious person so that was the approach i took but i would say just start working on it experiment see what works see what doesn’t work keep building it and then once you feel confident that it is the right time to go full time then you can make the jump how was your experience getting your first 1000 subscribers i think getting the first thousand subscribers that proves that you’re making content that people enjoy and that they value getting the first thousand is probably the hardest getting the next ten thousands a little easier getting the next hundred thousands easier but i think the initial set is probably the hardest because that’s when you have to basically convince people and kind of refine the types of videos you’re making what is your suggestion for aspiring software engineer students going into a software engineering job there’s a high demand for those types of jobs so it’s a good career to go into one thing i would also focus on is don’t not only uh become an expert in coding and developing but also have an open mind to kind of strategic decisions so why are you doing certain things uh what is the market need what do customers want i think that’s also kind of an important mindset to have along with simply being able to develop what’s your most popular video to date i did a video on how to get office for free it was a little bit of a controversial video because i pushed the office online apps and some they’re not quite as feature-rich they have some features that the desktop apps don’t have and vice versa but uh that was definitely the most popular a little bit of a click bait title right there so another question how did you get the baking tray out of the oven without wearing gloves so i pulled together a commercial for the kevin cookie company and i don’t have gloves on i really should have worn oven mitts so maybe i cook cookies so often i have calluses on my hands so i can just pull the cooking tray out that’s how epic i am at my kevin cookie company my favorite program is video editing currently i would say davinci resolve image editing get paints or paint.net web browsing i use chrome backup i use onedrive audio editing audacity note taking i use onenote uh web development i haven’t done much web development in a while back in the day i used front page but it’s been a while um so those are those are kind of my top apps in the different categories how do you keep the consistency with your channel i treat my channel just like a job so uh you know i i sit down for probably 10 hours a day just brainstorming ideas putting together my videos editing my videos and then i just do that every weekday you radiate so much positivity and confidence thank you is it natural or have you developed it by reading some books one of the i think most influential books that i read and a book that i recommend is how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie a very good book and it really helps you just have a more positive mindset about things and i think also you’ll notice that when you’re more positive the people you’re interacting with are also more positive and you just lead a better life so that’s that’s kind of mentality that i i tend to take and let’s see do you have an instagram account i do but i don’t really do much with it i should do more with it uh do you know html and javascript the first website i wrote i i just wrote the html by hand they didn’t really have any uh what you see or what you get tools at that time so i read a book on html and just pulled together my own website javascript i don’t code in javascript i do know visual basic and c plus plus um if your channel wasn’t a tutorial channel what would it be i secretly would love to have a miss or beast type channel but uh maybe in another lifetime or actually miss mark rober is also a youtuber who i just love he always pushes experimentation and i think that’s a really cool channel type but i think that’d be a really interesting one too do you know programming uh back in college i took i think i mentioned visual basic and c plus uh so i took some programming i understand the basics of it but i don’t code all that often anymore what microphone do you use i have a rode nt-usb microphone i think it works pretty well what made you open this channel this is an interesting one when i worked at microsoft one of the things i found is that we we had a marketing team and anytime we would build features we would go to our marketing team and say hey can you you know write a blog post or do a video about this topic and of course they were constrained and you know there’s only so much capacity because they’re representing all these teams across microsoft so i said well hey let me make a video about it if they don’t have the time and then you know it just kept growing and it resonated another one which version of onenote do you think is going to survive so the onenote app for those of you who don’t know there are many different versions of the onenote app you have onenote that comes with windows onenote that comes with microsoft office there’s also the onenote web app there’s also the there’s also the onenote mobile app so you have many different versions in software development the more versions you have it’s costly maintaining all those different versions of the app i don’t know if necessarily just one would survive one thing you could imagine happening is perhaps you even have a re-architecture or even a new version emerge that all of them move towards one of the problems with onenote today is especially when you’re collaborating with many people on a onenote you tend to run into merge conflicts so i wouldn’t be surprised if just um kind of it gets re-architected and a new version takes over across all of them um the question are you american i actually have uh u.s and also german citizenship so i’m uh i guess dual citizenship all right well that wraps up all of the q a session uh thanks for all the questions they were a lot of fun to go through hopefully you learned a little bit more about me and you also got to hear some of my thoughts if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up let me know what you think down in the comments below to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button also if you want to see me cover any other video topics drop a comment down below alright well thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye [Music]