Content Creator: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
satire - https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century
When Jonathan Silverman arrived for work in June 2019 at fancystuff.ai, the start-up focused on building fancy stuff through AI, it brought him prestige, his celebratory post receiving 3k+ reactions. The company had over 8 million in seed funding, and their numbers were growing quickly. Users on career oriented platforms reached out to connect with him. But in a few months, he perceived something was apparently missing in the social experience of his job. As one fancystuff engineer put it, “It was like arriving at a private beach and realising you’d only be interacting and drinking with the 8 folks in your team, some of whom you don’t really get along well with. So you just stand in the corner sipping your drink.”
Silverman was intrigued by the number of cold mails and resumes his firm got on a monthly basis. His experience in college had taught him that people seeked guidance, they found it easier to follow laid-out paths, as demonstrated by the reliance of juniors on seniors. He could imagine that the things he would put out might provide value to users. So he began making YouTube videos, mentoring individuals to crack interviews, writing his thoughts on the future of tech.
A New Breed
Silverman is a good example of a new key player in society: the “working-a-dayjob-cum-contentcreator” (DJCC). A high-ranking professional with the connections and authorial voice to make the crowd listen to him. Or maybe a barista with a body worth aspiring for. The title has been around for only a few years. But thousands of DJCCs are raking in millions of dollars each year.
Content creators want to give advice, not just build things.
For Jonathan, his side venture as a content creator allows him to connect with communities of his practice and also form informal associations. He’s too new to start making money out of it, maybe someday he will. The sudden appearance on the scene of many such non-profit creators reflects the fact that aside from the money (which his day job provides ample of), we wish for recognition.That the thumbs ups on a video perhaps are more stimulating more than a thumbs up on a code review.
Who Are These People?
If you’ve struggled your way from a tier-3 college to a FAANG job, if your start-ups have failed, been rejected multiple times and finally you’ve landed one decent idea, if your views on popular topics are controversial, or if you can host people who do, if you’re pretty and play Valorant, you’ve got a content creation opportunity. (Note — we’re keeping aside conventional arts)
Content creators’ basic, universal skill is the ability to engage, and not particularly their material. This may be less true in five years’ time, when many more people will have the title “content creator” on their profiles. More enduring will be the need for them to demonstrate the special skills involved in storytelling, whether verbally, visually, or — ideally — both.
These content creators are a part of the attention economy. They too cater to mankind’s supreme desire — not get bored. This decade’s most installed apps — Vine, musical.ly, TikTok, are not related to crypto-investment, news bytes, or even games, but simply p2p content platforms. Nothing is niche today, frankly we’re too densely populated to have niches, and everybody can be a creator — the engineer who teaches to code, the product manager whose product doesn’t really need a manager and hence has ample of time to write about other products, the chef who shows how to make anything in 10 minutes, or even the lawyer who simply, plays Valorant.
The Hot Job of the Decade
Amanda Bybel, the chief stylist at BybelBeautyCorner, is known to have said, “The sexy job in the next 10 years will be make-up and body transformation professionals. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that data scientists would’ve been the sexy job of the 2010s?”
If “sexy” means very exciting or appealing¹, content creators are already there. They have the freedom to work at their own pace, they get to sample the latest Nykaa products, their thoughts and views are heard, pictures seen.
My generation found pop stars, athletes, and movie stars “cool”. This was because we read and heard about them through media, and they seemed to live glamorous, envious, fun lives. The current generation is growing up consuming more content than all the previous generations combined. Ask any modern kid who they find “cool”. The name they take is likely to be a content creator.
“I think Elon Musk is cool.”
Why no other CEO? And which Elon Musk? The guy who’s into space and brains? Or the rich and eccentric content creator? I hope it's the former.
