Alberta Tech went from YouTube engineer to YouTube creator. Heres how she did it.

Alberta Tech didn't start posting TikToks because she was plotting her escape from corporate America. She was bored.

Like so many of us, cooped up at home in the early days of the pandemic, she started filming jokes, riffing on the absurdity of her tiny New York apartment and whatever else the For You page happened to hand her. A software engineer by day, she was just looking for a little fun. What she found instead were fellow tech workers, who saw themselves in every short-form bit.

By then, she'd been an engineer at Google for six and a half years, some of them spent on YouTube. For a long stretch, she lived two lives at once, building features for one of the world's biggest creator platforms by day, then becoming a creator herself by night like a techy Hannah Montana. But earlier this year, she stopped splitting herself in two and went full-time.

Her old life turns out to be her secret weapon. Alberta's comedy takes the dizzying, sometimes ridiculous world of tech, from generative AI to vibe coding, and makes it make sense by making it funny. She was once a hard skeptic of generative AI, and while it's now part of her workflow, she's still not sold on its ability to write a joke that lands.

In Mashable's Creator Playbook, Alberta Tech opens up about walking away from software engineering, why laughter is the fastest route to understanding, what AI is actually good for, and the one question every aspiring creator should answer before quitting the day job.

Mashable: You had an established career as a software engineer before becoming a full-time creator. What made you start making content?

Alberta Tech: I started making content during COVID. I was just bored at home. I was like, "I want to be making jokes on TikTok," because everybody I know is scrolling TikTok right now, making jokes on TikTok. I started off making really silly jokes about whatever would land. I'd make jokes about living in a tiny New York apartment during COVID, anything I could. As time progressed, I found my community more and more through tech, through software developers specifically. At that time, I was working as a software engineer at Google, so that was what my daily life was all about. It sort of grew from there.

Mashable: How did you balance your career at Google with being a content creator?

Alberta Tech: For a long time, I was doing both, until just a couple months ago. I loved working in my job. I was working specifically on YouTube, which obviously is very important to me now. I loved being able to build features for YouTube. But at a certain point, I realized that to take this really seriously, make the kind of content, and hit the high-quality bar I wanted, I needed to do this full-time.

Were you nervous to finally make that leap?

Totally. I was so nervous to tell my boss. She was like, "Are you sure about this?" And I was like, "I'm pretty sure. I've been thinking about this for a long time."

Do you think being an engineer helped establish trust with your audience?

I think it's super important. My audience now is just over half software engineers and developers. To speak to that group of people, you need to have some kind of credential behind you. You need to know what you're talking about.

I didn't talk about my career at Google specifically online almost ever because I didn't want to get fired, mostly. But I think the way I was talking about the topics and the things I was referencing made my audience know that I truly did have a career in this.

You satirize generative AI a lot, but you've also described yourself as cautiously optimistic about it. How did you get there?

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When generative AI first started becoming popular, I was so, so skeptical. I don't know if you've heard the term "stochastic parrot," the idea that the LLM is just saying the next most plausible thing. I was like, "Everyone thinks these things are genius, but they're kind of spewing garbage." And in late 2022, they were kind of spewing garbage.

But I have been really impressed by the progress that I've seen. I've seen AI used for actually very useful and good things, and now it's a part of a lot of my workflows. It has made me optimistic about what the future is going to bring.

What do you think AI is actually good at for creators, and what is it still terrible at?

I use AI a lot for researching, and I think that can be really useful because obviously you shouldn't be trusting facts blindly that you get from AI. But it can show you which paths to go down. This happens to me all the time where I'm asking AI about a topic I want to cover, and then I'm seeing, "I didn't even know about this backstory, and now I'm going to be able to go down a rabbit hole here." I think that is amazing.

Where I'm still not 100 percent convinced is the creativity aspect of it. I know people will try all the time to write out a script using ChatGPT. I have never had that work for me. I can have it give feedback and say, "This is not a good fact. This is spelled wrong." But whenever I say, "Generate a funny script" — not quite. It's not quite there yet.

"Vibe coding" has become this huge internet buzzword. As an actual software engineer, what's your relationship with it?

It's interesting because for software engineers, the word "vibe coding" has become such a dirty word. People really don't want to be called a vibe coder. But the word has evolved a lot. When it first came out, it truly meant typing into ChatGPT, Claude, whatever, "Build me a website," don't look at it at all, and just blindly trust that code.

Now a lot of developers have tools that fit into their workflows, so they can actually look at that code, know what's going on, or give very specific instructions as to what they want the AI to do. It has evolved a lot. It's not just blindly trusting that code, but becoming part of basically every programmer and software engineer's workflow.

We don't have a great word to describe that process. I've heard "agentic engineering" used before, but it's not a very popular colloquial word, I will say.

How has being an engineer made you a better creator? And did being a creator ever make you a better engineer?

My job as an engineer has definitely helped me as a creator in that I'm talking about technical topics, and I had six and a half years of experience really delving into those technical topics. I don't know every topic that comes up in the news, but I know how to look into those. I know how to think about them, how to conceptualize them. And then, in a boring way, working in corporate for a long time helped me stay on top of emails, stay on top of my calendar, know how to do all those not-so-fun but very important things.

As a creator, what really helped me in my career as an engineer was being able to communicate and being able to talk about these more technical topics in ways that are easy to understand.

Your videos are funny, but you're also unpacking some pretty complicated topics. How do you balance entertaining people with actually educating them?

I like to say that comedy is one of the best ways to get to the root of a problem, to get to the root of a topic. If somebody is laughing at something that is kind of technical, they have to understand it in some capacity. Sometimes I find that setting up the joke and making the punchline and giving just enough context to make that happen lets people actually get the topic, get the news story that's going on in AI.

As AI tools get better, do you think they'll make it harder for human creators to stand out?

I think AI does level the playing field a little bit. People are using AI tools so much, obviously now to the point of fully AI influencers, which is a bit scary. I would like to think that what helps you stand out is the original idea, the original script — not just an AI influencer reading it or having a ChatGPT script.

I actually ran an experiment where I took a video that I had posted before that had gone pretty viral, and I remade the whole video with AI video generation tools and took the exact same script. The video did pretty well, which told me a couple things. One, that the concept was the most important thing. And second, it told me video generation is getting really good. Scary good.

What's exciting you most about tech right now?

All of the new model releases and everything that's going on are uncomfortably exciting, as I say, because we are really on the precipice of this really intelligent AI, and everyone is paying attention. These used to be topics that were so small and only appealed to a small group of very technical people. But now it's something that is in the news every day. Everyone is talking about it.

What would you tell someone who's thinking about quitting their job to become a full-time creator?

My advice to new creators is that, in a lot of cases, your audience doesn't really care about you as a person, and so you kind of have to make them care about you. Until you can find that thing that makes them care about you — the value that you're providing, the entertainment that really hooks — you have to keep trying.

Don't quit your job until you find that thing.