Or to put it another way, if you work hard get a good degree, get a job at a top tech company and then find out your success boils down to the same skills you need as a youtuber, you may as well just quit and go be a youtuber - especially since being a youtuber could pay better and you don't have to pretend to add features to facebook.

Trying to be a celebrity is a very different career path than working at a big company. They shouldn't be similar.

I heard it as a criticism of deciding work decisions based on popularity, with product choices, technical implementations, etc... based on facebook likes, not real deciding factors. Which is very different from growing a YouTube audience.

What works for gaining viewers on YouTube will not work when you have to decide on highly technical manners in software development.

For one purpose likes are useful, for other purposes they are absurd.