Other Income Ideas Mostly accurate, with one big caveat

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-07-16 · 7 min read

Six “boring” online jobs from Shane Hummus — which paychecks actually hold up

Verdict: Mostly accurate, with one big caveat. The salary bands are close to real, but every job in the list quietly turns into “so start a YouTube channel about it — and join my training.”

Shane Hummus, a career-focused YouTuber with a large following, posted “6 Boring But Easy Online Jobs (Always Hiring In 2026)” and pulled roughly 78,000 views. The promise: unglamorous, low-competition remote roles paying five to six figures, no degree required, and you can start landing one this week. Most of the salary numbers survive a fact-check. What doesn’t survive is the word “easy,” and the fact that each job becomes a runway toward his paid coaching.

What the video actually claims

The six roles are a crime scene cleanup coordinator (the desk job, not the hazmat suit), a remote skip tracer or repossession coordinator, an industry subject matter expert, a medical coder, a software specialist (Salesforce admin as the flagship example), and — the sixth — simply starting a YouTube channel about whatever you already do.

Hummus attaches a salary band to each. Crime scene coordinators start around $50,000 and top out near $80,000. Skip tracers begin near $40,000 with commission pushing top performers past $100,000. Medical coders run $48,000 entry to $110,000 in specialties. Salesforce admins go from $70,000 to $250,000 for solutions architects. Subject matter experts land at $80,000–$130,000. He rates each with an “opportunity score” and describes exactly which job boards to search.

But watch what happens at the end of every segment. The crime scene coordinator should film her work for TikTok. The skip tracer should document the repo industry. The medical coder should record the questions she answers all day. In each case the “boring job” is a setup, and the payoff is a YouTube channel plus two sponsor breaks for his live training and a coaching program with “three to five spots.”

Do the salary numbers check out?

Mostly, yes — and that’s the part worth crediting. Take medical coding, his strongest example. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lists medical records specialists at a median wage of $50,250 in May 2024, with the top 10% above $80,950 and a job outlook growing 7% through 2034 — faster than average. His “$48,000 entry” figure is almost exactly the BLS floor. The $90,000–$110,000 for specialty coders reflects credentialed, experienced people, not beginners, but he does say that.

Salesforce is similar. Glassdoor puts the average Salesforce administrator around $99,877, with entry roles near $60,000–$70,000 and seniors around $115,000–$137,000. His $70,000-to-$250,000 span is real, but the $250,000 belongs to solutions architects with years of platform depth — a different job than the one a fresh certificate gets you.

Skip tracing is where the framing stretches. Glassdoor pegs the average skip tracer at about $46,475, and Indeed reports roughly $18.74 an hour — call it $39,000 full-time. The six-figure earner he cites from Reddit is real but sits at the far tail, driven by commission volume most desk tracers never touch. Crime scene coordination lands in the same honest-but-selective zone: the desk role does exist and the industry is genuinely short-staffed, but his $50,000–$80,000 leans on the higher end of a field where many technician-adjacent roles pay in the mid-$40,000s.

So the calculator doesn’t blow up. The numbers are cherry-picked toward the ceiling, which is what pitches do, but they aren’t fabricated.

The word doing the heavy lifting is “easy”

Here’s the caveat. “No degree required” is not the same as “no training required,” and the video blurs the two.

A medical coder needs the Certified Professional Coder credential through AAPC, which Hummus himself pegs at $400–$2,000 and four to six months of study. A Salesforce admin certification is a $200 exam, but the free Trailhead prep to actually pass it — and then to be hireable — is weeks of hands-on work, and the platform updates three times a year, so the learning never fully stops. Skip tracing may want a $200–$400 recovery-industry certificate depending on your state. None of these are “start this week.” They’re “start studying this week,” which is a very different sentence.

Would you call a job “easy” if it took six months of certification before anyone would interview you? That’s the gap between the thumbnail and the reality.

The funnel underneath the list

Now the real caveat. Five of the six segments end by pivoting to YouTube, and the sixth is YouTube. Hummus cites his brother going “zero to full-time income” in a month, a nurse whose month-old videos hit 500,000 views, and the Organic Chemistry Tutor allegedly pulling $82,400 a month in AdSense. These are the peaks. They are not the distribution.

The base rate tells a colder story. YouTube’s own Partner Program requires 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 watch hours before you earn a cent from ads, and industry analyses estimate that the large majority of channels that reach 1,000 subscribers still generate under 5,000 monthly views — nowhere near meaningful ad money. Among channels that do get monetized, most clear under $200 a month. The “boring job to multi-million-dollar empire” arc is one that happens; it is not one that typically happens.

And the two sponsor breaks are the point. The free “live training” and the coaching program are the product. The six jobs are lead magnets — real, verifiable, useful lead magnets, but lead magnets. Nothing illegal about that, and no regulator has flagged Hummus. Still, U.S. readers should know the FTC’s guidance on earnings claims treats atypical results shown to sell a program as requiring honest context — which peak-only testimonials rarely give.

Who actually wins here

Two different people win, and the video conflates them. The first is someone who picks one of these jobs, grinds through the certification, and builds a stable remote career. That path is real and the salary data backs it. The second is someone who already has years of on-the-job expertise — Hummus’s welder brother, the working nurse — and turns that into content. That person has something to teach on day one. The beginner watching does not, which is exactly the gap a coaching program is sold to fill.

What you’d realistically earn

Pick the job, skip the channel, and here’s the honest picture. Budget three to six months and a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars to get certified. Expect your first role near the bottom of each band — roughly $45,000–$55,000 for coding, skip tracing, or an entry Salesforce seat. Reaching the six-figure numbers he flashes takes two to five years of specialization.

Take the YouTube path instead and the realistic first-year outcome for most people is $0 for months, then perhaps a few hundred dollars a month if a video lands. The Organic Chemistry Tutor is a decade-deep outlier, not a template.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This is genuinely for you if you want a stable remote career, can spend a few months studying before your first paycheck, and treat the salary bands as ceilings you’ll climb toward. The medical coding and Salesforce routes in particular are well-trodden and recession-resistant. It’s not for you if you took “easy” and “this week” literally, have no runway to study unpaid, or expect the YouTube channel to replace your income in 30 days. If your real goal is content, judge that on its own odds — start with our look at how to beat the new YouTube algorithm in 2026 for faceless channels and the best jobs for people starting over in 2026.

What to remember

Hummus did his homework on the salaries — the numbers are selective but not invented, and the jobs are real, in-demand, and reachable without a degree. The caveat is that “boring but easy” is doing sales work the certifications quietly contradict, and every road in the video leads to his paid training. Take the job list. Leave the funnel.