I studied super hard in early high school /mid school but started smoking weed later into HS and ended up going to a low tier state school because I wanted to do CS and it was an impacted major.

I had an internship at a really good F500 media company but acted stupid and squandered the return offer.

I work on a terrible product at Cisco where CI builds take 18 hours and people work on the weekend all the time bc it takes 18 hours to find out your tests failed. You can easily spend your entire time here writing automation tests and accidentally becoming an automation tester.

I was dumb enough tk move to SF even though my job is in Milpitas 3 days per week. I have the same amount of money I had in college after internship ($25k) despite working for 2 years due to high rent and stupid purchases. I can’t help myself but make these purchases. My family also lives close to San Jose and I moved away simply because I’m too lazy to do chores and don’t like being around them.

I got 3 interviews since starting at Cisco but failed all of them. One was super easy for JPMC which is 5 days RTO but I acted like an asshole know it all during system design despite knowing nothing about SD and studying with chat gpt for a week. Other one was at another bank that asked me about simple multi threaded programming that I completely forgot after college, other one was also an AI startup that just wanted me to demonstrate proficiency using AI and I didn’t even use Claude code the week before because it wasn’t available at Cisco and I “didn’t have time”

I had every opportunity to date/have sex in college and now that I live in SF in one of the best areas of the city I still manage to get 0 likes on all apps. Im a virgin and have never been on a date at 24. I’m also white but fail to understand the dynamics of immigration enough to take advantage of that. I try to go to clubs/bars with friends too but have never received interest. I’m short (5’6) but know other short people that easily have sex whenever they want.

I don’t think I’m going to last at Cisco much longer. Everyone is rushing to create AI workflows and be the one that owns agentic SDLC but I’m struggling to even make AI workflows that work while others are easily making reliable ones. I still manage to spend sometimes $100/day on Claude tokens. I frequently WFH during in-office days out of laziness. We have been warned about layoffs later in the year due to AI.

I never wanted this for myself and want to get out of the tech industry. I feel like I’m not living a normal/fulfilling life and am instead surviving off of scraps from an industry I’m not smart enough for. What career should I go into instead? I’m thinking trades, construction, or retail management. I doubt my parents will pay for another degree and I don’t want to go back to undergrad with loans.

TC: 119k

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5848915&forum_id=2#49763239)