Today I am pissed. I am pissed because I have accepted that I am not special. After the countless hours of updating my resume, writing cover letter after cover letter, reaching out to “friends” on LinkedIn, I have been put back in the “bottom of the pile” and joined my fellow 98% of us who can’t get an interview based on my application… It’s kind of a hard to imagine that a measly 2% of the population are the lucky ones who actually get that far, however I also understand that when you do the math in an area of approximately 7 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area, that 2% sounds like a decent sample size of people that want to work the same kind of job as me. Oh right, but then again I have to be special to be even considered.

So who am I? Well based off my gripping opening line, I am just an “average” American trying to make sense of what a career would actually look like for a 30 year old man living in the Bay Area. I can proudly say that unlike many of my peers, I was born and raised in San Francisco. I have seen the city evolve over the last three decades (granted, the 1st decade was through the eyes of a child) and I have planted my roots deep into the spirit of the city. There are memories of soccer practices out at Beach Chalet slide tackling between beer cans and homeless shit, going out to Candlestick for Giants games with my Dad and feeling the biting cold wind out in the outfield. The Niners.. Oh man the Niners and their glory years! I have also lived through the first dot-com generation during my high school years and probably watched my teachers feel the same way as me as I do today with young people and their privileges.

Well today I am starting to feel like a stranger in my own town. I am now living through a time of my life where I have to make a living and all the sudden the common perception of success around me is that everyone has to be a developer or entrepreneur and that their latest software or application is going to make them a multi millionaire. It’s kind of hard to digest sometimes as I now find myself smack in the middle of this game of tech and I see fresh faces come into the Bay Area year after year while I am just trying to live this so called American dream of making a decent living to maybe someday buy a place of my own.

Whoa stop the presses. Did I really just say that I would buy a house here? BAHAHAHAHAHA! Well apparently I will need to pull in about $145K a year for the next 10 years to be able to even put a down payment, which will easily get outbid on a cash offer more than twice the value of the home. Pretty staggering figures when I still find myself in career limbo “reacting” to customer issues vs. “proactively” taking them on and making their experiences online or in person more than exceptional.

So why did I even start writing this when I haven’t picked up a pen (metaphorically speaking of course; come on it’s 2015!) to write in the last 2 years? Well I got rejected on another job application today, which probably brings my total close to triple digits now and I want to give up. Seriously…I do. Unfortunately my resistance to accepting things how they are is not in my nature so again I find myself coming back to the drawing board to try and get my career going and really start to make some kind of impact in this city of mine.

Because I didn’t care or express much interest in learning the lingo of being a developer, I have turned my attentions towards Product Management. In fact, my very first blog article I ever wrote was in a Product Manager class I took in 2013 that was supposed to explain the benefits of Netflix from a Product point of view. Not sure if I hit the mark there at that time or if I was just trying to make sense of what the hell a product manager even did. Clearly my understanding of the role hasn’t impressed many companies to want to give me a shot.

So my internet people, what kind of person does work as a Product Manager? Clearly taking a class and supporting a product roadmap for a company’s internal software solutions for the past 4 years isn’t good enough. You want KPIs and hands on experience of how your Epic in the upcoming Sprint Cycle is going to change the way customers shop or visit your site but someone who has an interest in the company, has good work ethic, and is fiercely loyal isn’t really quite enough is it?

So I go back to the drawing board yet again. Maybe through this endless search for a meaning of “success” in San Francisco, I am already there. Now, I just need to triple my earnings to buy that magical home someday!