Making cheat is hurting my career. Not sure what to do.

Silly question, I know.

But before I start. This is the one thing I have ever been decent at. Suck at Leetcode, suck at sports, gpa is nothing to talk about, tried cybersecurity and failed that class, can’t design pretty much can’t do anything except that.

I read a Twitter/X post about how a lot of anti-cheat developers were once cheat developers. That gave me some hope, but it turns out it doesn’t really work like that for me.

I’ve made video game cheats. Pretty much every game I’ve played, I ended up creating a cheat for it and straight up cheating (except Valorant).

After reading that X post, I started showing some of my work on GitHub and YouTube, and it honestly went downhill fast.

One of the videos I posted on YouTube got hit with copyright claims from the game company. They ended up taking down 4+ videos, which gave me 3 strikes and got my channel banned. (Which is fair, to be honest. I did do a walkthrough on the Internals of their AC)

GitHub also restricted my account until I took down a few repos.

At one interview, someone looked me dead in the eye and said, “We won’t hire people like you.”

I’m starting to see the stigma around it.

When I post on X, it’s mostly just kids asking me to teach them or sell them cheats. Overall, being public about this stuff has had a pretty negative impact on my career, and honestly it’s tiring.

I used to have huge imposter syndrome, and when I made those cheats I genuinely thought everyone could do it. It never felt that complicated to me. But when I showed some of my work to one of my professors, he was actually really fascinated and wanted me to help with some reverse engineering research he’s working on. Pays like $17/hr which is good money to me.

I’m not gonna lie, I have absolutely no idea how to tackle some of the problems he’s giving me, but it pays my bills and puts food on the table, so I can’t complain.

There seems to be a lot of stigma around this kind of work, and now that I’m trying to move toward a more ethical path, I’m looking for suggestions on how to demonstrate what I’ve built and learned without getting banned, hated on, or immediately rejected in interviews.

My current goal is to work in the gaming industry, which is probably a bit ambitious right now. But honestly, I just want a job where I get to build cool stuff and solve interesting problems instead of spending all day fixing Jira tickets.