I discovered my entire coding portfolio was gone at 11:30 that night. Every project wiped from my laptop, GitHub repositories deleted, even my cloud backups somehow accessed and erased. Dad stood in my doorway holding my backup drive and snapped it in half like a twig.
“Women can’t code. Stop embarrassing us,” he said coldly.
Mom appeared behind him, nodding. “Tech is for real men like your brother Tyler.”
My interview with Space Forward Technologies—the aerospace company I’d dreamed of joining since college—was at nine tomorrow morning.
They had no idea about my secret server.
Three months before that nightmare night, my life had already been spiraling toward this moment, though I didn’t see it coming.
After graduating from Stanford University with honors in computer science, I’d been working at a small startup called DataFlow Solutions while building my portfolio on nights and weekends. My parents, Harold and Diane Peterson, owners of Peterson Construction—one of Denver’s most successful construction companies—had never supported my career choice.
The contrast between how they treated me versus my older brother Tyler was something I’d grown up with, but it had become more pronounced since college.
They’d paid for Tyler’s mediocre business degree at a state school without question, even though he barely maintained a 2.5 GPA and changed majors three times. Meanwhile, when I got accepted to Stanford, Dad laughed.
“Why would we waste money sending a girl to such an expensive school for something she’ll quit when she has babies?”
I took out student loans that would haunt me for the next decade, worked three part-time jobs during school, and survived on ramen noodles and determination.
Tyler, now thirty-two, worked for Dad’s company as a senior project manager—a title that meant he showed up around ten in the morning, took two-hour lunches, and left by three to go golfing. He made six figures, lived rent-free in my parents’ renovated guest house, and drove a $70,000 BMW they’d bought him for his thirtieth birthday. The guest house alone was three thousand square feet, with a full kitchen, two bedrooms, and a view of the mountains.
Meanwhile, I rented a cramped six-hundred-square-foot apartment in a building that should have been condemned years ago. The heat barely worked in winter, the air conditioning was non-existent in summer, and I’d killed more roaches than I could count. My fifteen-year-old Honda Civic had two hundred thousand miles on it and made a grinding noise whenever I turned left.
I worked seventy-hour weeks—not because I was building a future at the startup, but because I needed the overtime pay to make my student loan payments.
The startup folded suddenly on a Thursday afternoon. Our CEO gathered all twenty-three of us into the conference room and announced that our primary investor had pulled out. We had two weeks of severance if we were lucky.
I sat in my car in the parking lot for an hour calculating how long I could survive without income. Six weeks, maybe seven, if I only ate once a day.
That Sunday, at our mandatory weekly family dinner, I told everyone about losing my job.
Tyler actually laughed, spraying beer across Mom’s pristine white tablecloth.
“Maybe this is the universe telling you to find a real job,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You could be Dad’s secretary. You’d be good at that—organizing files and making coffee.”
Mom nodded enthusiastically, her pearl necklace catching the light from the chandelier.
“Oh, that’s a wonderful idea. You could answer phones at the company. You have such a pleasant voice, and you’d be so good at organizing Tyler’s calendar. He’s so busy with all his important projects.”
Dad leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking under his weight.
“I could start you at forty thousand a year. That’s generous for a secretary with no experience. Plus, you’d learn how real business works, not this computer nonsense.”
I tried to explain that I was a software developer. That I’d built entire systems from scratch. That my code was currently processing millions of data points for scientific research.
But they weren’t listening.
They never listened.
For Complete Cooking STEPS Please Head On Over To Next Page Or Open button (>) and don’t forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.
