Right before the holidays, the boss announced that the company needed "fresh blood." With a wave of her hand, the HR manager fired me—the very person who had built the company’s tech from the ground up alongside him since I was just an intern. But what she didn't know was that the code I wrote back then was an absolute mountain of spaghetti code. Aside from me, no one on earth could decipher what the scattered comments actually meant. Later, she brought in ten senior experts. Staring at a hundred layers of nested if...else statements, they fell into a collective, stunned silence. During Christmas Eve dinner, my phone blew up with calls from my boss, who had just returned from his business trip. 1 "Eat up, Stella! Here, your favorite pot roast and mashed potatoes!" It was the week before Christmas, and our extended family was gathered for dinner. Aunt Susan was enthusiastically piling food onto my plate. Under the table, my phone was buzzing so hard it was burning up. My cousin Rachel gave my flushed face a weird look. "Stella, are you okay?" "Do you guys hear a buzzing sound?" "No... nothing." My heart was racing with excitement. The moment of reckoning had finally arrived. I sneaked a glance at my phone. The contact saved as Ex-Boss had relentlessly called me 125 times. Even through the screen, I could picture his absolute, devastating meltdown on the other end of the line. "Stella, I heard your company is going public soon," my uncle chimed in. "You really had a great eye back then. Picking a tiny startup out of nowhere, and in just five or six years, it's actually booming." My parents' faces darkened. "Oh, stop praising her. They laid her off." "What? Wasn't she doing great? Wasn't she Employee of the Year?" Aunt Susan looked deeply confused. My dad angrily slammed his fork onto the table. "They claimed Stella's tech skills were too outdated! Getting fired is one thing, but they didn't even pay her a dime of severance! "What kind of scumbag boss does that? I told her to report them to the Labor Board! "But Stella insisted on stopping me, saying that if she sued her boss, she'd be blacklisted in the tech industry." Aunt Susan sighed heavily. "What can you do? Stella has always been too kind-hearted." The relatives murmured in sympathy, complaining about how brutal the job market was these days. Clutching my phone, I kept a deeply troubled expression on my face, while internally, I was light as a feather. "I need to step outside to take a call. "It's the boss from my old company calling personally. It'd be bad if I didn't answer. You guys go ahead and eat." As I closed the dining room door, I heard Aunt Susan praising me: "See? That's the value of technical talent! She's been gone this long, and the boss is still begging for her." 2 Half a month ago, I had a unilateral falling out with the boss. He had proposed bringing in "fresh blood," and I was actually looking forward to welcoming new colleagues. HR recruited a few young guys. I heard they were all graduates from Ivy League schools. I walked them through the project workflows, and eventually, they started getting the hang of it. It should have been a happy occasion, but when the holiday bonuses were distributed, there wasn't one for me. I went to HR. Chloe Davis looked at me with a conflicted expression, waving her freshly manicured nails in front of me. "Stella, there are some things Mr. Carter feels awkward telling you himself, and I hate seeing him put in a tough spot. "You're turning thirty after the holidays. For us women, youth fades fast. You don't have a boyfriend right now, and I'm sure your family will start pressuring you to get married and have kids soon. "Besides, how many female coders actually make it? When it comes to logical thinking, women are inherently a step behind men. "If you stay in this industry, you won't have a future anyway. "You've been with Mr. Carter for a long time. You were involved in the very first projects; you're essentially a company veteran. But why do you think everyone else got promoted, while you're still at the bottom? "Liam is just afraid the company is holding you back. "You get it, right?" 3 This rapid-fire string of absolute garbage left me completely stunned. I had joined Liam Carter's company right after graduation. I never expected that five or six years later, I'd be hit with such a pathetic excuse. "So what you're saying is, because I'm a woman, you're firing me on behalf of the boss?" Chloe smiled politely. "All you do at work anyway is slack off and read web novels. Our startup can't afford to keep a mascot on the payroll. I've already submitted the termination paperwork, and your manager approved it." "Stella, let's save each other some dignity so we can part on good terms. You should pack up your desk today." "Does Liam Carter know about this?" I asked suspiciously. "There's no need to bother the CEO with trivial matters like this. At the end of the day, you're just a base-level employee." I gritted my teeth. Motherf*ers. Burning the bridge after crossing the river. "What about severance?" "Stella, for severance, we will calculate your salary for this month and deposit it in full. "You wouldn't want anything negative showing up on your employment verification letter, would you?" I narrowed my eyes. Perfect. Now she was threatening me. "The smartest thing Mr. Carter ever did was hire me. And I don't recall him ever instructing anyone to steal an employee's severance package." Chloe looked at me with pure disdain. "You don't need to worry about that, Stella. Just pack your things. "Discuss the details with your manager." 4 My department manager, Greg Jenkins, was a greasy, overweight guy in his late forties who constantly used "work" as an excuse to text me inappropriate things. Once, at three in the morning, he demanded I analyze a piece of code from six months ago. He claimed he was "evaluating my progress." In his exact words: "It's the end of the year, we're all just sitting around anyway." He used this excuse repeatedly to chat with me late at night. Meanwhile, I was juggling three massive projects and absolutely did not want to entertain him. Finally, my patience snapped, and I chewed him out during a team meeting. "I hope certain managers stop using work assignments to maliciously harass female employees. "I am a software engineer, not your late-night chat line. If you want to do an evaluation, submit a formal process plan. "I am officially refusing all sudden, unprompted late-night tasks." Someone snickered in the meeting room. I stared dead at Manager Jenkins; even a blind man knew I was talking about him. Later, word of what I said reached his wife's ears, and the two of them got into a massive physical fight in the middle of the night. She scratched two huge, bloody gashes across his face, which he stubbornly claimed was the family cat. That incident made him hold a permanent, vicious grudge against me. While the boss was away on a business trip, Greg colluded with HR to use the "company restructuring" as an excuse to fire me. Only an idiot would beg him for mercy. I simply packed my desk and walked out. 5 I finally answered the phone. An enraged male voice blasted through the speaker: "Stella Vance! You resigned?!" "Yeah, Liam. Your HR manager fired me. "Didn't Manager Jenkins report that to you?" "Who the f*** fired you?! Get back in the office tomorrow!" Liam's tone sounded like he was ready to murder someone. I shook my head, feigning distress. "I can't. My termination paperwork is already processed. If I go back, my seniority starts from zero. "Besides, your company doesn't offer standard severance. It wasn't a legal layoff, and your HR discriminates against older, unmarried women. "I am definitely not going back." He must have been in a conference room. Through the tense, suppressed silence over the phone, I could hear Manager Jenkins' muffled, stammering voice: "Mr. Carter, aside from Stella, we have plenty of excellent programmers in the department. "For example, the new hires from the Ivy League are doing fantastic. Stella has been with you a long time, but her educational background is severely lacking. She only went to a community college. "Plus, she's a woman. There are too many unstable factors. "Her work attitude has always been an issue too. She's either chatting with people or browsing non-work websites." The line went dead silent for a full minute. Even through the phone, I could picture Liam's face turning black as pitch. I laughed out of sheer anger. A woman? What's wrong with women? Is his mother not a woman? When I was pulling all-nighters and working straight through the weekends to launch a new version, he didn't utter a single word of complaint! But the second promotion evaluations came around, suddenly my gender was an issue. And the "chatting" he mentioned? I was managing relations with our very first client, who also happened to be the company's angel investor. When the startup first launched, there were no managers or HR. I ran around with the boss securing every single client, laying the groundwork for what eventually became the Operations Department. Except for one major client's wife, who just loved chatting with me specifically, all other relations were handed off to Operations. 6 Liam let out a cold scoff and asked, "What is Stella's monthly salary right now?" HR quickly replied, "Eight thousand." Liam's voice was deathly quiet, but I could feel the hurricane brewing through the screen. "I am giving you a budget of twenty-five thousand a month. Go find someone to maintain Stella's core project and get the new version launched by the end of the month. "If you can't do it, you two had better personally go to her house and beg her to come back. Otherwise, you two are the first to get the hell out." Liam's salary offer was 30% above the industry standard. Getting fired at this age from a gig like that was definitely a brutal hit for them. The call abruptly ended. A moment later, I refreshed my Facebook and saw a new post from Manager Jenkins: [There are always some ants who think they are irreplaceable. They think just because they're a woman, everyone has to cater to them. Just wait and see.] The very next second, my phone buzzed with a new text message: [Wifey, please don't be mad. Relax at home for a few days, and Hubby will take out the trash for you. (Kissing emoji)] I replied with an eye-roll emoji and instantly blocked him. When subordinates commit such a massive workplace taboo, the boss deserves to suffer by association! What Manager Jenkins didn't know was that the reason I hadn't been promoted all these years wasn't because I was a woman, nor was it because I wasn't important. It was because I genuinely enjoyed a low-stress lifestyle where I could just code a bit and relax. I just never expected that these people harbored such deep-rooted sexism against female engineers. This time, he had kicked a steel plate. Because the core project Liam demanded he maintain was built on the very first code I wrote right out of college. You couldn't even call it code. It was a literal mountain of spaghetti. Except for me, absolutely no one could read it. It was a textbook case of high coupling and low cohesion, with abysmal maintainability, and absolutely zero comments. As my skills improved over the years, even I would cringe hard enough to crush a fly between my eyebrows whenever I looked at it. I couldn't wait to see the look on those Ivy League geniuses' faces when they opened the file and saw a hundred overlapping conditional statements. The best part? If you deleted even a single, seemingly useless line of my code, the entire system would crash globally. I was the only person alive who knew where to even begin fixing that project. If he wanted to refactor it, just analyzing a single module and untangling the workflow would take over a month. It was physically impossible for him to finish it, unless he forced the entire software department to work 24/7 without a single minute of sleep. And was that likely? They were there to work a job, not to torture themselves to death. The irony was, I had already finished the refactored version. It was just waiting to be deployed after the holidays. Well, too bad. That project was going to detonate right in Manager Jenkins' hands. After all, the golden rule of programmers has always been: If the code works, don't touch it.
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