I never planned on going into tech.

The original plan was medicine, but I burnt out pretty badly at the end of university and I knew I needed a break.  About two months before formal graduation, I drove by a car dealership in Lexington, Kentucky, and an intrusive thought told me to stop in and ask them if they had any open jobs selling cars. They did. For some reason, they hired me.

This was the beginning of the digital shopping era, where car buyers were able to compare vehicle pricing against other websites instead of haggling with a dealer and taking their word for it. “Car Row” and the foot traffic that came with it were dying–clients weren’t visiting 3-5 dealerships in a day anymore, they were looking up prices, calling around, and showing up to dealerships informed and ready to bargain. Even though my dealership was a flagship luxury car dealer and an incredible experience in its own right, it was still competing with clients in a new way and navigating a new world of website leads. 

The dealership used the ADP CRM (now CDK CRM) to manage all its sales, and bolted on top of it was a software called AutoAlert, which calculated remaining payments on a car against anticipated equity. It served up a list of CRM contacts who could essentially be flipped into a new car without changing their car payment, and I loved the excellent use of client data it provided. I went through as many equity-rich orphaned accounts as possible and cold called them to see if they’d want to take an appointment with me for a new car, and shockingly–about 20% of them did. Working the AutoAlert CRM app very quickly became my major sales channel and kept me around the top of the leaderboard.

At the end of one particularly challenging month-end close, I called the owner of a rare, white 2010 Lexus GS 460, who had a healthy chunk of equity in his car. He informed me the car belonged to his company and that the CFO wouldn’t give him the authority to change it yet, but he said that he liked my style and asked if I’d be interested in working for him in ad sales of digital media and cable spots. I told him I’d be willing to talk to him and met him in his office the next day, where he handed me a list of all of his US offices and told me to pick one.

I chose Chicago and moved a few weeks later.

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These were the early days of SEO and SEM services, where clicks were $.03 a pop and conversion rates were regularly in the 40-50% range. Clients were still buying tv, but the cost efficiency and sprawl of digital was too great to ignore. While I did well in ad sales, I still flirted with going to medical school and decided to step back into a support role to focus on finishing my studies, but the power of digital media and its ability to connect into CRMs never loosened its grip on me. Eventually, I moved to my company’s Detroit office to be nearer to family, and an automotive company hired me to join their French Canada team, because I spoke French.

The sprawling, colorful tech office in downtown Detroit of this company had an exuberance about it that you could only really experience if you were around for the Buzzfeed-and-Manbuns Millennial optimism of the bygone 2010s. Conducting business in my second language all day was daunting, stressful, and incredibly difficult, but working with all these smart people in such an exciting place was also insanely fun and rewarding. The French team oversaw all parts of the digital landscape for the French-language car dealers, because the additional tech support that English-speaking dealers got simply didn’t exist for their French counterparts. We quickly learned how to troubleshoot CRM integrations and the FTPs of Inventory Management Systems and email marketing systems, alongside explaining site analytics and SEO tactics and strategic site positioning for our dealers.

Eventually, another automotive company hired me to join the US field team in Atlanta, which has been my primary residence ever since. But as my early career in auto ad tech advanced, I became less and less interested in advertising and more and more interested in the tech that powered it all.  I was also becoming quite tired of being spoken to like I didn’t know what I was talking about simply because I was young and female and wore pretty dresses. The compounding burden of feeling that I had to prove myself to people who didn’t take me seriously, coupled with the hectic hours of the automotive industry, began to take a toll on my health. The college burnout I never truly recovered from finally caught up to me in the beginning of 2016. I had to go on medical leave to recuperate from the stress and to have a tumor surgically removed from my parotid gland.

Upon returning from medical leave, I knew I needed to change or that my body would keep trying to kill me. I took a job working client-side for an industrial manufacturing company, where I most heavily began my journey in Salesforce and the artist formerly known as Pardot (now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, I will die mad over the renaming of that product). I absolutely loved the interconnectivity of the two systems, and was very blessed to meet a brilliant female colleague who introduced me to people she knew at Salesforce. Salesforce recognized my work on the platform and graciously invited me to speak at Dreamforce and several other events on the topic.

After the rubber stamp of approval from The Mothership herself, a career in Salesforce and enterprise architecture opened up for me, and I was at last able to design systems and pull levers all day long.

Eventually, I left manufacturing and auto for a finance company, where a new Salesforce implementation hadn’t respected the standard sales object model required to make Pardot work optimally, and I redesigned their entire system for them in order to leverage their marketing automation. I was hooked. Architecture was all I wanted to do, and I eventually moved over to a healthcare payer where I was allowed to work in the Salesforce Center of Excellence in Innovation, on a wide variety of new software and Salesforce products.

At this healthcare payer, I met one of the most formidable female architects and leaders I’ve ever encountered, and she changed my life in ways this essay can’t begin to adequately honor. When COVID hit, the two of us built the entire Medicaid and Medicare outreach program on Salesforce Service Cloud together, by ourselves, and we worked insane hours as first responders keeping this system going in the early months of COVID until we got a team to support us. It was intense, unbelievably sad, and at times very traumatic, but knowing the work that I was doing and how quickly I could deliver it meant the difference between life and death for some of America’s most vulnerable people was the most rewarding moment of my career. While I was quickly promoted into management and generally well-treated at this company, the lonely reality of being a female manager in tech, especially a hands-on technical one, started to sink in. There weren’t many of us. In fact, there were only 18 other women who were technical people leaders for the nearly 100,000 person company, and she and I were often the only female people leaders in any given Zoom call.

Like many people who lived through the 2020s, I don’t think I was ever really the same after COVID. I left the healthcare payer and kept climbing the corporate ladder at a few other companies, and attaining more responsibility and eventually branching out further into enterprise applications and architecture. But my sense of purpose had taken a hit, and I felt very adrift.

I am hearing impaired, and I have an auditory processing disorder that negatively progressed over the COVID years until I finally had to start wearing hearing aids for it. Auditory processing isn’t traditional deafness, it’s a neurological issue where my brain works faster than my body (tbh, kind of a flex as far as disabilities go), and if there’s too much auditory input, sounds mush together and I can’t understand what someone is saying, or separate their words. It’s like I hear in mono instead of stereo, and it makes noisy environments like open-plan offices really challenging for me. When I would go into an office, I’d inform HR and my colleagues of my hearing impairment so we could pick quieter spaces to work, or I’d request to be at a digital meeting so I could have the assistance of subtitles and transcripts.

One day, at a meeting where I was at home and other meeting participants were together in a conference room, I chimed in to ask if they could move the microphone puck closer to the speaker so I could better hear the speaker and let our meeting software pick up subtitles. One of my male colleagues made what can only be described as the kind of noise a 7th grade bully would make before calling another kid a slur, following it up by saying, “Whaaaaaat?” in a similarly mocking tone.

And then the rest of the room laughed with him, at me.

It fucking broke me.

In an instant, all my accomplishments over my near 15-year career were gone. My decade and a half of intense technical experience, my ability to thrive in a second language despite my quasi-deafness, my conference keynotes, my awards, my academic papers, my publications, my book, my time as a UN delegate–all of them erased in the cruel realization that my colleagues almost certainly insulted me and my disability behind my back, because they just did it to my face.

I knew then and there that I couldn’t keep climbing the corporate ladder inside a company if I wanted to stop feeling adrift. I couldn’t put my fate in the hands of people who’d happily accept the fruits of my knowledge and hard work, only to belittle me for asking to be included in a conversation.  I knew I had to go work for myself.  

It took me much longer than I’d wanted to go solo, but I did it, and I love it. I’m so much happier on the other side. I’m a private Salesforce and Enterprise Architect for hire, but I also ghostwrite–and I have some excellent clients whom I adore and for whom I am unbelievably grateful. While I still work with corporations, being outside of the FTE world and its specific corporate structure has been hugely healing for me at this time–operating on contract as a private gun has helped me grow my skillset, improve my messaging, and not get as bogged down in the corporate drama that used to weigh on me. It’s hard work juggling several clients on my own, and I have a lot more administrative overhead that I never experienced as someone’s employee, but the fire is back in my soul and it keeps my enthusiasm warm.  Living under contracts that I can control has helped me feel more purposeful and focused, and it’s given me a sense of power and accomplishment that had been missing for a while.

There’s no right or wrong way to start or end a career in tech as a woman, and I’m not saying I won’t ever go back to FTE-life if it makes sense for me in the future. If anything, I think I’m proof it doesn’t matter how you move in and out of tech as you’re willing to master a technical skill set and hustle. This essay has barely scratched the surface of the kind of struggles I’ve endured just for being a high-powered woman in this industry, and I’m sure I’ll write future essays for 50x35 about the exciting worlds of harassment and discrimination, or the insane amount of Tone Policing at the Jira Factory that I’ve never seen male colleagues subjected to. But I want any woman or person of marginalized gender reading this, who’s maybe looking for purpose, who’s maybe thinking about joining tech but isn’t sure they can, who’s been here a while or is thinking about going solo, that you’re totally capable. Don’t let a bad experience with anyone hold you back from a path that’s going to make you feel fulfilled, and don’t be afraid to push yourself.