I’m Glad I’ve Found You
by Sharon BaezLink to article
Born in Santa Clara County, CA, 1944. Life member of California Scholarship Federation; entered UC Berkeley with Honors in 1961; dropped out a year and a half later. One child, born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, 1971; husband, a Mexican citizen, died of testicular cancer when our baby was not quite 2 years old.
Returned to California, entered UC Santa Cruz when she was in 4th grade, got a degree in Computer and Information Sciences in 1982, and worked as a software engineer in (now called) Silicon Valley for fifteen years, living mainly in Santa Cruz during that time. I have never remarried. Moved back into the house I grew up in in Los Altos, CA, after my Dad died in 1991.
Was “let go” from the last company I worked in in the computer industry in 12/1996; they presented me with a letter which described our “separation” as a mutual meeting of minds, but it really had to do with my age. I know this, although they covered themselves well, of course. I was at the top of my game, receiving kudos from clients in the financial industry (I worked for companies with large database products–not Oracle! Could have, but didn’t like that one!)
What the heck, given that I entered the industry at age 38, older than many of the CEOs in whose companies I worked (I worked for three that went public while I was there), I’d had a good stint. I was unusual from the beginning, given both age and gender. Made a lot of friends, friends to this day. When I was let go, I didn’t attempt to find more work in the industry, because I’d just recently passed the six-month period that has to pass before an insider can sell stock; I had a fair number of options which I exercised. Good thing I sold when I was let go (at $26 a share), because a month later the stock went down to $8 and tanked after that.
Anyway, I went into business for myself, with an individual who turned out to be a person with no integrity; I moved to Utah during that time. I should have used my discrimination. I put up a LOT of money for our business, and lost about everything. I’ve learned a lot. I managed to sell the condo I bought with only one late payment. I had to decide whether to go back to California, or to Florida, where my daughter had lived since 1993, to declare bankruptcy. I chose the latter. I figured I could get a job there. I did not intend to try to go back into the computer industry, since I was now considerably older, it was 2001 with a plethora of people looking for IT jobs (”dot-com” bust), something I’d never done anyway but the only kind of thing I could’ve found in Florida, and since my skills were out of date anyway.
After a mysterious health condition manifesting in a whole-body rash (stress?), the only jobs I could find paid a maximum of $10 per hour. I enrolled in a private college in Dania Beach, Florida (Key College) and am enrolled in their court reporting program. Using a machine to do stenography, which is what one learns to do in a court reporting program, enables one to go into closed captioning or into CART (helping the hard-of-hearing and deaf), and these last two are truly merit-based. Your age doesn’t matter.
Court reporting is also, albeit a little less so (merit-based). One can earn very good money. It’s VERY difficult to get through: attrition rates are, I’ve read, 95% and more, and when I get through it (NOT IF), I won’t have anywhere near as many years in which to work as those folks I’m enrolled with (mainly twenty-somethings), and I’ll have a student loan debt, too, as well as one to my brother. Sigh.
But what else can I do? Without trying this, I’d have a debt to my brother I’d never be able to pay off at $10 per hour. I have a couple of highly-skilled friends whom I met in the computer industry who, like myself, have not been able to find work in years. One left on her last job on her own volition. The other, whose last job was Director of Engineering, was laid off after the company for which he worked was acquired by another. I guess I should stop now. I’m glad I’ve found you.
Tags: age-discrimination, computer-industry, dot-com-bust, student-loan-debt