Jessica Rose

6th grade science teacher said I should be burned at the stake like Joan of Arc. Hi, I make 10x more than you did as a teacher, have two black belts, three degrees, and I’m on network news or in the newspaper every other week.

Told me - my OSS project was only used because it was free, not because it was good - my business model to build a company around it was stupid - speeds n feeds was the only metric that mattered, not efficacy - nobody had ever melded network & endpoint security and I’d fail too

Result: my company that would never work was acquired by Cisco for $2.7B

Was turned down for an (unpaid) tech mentorship role because of my anxiety disorder. 1yr later I turned down multiple promotions to take on nearly all training (paid promotion) and tech writing. Then left to make 2x more as DevOps Engineer. #CantHandleIt? #TryAgain.

My parents told me not to quit my job when I transitioned because no one would hire me. I’m now traveling the world as a lead consultant for a major company, sit on the advisory board of 2 labs, and am having to turn down interviews with major newspapers and media outlets.

I was barred from doing computer studies at high school because the maths teacher reasoned that “I didn’t have a logical mind”. 36 years later I’ve programmed 50+ games with over 200,000,000 unit sales.