My journey started off as a mechanical engineer where I was in charge of automating the manufacturing line for a Naval products company that built Sonar Buoys. Trust me, back in the 80s (at age 22), this was quite an emotional roller coaster for me as I was the only women in the manufacturing engineering department, but I learned how to deal with the almost 100% white male colleagues. It was an adjustment for the male colleagues as well, as they had never worked with a young women engineer. After about 3 years, I moved to the semiconductor industry where wore many hats. I worked as a manufacturing engineer, business development/marketing manager, project manager and finally as product line manager. I then took a brief break to spend time with my little ones and dabbled in some non-tech ventures where my kids could tag along with me. I owned an antique retail store, became certified yoga teacher (conducted kid’s yoga camps) as well as owned a math/reading tutoring center. Once my kids were grown, I realized I missed the tech sector, so I went back to working for a major semiconductor company as a project manager; managing software developers for a WIFI product. In addition to the full-time employees that were working on this WIFI project, we also had a requirement for some part-time software contractors. At that time, I had a friend who had recently gotten divorced, single mom who was looking for a part time coding job. So, she and I started our software outsource company. It was just the two of us, my friend being the coder and me doing everything else. I left the semiconductor company I was working for to devote more time to my start up. We started off with just this one customer and then I started getting other customers by word of mouth. My company has grown from two women to around 15 developers now. I moved all of my development to India as it was cheaper but all the PM and communications is conducted from the USA. I mainly work with startups in helping them with product scoping, MVPs, architecture design, software contract to hire.

I enjoy what I do as I have a lot of flexibility in terms of time and where I work from. I need this flexibility as my parents are aging and need to take care of them. I also have an excellent, reliable CTO who does all the managing of the developers so I don’t need to spend my time worrying about this part of the company.

If you have any questions about software development, outsourcing, or anything else, please ask.