Month: December 2025

• Cher Scarlett resigned from Apple after helping to start the employee activist movement, #AppleToo.
• She struggled to find a tech job and later ended up homeless, living out of shelters.
• She now attends community college, sees a bright future, and has no regrets about leaving Apple.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Cher Scarlett, a 40-year-old former programmer and current community college student based in Southern California. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

Growing up in a chaotic household, I never had much of a choice but to figure things out on my own. At age 6, I learned how to bake bread when my family needed dinner, and in middle school, I used that same initiative to teach myself how to code.

My home life worsened, and I dropped out of high school and went down a dark path. When I got pregnant at 19, I knew I wanted a better life for my daughter. I earned my GED with a near-perfect math score and broke into tech as a front-end engineer without a college degree. My tech jobs became my identity and source of self-worth.

Twenty years after starting my tech career, I quit my job at Apple. What followed was one of the hardest times of my life, but it was what I needed to finally see my true value.

My engineering career was fun at times, but unfulfilling

I worked for companies such as Blizzard, Starbucks, and USA Today as a software engineer. I had the opportunity to work on some really interesting projects, but I felt unfulfilled. I was always the activist type at work, speaking out against injustice, and I kept looking for a company that I felt like was making a positive impact on its community and employees.

When I was hired as a principal software engineer at Apple in April of 2020, I thought it was what I’d been looking for: Apple invested in education, installed computers in elementary schools, and even advocated for human and environmental rights. It seemed to embody the counterculture and activist movements that had been ingrained in my identity as someone who grew up in the Seattle area in the 1990s.

I started the #Appletoo movement and had no idea it would impact my career

About a year after I started working at Apple, coworkers and I created the #AppleToo movement, where we gathered testimonials from employees who shared their allegations of harassment, discrimination, abuse, and more.

I later helped send an official open letter to Apple asking for specific changes in how the company handled labor-related issues and complaints.

Two months later, I resigned. I didn’t view what I did as something that could ruin my career or put myself in a position where I couldn’t provide for my daughter. I was still taught when you see something, say something — so that’s what I did.

After I quit Apple, I couldn’t find another tech job

I had mixed feelings about my departure. I felt grief and disbelief at how it was ending, but I was self-assured and excited to reshape my vision of how I could impact the world with the software I worked on. I wasn’t fearless, but I had a lot of belief that I’d find another programming job because it had never been an issue in the past.

I applied to places that seemed to align with my values, but I wasn’t hired. Some hiring managers told me it was because I was underqualified without a college degree.

In August 2023, a year and a half after I left Apple, I ran out of money to pay my bills and enrolled in a community college to pursue a degree in computer science. Not only was it out of desperation because I needed a job to take care of my daughter and myself, but also because without that part of my identity, I felt like nothing.

I experienced homelessness before enrolling in community college

The same month I enrolled, I left an abusive situation in my personal life. I had to send my daughter to live with someone else, and I lived out of my car. I ended up withdrawing from my classes.

I spent some time in shelters before getting referred to an intensive, 10-week domestic violence program. I went to classes daily and counseling sessions multiple times a week to talk about why, my whole life, I kept going towards abusive situations. I realized that I put all of my self-worth into my identity as a software engineer and neglected the rest of myself.

I left the program feeling like a completely different person and re-enrolled in community college, but this time it was for something I’ve always been passionate about — astrophysics and earth sciences.

I’m on track to graduate with highest honors this spring, and I just applied to transfer programs. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my degree yet, but I know that it’s something that’ll make me happy.

I don’t have any regrets about leaving Apple

If I could go back and change anything about the time I left Apple, it would be that I reached out for help with the domestic violence I was facing, instead of suffering in secret.

I’m redefining what success means to me, and it has nothing to do with money or prestige. I’ve landed an internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a research assistant position at Caltech. It’s interesting because the thing that has gotten me noticed at these places is my programming experience. I’m finally in a place where that’s no longer my whole identity, but it’s a part of myself that I’m getting to reclaim.

College has done for me something that no other part of my life has given me. I feel rewarded for my hard work. Getting that positive attention means everything to the bright little girl who never got any and has helped me learn to truly value my whole self.

If you quit your job for an unconventional path and want to share your story, please reach out to this reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

The offers and details on this page may have updated or changed since the time of publication. See our article on Business Insider for current information.

• For Love & Money is a column from Business Insider answering your relationship and money questions.
• This week, a reader wonders how to teach their children to recognize their financial privilege.
• Our columnist suggests centering gratitude in their children’s lives and healing their own inner child’s relationship with money.

Dear For Love and Money,

My kids are growing up with way more financial security and privilege than I had as a kid. That makes me hugely happy, but I’m struggling to help them understand their privilege and appreciate the value of a dollar.

They’re not spoiled brats, but there’s a level of expectation, because things that were unfathomable to me as a child — yearly vacations, expensive extracurricular activities — are just the norm for my kids, who are in early elementary school.

I like that my kids get to do things I couldn’t do when I was their age. However, what’s your advice for getting them to understand how lucky they are? Does that just come with age? Or is this more about me coming to terms with my own hang-ups about a changed financial status?

Sincerely,

Raising Rich Kids

Dear Raising Rich Kids,

It’s the natural instinct of every parent to want more for our kids than we had ourselves. It’s also natural to think, when we see anyone living a life we perceive as easier than our own, Must be nice. Reconciling these two natural responses takes practice and will be the key to navigating how you feel about the privileged circumstances you’ve provided for your children.

You asked me if the solution is teaching your kids to understand their luck or if it’s getting over your own hang-ups — I think it’s a bit of both.

Helping your children understand their privilege is an important part of this conversation. As parents, we’re responsible for ensuring they learn not to be entitled, but teaching our kids to recognize their privilege is different from teaching them to feel guilty about it.

This world of security and privilege that you’ve provided your children is the only world they know; it’s not a problem that needs to be solved. Your kids have done nothing wrong by being born lucky. The difference between teaching your kids to recognize their privilege and instilling guilt in them is gratitude.

Make gratitude a central part of their lives

The best way to do that is by first modeling it yourself. You mention that they take for granted things you wouldn’t have dreamed of when you were their age. Tell them this! However, be mindful not to frame it as a guilt trip — but rather as your own story.

For instance, instead of saying something like, “When I was your age, I would have thought I’d died and gone to heaven if my mom took me anywhere outside the county,” reminisce with your kids about the special little events from your childhood that felt like a really big deal to you. Don’t deliver the story like a morality lecture, but don’t shy away from the bits that highlight your relative lack of privilege either. Just share pieces of yourself with your children, and trust them to fit the puzzle together.

Remain vocally in awe of your good fortune even now. Your kids will pick up on this thanks-centered worldview and adopt it themselves.

Another way to instill gratitude is to create regular opportunities for giving thanks. Encourage them to write thank-you cards, initiate “one thing you’re grateful for” round robins every holiday, family meeting, and long car ride, and introduce them to the idea of gratitude journaling or a gratitude jar. The more often you do it, the more regularly they’ll reflect on the good in their lives.

Creating opportunities for your children to give back is another way to guide them away from entitlement issues. Generosity is a habit; get them hooked on it by embedding it into their lives. Give often and regularly, and bring them with you.

Find a local charity that allows children to volunteer and get the whole family involved. Explain to them why it’s important to give not only money, but also time. Give them perspective and help them understand that what they take for granted could be the dream of someone else dealt a different hand in life.

Meet your children halfway

But as you mentioned at the end of your letter, your path forward isn’t only about improving your children’s relationship with their privilege; it’ll also require that you address your hang-ups around your improved financial status.

Growing up in a vastly different financial status than you achieve in adulthood can be difficult to adjust to. I know you’re happy to be able to give your kids the financial security you never had, but I wonder if on some level you are viewing your children’s cushy circumstances through the envious eyes of your inner child: Must be nice. Meanwhile, your inner child, eager to make up for past deprivation. may also be the one creating that cushy life for your kids.

As I mentioned above, all of this is normal. Any comparison-driven resentment you may feel or desire to make up for your own childhood through your kids is a natural human instinct, and you’re not a bad person for having these feelings. You’re simply human.

That said, I know you don’t want to feel resentment toward your kids, even subconsciously, which is why I think the first thing you need to do is recognize where you are viewing things from the perspective of your inner child, so that you can step away from it and step into the perspective of your children. Journaling, setting aside a block of time for reflection, or even investing in a few financial therapy sessions could all be part of your path toward healing your inner child’s experience as you come to terms with how different the life you’ve created for your children is.

If, upon further reflection, you realize there are ways you’ve started to approach money with a new mindset that don’t align with your values, then it may be worth considering whether you want to make some financial changes. For example, maybe you feel you’ve started throwing money at problems your kids encounter rather than sitting down and working through them together, or you’ve gotten into a habit of buying them whatever they ask for without conversations about the value of what’s being purchased and whether it’s necessary.

However, if you are simply worried about the potential impacts of privilege on your children and feel aligned with the lifestyle you’re providing for them, you don’t need to deny your children nice things just to prove a point.

Trust in your abilities as a parent; after all, you said yourself that your children aren’t spoiled brats, and that’s no small feat. And don’t forget that the luckiest thing about your children’s lives is that they have you — a parent who wanted to give them everything, and so you did.

Rooting for all of you,

For Love & Money

A version of this article was originally published in January 2022.

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