Cheese Rice Got Me Fired

I looked at his self-satisfied face, slightly sagging from years behind a desk.

And suddenly, everything became clear.

All those moments when I used to tell myself, he’s a business guy, he doesn’t get it—they flashed through my mind like a fast-forward reel.

This wasn’t the first time.

When Vivian had just joined, the company was preparing for the Annual Tech Summit.

David asked me to handle the content and Vivian to handle the presentation format.

I led my team to compile all the year’s major technical breakthroughs and architecture optimizations into detailed documentation and slides.

Vivian, meanwhile, decorated the entire venue like a hip coffee shop and designed a bunch of party games.

At the final prep meeting, David slammed my slides on the table and barked,

“Sophie! Your slides are crammed with code and charts—who’s going to enjoy that?”

“Learn from Vivian—make everyone feel the magic of technology in a light and fun atmosphere!”

He publicly praised Vivian for being “creative” and “great at engagement,” while ignoring my team’s painstakingly prepared technical work.

In the end, he ordered me to turn the summit into a “Tech Carnival.”

Content was secondary—what mattered was that it looked lively.

I told him that would turn a serious technical exchange into a shallow sideshow.

He accused me of being rigid, inflexible, full of “engineer arrogance.”

So I gave in.

I spent two more days repackaging all my hard work into a hollow, flashy shell.

Naturally, the event was declared a “great success,” because the photos looked good and got plenty of likes on LinkedIn.

At the end of the summit, David made sure to call Vivian up on stage in front of everyone and said,

“This event’s success owes everything to Vivian’s creativity. She made our tech go viral.”

Another time, the company needed a fundamental system overhaul to prepare for three years of projected growth.

I started technical research six months in advance, wrote a report and implementation plan tens of thousands of words long—

from server selection to data migration, every step tested and risk-proofed.

I submitted the plan, and David sat on it for a month without approval.

When I asked him, he sounded impatient.

“Sophie, this plan is full of jargon.”

“And the investment is huge, the risk even bigger. What if it fails? The current system still works, doesn’t it?”

“Can’t you make something that I—and the marketing team—can understand?”

In that moment, I just felt utterly exhausted.

I built systems with professionalism, with logic, with respect for technology—

not to write a PR brochure that makes non-technical people nod in approval.

I wasn’t incapable of such tricks. I just refused to stoop to them.

I used to believe that in a tech company, technical strength was the ultimate foundation.

Now I realized I had been wrong.

In David’s world, technical strength was only the bare minimum—expected, taken for granted.

What really earned you points were the things that let him boast at conferences and on LinkedIn: “vibes,” “user experience.”

He didn’t want a precision instrument quietly solving core problems.

He wanted a flashy speaker system playing background music.

The company’s technical framework was now stable, the core business running smoothly—