I found out my dad has been paying my boss a secret monthly "stipend" to keep me employed at my dream tech startup
I am still processing this and my hands are literally shaking as I type. I am a 25F systems engineer, and for the past fourteen months, I thought I was finally winning at life. I landed a role at a highly competitive infrastructure startup, survived three brutal rounds of layoffs that gutted half the staff, and was regularly given complex automation tasks. I had massive imposter syndrome at first, but my confidence soared because I genuinely believed my hard work was the only reason I was still there.
My dad has always been incredibly protective of me, sometimes to an suffocating degree. Three years ago, when I was at my first junior dev job, I went through a severe burnout episode followed by a deep clinical depression. I could barely get out of bed, and my dad had to watch me completely fall apart. When I finally recovered and started job hunting again, he kept telling me that he would "make sure I was taken sure of" and that I would never have to experience that kind of workplace trauma again. I thought he just meant he was being emotionally supportive.
Yesterday, my dad asked me to help him migrate his old emails and financial spreadsheets to a new cloud drive because his laptop is dying. While I was organizing his local folders, I stumbled upon a PDF labeled with the name of my startup's CEO. I shouldn't have looked, but curiosity got the better of me. It was a formal, notarized private agreement between my dad and my boss.
My dad has been wire transferring $3,500 to my CEO's personal account on the first of every single month.
According to the documents and the email thread attached to it, my dad set this up right after my final interview. The startup was actually leaning toward another candidate, so my dad stepped in. He is essentially subsidizing more than half of my salary out of his own retirement savings. The agreement explicitly states that the company must keep me employed, give me positive performance reviews, and assign me projects that "foster a low stress, high validation environment." My boss literally sold my role to my father. Every single piece of praise I received, every time my team lead told me I did an amazing job during a sprint, and the fact that I survived the layoffs it was all fake. It was a paid performance.
I confronted my dad last night. He immediately broke down in tears, trying to hug me and saying he only did it to protect my mental health. He said he couldn't bear to see me hit rock bottom again, and that the tech industry is too cruel for someone as sensitive as me. He told me he has enough saved to keep paying them for another two years.
I feel utterly sick to my stomach. I feel humiliated, hollow, and completely stripped of my professional dignity. I look at my git commits and I don't even know if my code is actually good or if my team just merges it because they are ordered to keep the investor's kid happy, except I'm not an investor's kid, I'm just a fraud whose dad bought her a career.
I haven't logged into Slack today. I don't think I can ever look my coworkers or my boss in the eye again, but I'm also terrified of quitting because it means admitting that I can't survive on my own. I haven't told my dad what my next move is, but everything feels completely ruined.