Online educator [Dream Jobs » 2013 - Software]

In late August 2010, Marcia Lee, newly graduated from Stanford with a master's degree in computer science, packed her car and drove north from Silicon Valley for what she thought would be a fantastic job at Microsoft and an awesome apartment in Seattle. She turned out to be right about the digs but wrong about the work. So after just five months, Lee quit Microsoft and headed back to Silicon Valley. The apartment she settled into there was nothing special, but the new job she found, at the Khan Academy, sang to her heart. The Khan Academy educates millions of people online, and for free, thanks in no small measure to Lee's software. That code allows both students and teachers (or coaches, as the Khan Academy calls them) to navigate and interact with the site. Lee loves using her technical skills to help people. But she had to spend time at Microsoft before she grasped how much the human part meant to her.