Peculiar Monster

Jobs. Jobs are good.

As of July 1 of this year, I was laid off from my job as a junior web developer. The details don’t matter, it essentially boiled down to: I was a bad fit for the job and the job was a bad fit for me and we tried to make it work and couldn’t.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past couple of weeks and I’ve decided that I don’t want to continue in web development. I prefer to code and do stuff to my website as a hobby and I just don’t want to do it for work. See? Not a good fit.

Consequently, I’m looking at getting back into my previous field where I have 18 years of experience at a company that was pretty large but is smaller now. Okay, 2 of those years were with a spin-off company, but it was the same kind of work.

At a very high level, what I did was help to manage budgets. Very large budgets. The smallest was $45 million and the largest was $500 million.

And more than the size factor, I was really good at it. I tracked forecasted vs actual vs budgeted spending on a line item basis, calculated variances, found discrepancies, and made sure everything balanced to the last penny. And then I made graphs to present to management about those budgets. I loved what I did.

My problem? I don’t have a degree in accounting, finance, or business. I was an English major. Trying to get my foot back in the door is going to be a challenge, especially in this job market.

Especially since I have very specific company size and culture requirements. I need to be at a company of at least 200 people, ideally more. I need a culture which is collaborative and where it’s recognized that everyone is working toward the same goal. I also would like to work somewhere with a strong culture of mentorship for new hires, regardless of their level of outside experience. I’d like to avoid useless meetings, but I know that’s pie in the sky.

I also require ADA accommodations, especially since they were explicitly denied me at my last role in budget management.

As much as I would like to take an extended break, it simply isn’t financially possible.

I am so grateful that we had Frances Perkins as the Secretary of Labor in the 1930’s and 40’s, because without her, there would be no unemployment insurance. I received a letter from Delaware’s Department of Labor today letting me know that I qualify for unemployment and what a relief that was.

If you have any leads, please reach out to me on Bluesky.

Or if you’d like to help out a little bit, I’ve added a Ko-Fi button to the pages here.

And if you can’t do either of those things, I hope I can include you as part of my silent cheering section. 💖