Michaelbox

 

This post has been stew­ing for just about three weeks now, and I real­ize that if I’m ever going to post it, it needs to be now. Out of respect to those involved, I will not list names or the offi­cial com­pany name. From here on out, the com­pany will be called “dayjob”.

On March 3rd, 2011, my time at dayjob came to an unex­pected end. Rea­son given was stated as being a busi­ness deci­sion, noth­ing per­sonal, and a hard deci­sion at that. No mat­ter how my mind may try to rea­son for my depar­ture, and what rea­sons bol­stered the deci­sion, I am believ­ing that it was busi­ness only.

I was three days shy of my seven month anniver­sary, and after I was noti­fied that morn­ing, I was very ner­vous about my imme­di­ate future. I know that I did not want to revert back to my pre­vi­ous job state where I was work­ing 40hrs/week in a com­pletely unre­lated field. I have had my foot in the field for seven months and I’d really like to stay there.

My time at dayjob helped me real­ize what truly inter­ested me in the area of web cre­ation, and, look­ing for­ward, I will be able to weed out com­pa­nies that do not hire for my skills or inter­ests. Front-end web devel­op­ment, Word­Press, mod­ern html/css tech­niques, the seman­tic web, API inter­ac­tion, and cre­at­ing tools for oth­ers to use are a lot of areas I want to explore with my time.

While I do have a degree in Graphic Design, it is not an area I want to attempt mas­ter­ing, and will fall back to mostly hobby. I will never be able to shake my love for good vec­tor art <3. These realizations are a huge step forward regarding job search as I can focus directly and not try applying for such a wide spectrum of specialities. That is how I approached job hunting my first 3.5 years in Sioux Falls.

First task I did once I returned home on March 3rd was locate my resume and get it updated. It def­i­nitely felt good remov­ing expe­ri­ence list­ings dat­ing back to 2007, when I was still in col­lege. Given the direc­tion and nature of web devel­op­ment, I felt that sim­ply a pdf/doc resume was not enough in 2011. I am not exclud­ing a print­able resume, but an online ver­sion, I feel, helps to show what I can do as well, through the resume itself. That said, I refash­ioned my [link id=‘109’] page. While visu­ally, it’s notably less than what I orig­i­nally envi­sioned in my head, I find the sim­plic­ity more appeal­ing. I was also able to con­trol the markup and pro­vide seman­tic mean­ing for the var­i­ous parts using hcard, hre­sume, and hcal­en­dar microformats.

After revis­ing my resume, I did what any web cre­ator in 2011 does, I went to social net­works. I informed peo­ple, that I trust, about what had hap­pened, and kindly asked them to keep an eye out for any oppor­tu­ni­ties that they could refer me to. Free­lanc­ing as a pri­mary source of income was also imme­di­ately con­sid­ered, until I could find another job locally. Tweet­ing about my sud­den avail­abil­ity was done, and thank­fully some peo­ple con­tacted me pretty quickly regard­ing pos­si­ble work. One hasn’t had any work yet that they’d be able hand off to me, but they know my rates and have me down as avail­able. Hope­fully there will be some­thing soon. Miss Loren Depalma saw a tweet from Miss Grace Smith and Loren con­tacted me over Face­book about help­ing her with some func­tion­al­ity for an art gallery she was putting up at lorendepalma.me. I am proud to say that the site turned out very well and a work­ing busi­ness rela­tion­ship has formed between Loren and I. I look for­ward to work­ing with her more in the future.

I know that I am thank­ful for every­one who has con­tacted me about work, both men­tioned above and some not men­tioned. I am eter­nally thank­ful to them for bring­ing me in and I hope I am pro­duc­ing a qual­ity even higher than they hoped for or expected . I was extremely touched by everyone’s gen­eros­ity, espe­cially with most of this hap­pen­ing the same day.

Dayjob did pro­vide a sev­er­ance check to me, and that, plus the reg­u­lar pay­check I had just received, has cov­ered most of the monthly expenses for March. Thanks to that cov­er­age, most free­lance income earned dur­ing the rest of March is going to be used to pay my mid-April bills. It’s a rare moment when I am able to work ahead like that. Fru­gal liv­ing is also a method I am try­ing my best at to keep expenses low, though cof­fee is still a hard item to avoid splurg­ing on.

I am still wor­ried and ner­vous about what lies ahead finan­cially, and I fear that I won’t be able to find enough reg­u­lar work to sus­tain monthly bills. How­ever, I have finally increased my quoted hourly rate, which has been noto­ri­ously low at around $15/hr or below. I also hon­estly wouldn’t argue too much with the idea of a part-time only unre­lated job to help cover most bills, and in my time away from that, focus on web devel­op­ment. That way, I still have most of my time for doing what I enjoy, as well as time for per­sonal projects that I have going.

To wrap up this long update, I am for­ever thank­ful for what dayjob pro­vided me, as it got me much needed on the job expe­ri­ence and got me away from being a secu­rity offi­cer, which was not doing very well for per­sonal morale. I really don’t know what my imme­di­ate future holds or where my feet will take me, but it is at least a lit­tle excit­ing to see where it will lead. I may actu­ally find this to be a great oppor­tu­nity to get away from always doing agency style work, and find oppor­tu­ni­ties for unique ventures.

My name is Michael Beck­with, and I make things for the inter­net. What can I help you with?