Personal Mental Potpourri
I have questions. Do you have answers?
Most of my Substack readers found their way here through Twitter, which brought me access to an incredible group of good people, and this despite being a demonic hellpit truly worthy of the appellation, “the demon bird app.” The wisdom of the crowd, especially when your crowd had a lot of wisdom to share, is the one and only thing that I miss about Twitter.
Here are the questions on my mind today. I am hoping some of you have answers. I turned on the comments for paid subscribers, but you can also reply to the email that landed this in your inbox, or just email me directly at hollymathnerd at gmail dot com. Thank you in advance!
If you can’t afford a paid subscription, just email me. I have too many hate followers to turn them on for everyone, sorry.
Looking for a New Job: Several Issues
I’m looking for a new job. Nothing is terribly wrong at my present one—boss is very happy with my work, etc.—but I am seeing troubling signs, like not even considering Americans for our present openings. A perusal of glassdoor and other salary information sites also tells me I am underpaid, and every smart person I know who is older than I am, when I talked to them about it, told me that the only way to get a real raise is to change jobs. (Not that money is everything—it is not my primary motivation, by any means—but I’d like to buy a house eventually and that’s not going to happen in New England unless I change jobs or the housing market crashes.)
The first issue is that I need to be fully remote. I could handle occasional travel (as long as I had a reasonable amount of time to prepare for it) but I could not handle being in an office. My PTSD is under excellent control in large part because I have full control over my environment. I have full cognitive energy available for work because I don’t have to spend any of it monitoring, managing, or controlling my mental and physiological responses to anxiety triggers. This also benefits my employer; when I have a good idea, I sit down and work on it, including during the middle of the night or on weekends.
The second issue is that I need really, really good health insurance. Hearing aids and therapy are expensive. And while they don’t prevent me from working, I do have some issues, consequences from my childhood, that require medical monitoring. So a small start-up that can only afford to offer one of those high-deductible, catastrophic-coverage-only plans is not going to work for me (though I truly wish it could; I think that working in a start-up would be amazing.)
The third issue is that lots of companies seem to want 3 years of experience; I have about half of that. But I can produce really excellent references from co-workers, a former boss will sing my praises, and I am fully confident in my ability to do well in a statistical theory interview, produce a coding sample, etc.
The fourth and final issue is that I am not and will never be on linkedin, facebook, etc. Since leaving Twitter, I have no social media at all. I wouldn’t blame a company who thought I was lying about that, but I’m not.
If any of you have any leads, suggestions, insights on searching, etc., I’m all ears. Interested in data science, data analytics, and all other possible uses of those skill sets. Good at statistical modeling, hypothesis testing, both frequentist and Bayesian statistical reasoning processes, Python and R (and getting better all the time; just finished a data visualization course and really leveled up my skills there), learning SQL; working knowledge of Tableau, Excel, PowerBI, and the rest of the usual range of tools in these domains, though I’m much better at coding than using those and will always move things to R or Python as quickly as possible. :-)
Where I am, not to be immodest, really a star is this: I am extremely good at helping normies understand math. If you need a client to really understand the reasoning for something you are recommending that they do, and you are in despair at how to take your master’s level statistical insight and 800 lines of code and turn it into a story that a sociology major with an MBA can not just understand, but will get excited about, you really need me. Somewhere between teaching myself high school math in a summer and tutoring calculus, I got just amazingly good at that.
Looking for a Reasonable Media Source
There are a lot of issues that I follow on right wing media because left wing media simply ignores them. But that doesn’t mean that I find right wing media fully trustworthy.
For example, there is now a legal attempt to go after access to PreP (the medication that gay men take to avoid HIV infection)—but I’m only finding coverage of this in far left sources. There might be a kernel of truth to the OMG THE CHRISTIANS WANT TO MURDER THE GAYS breathlessness of the coverage (I grew up in the rural South and heard several “yes, absolutely, the death penalty is appropriate for sodomy” sermons), but the asymmetry exists in that the far right’s extremists have minimal cultural power. The far left’s extremists have a lot. So I’d like to read about this (and other issues) from a source that is not on the far left.
If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.
Looking for Insight on Surviving a Really Bad Economy
Were you an adult during the Carter administration? I keep seeing comparisons between the Biden economy and the Carter one. How did you get through it? What do you think is happening? What would you do, starting today, to prepare if you had to?
Looking for Things to Write About
Not being on Twitter has meant finding myself emotionally activated by the news far less often. While this is a good thing, it has also meant that I have just one or two half-written posts in my Substack drafts at a time, instead of the Twitter-level eight or nine. So if there’s a story you think would make for an interesting post, please suggest it!
See you in the (open, for now) comment section! Thank you all, so very much.
Reminder: birthday sale!
The birthday sale is ongoing but almost over — 10% off (forever) on an annual subscription if you use this link before Monday, July 18.
I would strongly suggest getting up on LinkedIn. I am on no other social media and I only use LI for work purposes. I have never posted there nor do I read that cringe. I have gotten so much work coming to me via this resource. I don't see LI as social media, just part of my online professional presence along with my design portfolio.
Hi Holly! Don't necessarily dismiss a high deductible plan for the right job--if the firm generously contributes to the associated HSA the numbers on them can actually crunch pretty well. They tend to work best for people who a) have very few health expenses or (and ironically) b) people who have a lot of expenses and consistently hit their annual out-of-pocket amount. You get the benefits of the insurance-negotiated underlying rate (you aren't paying walk-up) and one nice thing is you don't need referrals from a primary care physician for specialists.