Howdy!

I hate to use this card, but I'm autistic and I'm struggling to think of what kinds of jobs I could apply for. So far all the jobs I've had have just kind of fallen into my lap before I knew I even needed the job.

For the past several years I've been doing freelance carpentry, remodeling, and general handyman stuff. Work was booming for a while, but died out when lumber prices skyrocketed. I haven't had any jobs in months except for little oddball stuff family has me do out of pity (installing a door 2 weeks ago is the highlight of the entire winter season). I really need to find a job if I don't want to end up homeless, but I don't want to "just get a job" and be a mindless laborer.

Before the carpentry stuff, I was a project manager, 3D CAD guy, and SysAdmin at a small industrial metal fabrication shop. I handled over $1M in (gross) sales one year, and I handled the company's 2 highest-sales customers. I was single-handedly responsible for making the company compliant with legal regulations: I wrote the employee handbook, created the SDS books, arranged for annual maintenance on fire extinguishers, etc. I also standardized the company's aesthetic, color palette, document templates, fonts, and all sorts of other "public image" type stuff. I developed an application (in Excel) to estimate the prices of jobs, and they still use it today to price every job. I also re-designed the entire manufacturing process for a particular JIT machine for the automotive industry and cut the time-to-manufacture down by over 50%.

I'm into tech as a hobby, and I've been going to school for InfoSec just for the free financial aid money (because I need money since I'm out of work). I just generally like to tinker and hack on things. I've been into Linux since my early teens, and I've recently gotten into Emacs. I've been script-kiddying with programming since my early teens too, but in the past year or so I've been putting a lot of effort into learning more in the way of programming my own stuff. I've been learning C and Emacs Lisp, and in school I'm taking a python class. I also started building a data center in my bedroom (only 1 rack server so far). Sometime soon I plan on learning more about microelectronics and hardware programming.

I don't have any certifications or degrees. I have massive gaps in employment because I've tried to do so many things on my own.

Does anyone have an idea of a job that would be a good fit for me? I really like to hack, tinker, and take on projects that require me to think a lot and come up with creative solutions. I'm not so good at grinding out tasks that just need to be done. I tend to try to find ways to avoid doing a lot of repetitive nonsense work, which means I usually try to find ways to automate it or negate the need for it. That's what caused so much stress at my project manager job. They expected me to "just get the work done", instead of working on ways to make the work unnecessary. I want to improve things, not just keep mindlessly churning stuff out.