fixing things and not winning gold
This week we had Wednesday off. February 28 is a holiday in Taiwan to remember the massacre of thousands of civilians by the Chinese nationalist authorities who went on to rule the country as a military dictatorship for 40 years. Awkwardly, that very same political party continues to be one of the two major players in Taiwanese politics today, and the only one that the government of China is willing to deal with. It's a weird situation.
Coming in the middle of the week, i couldn't do much with the day. Even more because this week has been bitterly cold by Taiwan standards. Any time the mercury drops below 15 degrees it's a cold weather warning here, and rightfully so. Anything below 20 is miserable, especially if it's coupled with the usual clouds and drizzle that seem to permanently blanket Taipei. The rest of the island is sunny because of course it is. Who builds their fucking capital in a rain bucket, seriously?
Anyway, so i stayed home. I was going to do some work on my employment gold card application (more on that in a bit), but then i got sidetracked fixing some open source software.
I don't much like doing computer programming in my free time, because i do it all day for work. It's exhausting. Unlike a lot of "makers", i'm also not driven to build things. Even in my job i roll my eyes any time product management comes along and asks me to build something new. It's so fucking tedious to me. It doesn't inspire me. It doesn't excite me. But you know what i do love to do? Take a tangled mess of legacy code that isn't working very well and fix it up. I like fixing things, i don't like building things.
I got to fix something a couple weeks ago. Or try to, at least. Someone posted on an internal forum if anyone knew anything about Java. I have almost 20 years experience in the technology, so i answered, and was presented with a teetering stack of enterprise integrations bodged together from random 10-year-old bits of unmaintained code that stopped working after a recent upgrade of some downstream service. Because it wasn't work for my own Business Unit, i wasn't officially supposed to spend time on it, but i put in a couple hours just for the fun of getting back into a technology in which i am expert level, and to deal with the kind of spaghetti junction that no "cool" developer ever wants to touch.
There's no glory in getting something old and shitty kinda-sorta working again. Being an ace detective is not going to get you a bonus or a promotion in the tech industry. The people who get recognition are the ones who exhibit a "growth mindset" by constantly coming up with new products and features. So if you ever wondered why software sucks so much, this is why. The incentives are not there to maintain it, only to keep adding more useless shit.
So, i fixed the thing, or at least came up with a least-awful way to get around the problem, and then i went back to my normal job. Perhaps that inspired me on Wednesday to revisit a long-broken plugin for a tool that i actually use every day at work, but never have time to fix because tech companies don't pay you to fix your tools, they pay you to build new stuff with them. I ended up noodling around late into the night, trying to find a solution for the very annoying 18-month-old bug which always leaves the cursor one to the left of where it's supposed to be. I didn't fix it, but i at least found the cause of it, and was able to come up with a very janky workaround that introduces a bit of lag... It remains to be seen if the lag is worse than the imprecision.
I fired off a new release of the plugin, leaving comments to perhaps help me (or others) get closer to finding a proper fix... This time hopefully not after another 18 month gap.
And i thought to myself, well, yeah, this is what i would actually do if i wasn't employed to be a software developer. I would patch software.
I try to use open source software wherever possible, because i believe that open source is better than proprietary software. And the reason it's better is exactly because users of the software have the opportunity to fix it, when they encounter a bug. That was the impetus behind the open source movement. It's related to the hacker ideal that information wants to be free. Copyright is stupid. Intellectual property is not a thing. Fuck paywalls. Fuck gated communities. The whole promise of the world wide web was that you could click "view source" and see exactly how a web page was made, customize it with your own style sheets, modify it, get inspired and build your own version. You didn't even need to be a nerd to tinker, because HTML was pleasingly accessible. Apps killed that accessibility, but at least for some things you can still choose to use open source.
That's the corner of the tech industry i still care about, and i would still be a part of, if it wasn't my job. Fixing little things that bother me and sharing those fixes back to the community. I have to ask myself... am i really contributing more to society working 45 hours a week in a corporate job than i would be if i had that time to myself, to work on open source, pottering around for the public good?
Which brings me back to the gold card situation. Before the New Year, my application was returned asking for more information about my income level. I sent my 2022 tax statement, which only had 3 months and 3 weeks of work on it. Last week that was returned to me saying that dividing my total income across 4 months did not meet the income threshold for the employment gold card. On one hand, this is because i had to start work a week later than expected due to COVID quarantine and immigration processing delay, but looking at how they calculated it, i realize that even if they only divided the total income across the full 3 months it would be something like $50 short of the threshold to meet the gold card requirements. This is exactly what i feared, and i don't know if i can wangle it such that my tax-exempt "meal allowance" of $75 per month would put me over the threshold. So i procrastinated on Wednesday, not doing anything.
The thing is, i need to send my application back explaining several points.
1. I did not work a full month in August 2022, so please do not consider that as representative of my normal monthly income.
2. From September 2022 though November 2022, you can see that - if you include the "meal allowance" - my gross income met the threshold.
3. For the entire subsequent year of 2023 i continued to be employed at that same income level, which can be seen from my pay stubs.
4. I know pay stubs don't count as proof and only tax statements count as proof, but my 2023 tax return has not arrived yet.
5. By the way i also have a Canadian tax return from 2021 which shows i met the threshold, but not if you divide across all 12 months because i only worked January through July.
And all of this is a real stretch. It's basically asking them to "just trust me bro", and probably not follow the letter of the law - which requires tax returns plugged into a simple "divide by 12" formula - but the spirit of the law. It's tremendously frustrating because i know that people who are far less skilled than me can easily pass the income threshold because they live in a rich country, or conveniently happened to work a full year and not take a sabbatical in the middle of the tax period, or they pay sweatshop workers to churn out a bunch of fake academic papers in their name so that they can show evidence they are "foreign experts". (That sounds ridiculous, but some friends of my colleagues have done exactly this to get their "skilled migrant" visas, and working in the anti-abuse space part of my current job is actually catching the kinds of people who engage in this sort of shady dealing, and i can assure it is a lot more than you would hope.)
But this shit... this is the shit i have to eat as an immigrant. If i never qualify for the gold card, that means i have to stay on for 5 years working full-time to become eligible for permanent residence, and the freedom to NOT work for a while, to instead do something that actually contributes to society. And the level of permanent residence i would get after 5 years of normal white collar work is not the same level of permanent residence i would get after 3 years of gold card "work as much as you want for whoever you like" work, because permanent residence in Taiwan in granted in tiers, and the base white collar tier gives you a version of "permanent" residence that can be canceled if you leave the country for more than 6 months in a calendar year, so no more sabbaticals for me.
I knew all of this going in, of course. I knew it was a long shot. And now, instead of typing up my closing arguments, which are likely to usher in a sad ending, i am typing a journal entry. Sigh. Why is it so cold outside? Why can't i just not work, just for a bit? Why not let me just fix stuff?
Sigh.
Coming in the middle of the week, i couldn't do much with the day. Even more because this week has been bitterly cold by Taiwan standards. Any time the mercury drops below 15 degrees it's a cold weather warning here, and rightfully so. Anything below 20 is miserable, especially if it's coupled with the usual clouds and drizzle that seem to permanently blanket Taipei. The rest of the island is sunny because of course it is. Who builds their fucking capital in a rain bucket, seriously?
Anyway, so i stayed home. I was going to do some work on my employment gold card application (more on that in a bit), but then i got sidetracked fixing some open source software.
I don't much like doing computer programming in my free time, because i do it all day for work. It's exhausting. Unlike a lot of "makers", i'm also not driven to build things. Even in my job i roll my eyes any time product management comes along and asks me to build something new. It's so fucking tedious to me. It doesn't inspire me. It doesn't excite me. But you know what i do love to do? Take a tangled mess of legacy code that isn't working very well and fix it up. I like fixing things, i don't like building things.
I got to fix something a couple weeks ago. Or try to, at least. Someone posted on an internal forum if anyone knew anything about Java. I have almost 20 years experience in the technology, so i answered, and was presented with a teetering stack of enterprise integrations bodged together from random 10-year-old bits of unmaintained code that stopped working after a recent upgrade of some downstream service. Because it wasn't work for my own Business Unit, i wasn't officially supposed to spend time on it, but i put in a couple hours just for the fun of getting back into a technology in which i am expert level, and to deal with the kind of spaghetti junction that no "cool" developer ever wants to touch.
There's no glory in getting something old and shitty kinda-sorta working again. Being an ace detective is not going to get you a bonus or a promotion in the tech industry. The people who get recognition are the ones who exhibit a "growth mindset" by constantly coming up with new products and features. So if you ever wondered why software sucks so much, this is why. The incentives are not there to maintain it, only to keep adding more useless shit.
So, i fixed the thing, or at least came up with a least-awful way to get around the problem, and then i went back to my normal job. Perhaps that inspired me on Wednesday to revisit a long-broken plugin for a tool that i actually use every day at work, but never have time to fix because tech companies don't pay you to fix your tools, they pay you to build new stuff with them. I ended up noodling around late into the night, trying to find a solution for the very annoying 18-month-old bug which always leaves the cursor one to the left of where it's supposed to be. I didn't fix it, but i at least found the cause of it, and was able to come up with a very janky workaround that introduces a bit of lag... It remains to be seen if the lag is worse than the imprecision.
I fired off a new release of the plugin, leaving comments to perhaps help me (or others) get closer to finding a proper fix... This time hopefully not after another 18 month gap.
And i thought to myself, well, yeah, this is what i would actually do if i wasn't employed to be a software developer. I would patch software.
I try to use open source software wherever possible, because i believe that open source is better than proprietary software. And the reason it's better is exactly because users of the software have the opportunity to fix it, when they encounter a bug. That was the impetus behind the open source movement. It's related to the hacker ideal that information wants to be free. Copyright is stupid. Intellectual property is not a thing. Fuck paywalls. Fuck gated communities. The whole promise of the world wide web was that you could click "view source" and see exactly how a web page was made, customize it with your own style sheets, modify it, get inspired and build your own version. You didn't even need to be a nerd to tinker, because HTML was pleasingly accessible. Apps killed that accessibility, but at least for some things you can still choose to use open source.
That's the corner of the tech industry i still care about, and i would still be a part of, if it wasn't my job. Fixing little things that bother me and sharing those fixes back to the community. I have to ask myself... am i really contributing more to society working 45 hours a week in a corporate job than i would be if i had that time to myself, to work on open source, pottering around for the public good?
Which brings me back to the gold card situation. Before the New Year, my application was returned asking for more information about my income level. I sent my 2022 tax statement, which only had 3 months and 3 weeks of work on it. Last week that was returned to me saying that dividing my total income across 4 months did not meet the income threshold for the employment gold card. On one hand, this is because i had to start work a week later than expected due to COVID quarantine and immigration processing delay, but looking at how they calculated it, i realize that even if they only divided the total income across the full 3 months it would be something like $50 short of the threshold to meet the gold card requirements. This is exactly what i feared, and i don't know if i can wangle it such that my tax-exempt "meal allowance" of $75 per month would put me over the threshold. So i procrastinated on Wednesday, not doing anything.
The thing is, i need to send my application back explaining several points.
1. I did not work a full month in August 2022, so please do not consider that as representative of my normal monthly income.
2. From September 2022 though November 2022, you can see that - if you include the "meal allowance" - my gross income met the threshold.
3. For the entire subsequent year of 2023 i continued to be employed at that same income level, which can be seen from my pay stubs.
4. I know pay stubs don't count as proof and only tax statements count as proof, but my 2023 tax return has not arrived yet.
5. By the way i also have a Canadian tax return from 2021 which shows i met the threshold, but not if you divide across all 12 months because i only worked January through July.
And all of this is a real stretch. It's basically asking them to "just trust me bro", and probably not follow the letter of the law - which requires tax returns plugged into a simple "divide by 12" formula - but the spirit of the law. It's tremendously frustrating because i know that people who are far less skilled than me can easily pass the income threshold because they live in a rich country, or conveniently happened to work a full year and not take a sabbatical in the middle of the tax period, or they pay sweatshop workers to churn out a bunch of fake academic papers in their name so that they can show evidence they are "foreign experts". (That sounds ridiculous, but some friends of my colleagues have done exactly this to get their "skilled migrant" visas, and working in the anti-abuse space part of my current job is actually catching the kinds of people who engage in this sort of shady dealing, and i can assure it is a lot more than you would hope.)
But this shit... this is the shit i have to eat as an immigrant. If i never qualify for the gold card, that means i have to stay on for 5 years working full-time to become eligible for permanent residence, and the freedom to NOT work for a while, to instead do something that actually contributes to society. And the level of permanent residence i would get after 5 years of normal white collar work is not the same level of permanent residence i would get after 3 years of gold card "work as much as you want for whoever you like" work, because permanent residence in Taiwan in granted in tiers, and the base white collar tier gives you a version of "permanent" residence that can be canceled if you leave the country for more than 6 months in a calendar year, so no more sabbaticals for me.
I knew all of this going in, of course. I knew it was a long shot. And now, instead of typing up my closing arguments, which are likely to usher in a sad ending, i am typing a journal entry. Sigh. Why is it so cold outside? Why can't i just not work, just for a bit? Why not let me just fix stuff?
Sigh.