Zodiac Killer

I've come to realise that for me to “return” to the factory, I would have to get over 3 obstacles. The first obstacle shouldn't really be an obstacle, but it is. It's having my head in the right place again to try finding myself a job. I really should only have been unemployed for half a year, 1 year. They took me back, and only now, looking back on it, do I see that circumstances were favourable. They were in the middle of doing a project that would need a person of exactly the skill set that I possessed. I was a very qualified candidate.

The second obstacle would be for me to complete that project and convert myself to permanent status. I would have to undo the years of neglect and damage I did to my career and psyche in order to get myself back on track. And in some other way I was lucky. I had supportive people around me. I didn't have people who fit me to a “T”. I would never have jobs that were as easy as my first stint at the factory, or my first few years at Mexico. Some years were just important: years that ended with a “2” were important to me, one was the official start of my adolescence, one was the official start of my work life, one was the year I would make that transition from Singapore to "Mexico", and 2022 would be the year where I would make the transition to the permanent job.

I saw this parallel with when I landed in "Mexico": I would have to get admitted to uni, get that degree, then I would have to get that job. But after getting the permanent job, I did not go one further and seal the deal. This last thing I had to do was to make that transition from surviving to thriving. To take it up one level. And that is the challenge that faces me now. 

I was talking with a guy who was there during my first stint. He finally figured out where he had seen me before. He did mention that an old colleague, a PhD from China, was still going on and on about “trying to improve xxx process”. It reminded me of Captain Ahab who spent his life obsessed with white whale. 

I told him I also did optimisation too but eventually I gave it up. You can't waste too much of your life on doing just one thing. I had a comfortable life, and I could have ended up having that comfortable life for years, but I gave it up - at least I wanted to explore the wider world for a time before I went back. 

And that's the one thing that returning to work has taught me. Are you content doing that one thing over and over again? Are you content to just learn whatever you need to learn to do that one task, and then just try to make a living trying and failing to do just that? Because that was what I thought I could do, what I thought I could get away with. My first job was just like being that guy in Moby Dick – I would go after squeezing out a bit of improvement in operational efficiency. It was hard to peer through all the complexity and make a head or tail about what was going on.

Then I got started on my software engineering job, and I was handed a task that was supposedly hard to do. First, I worked mostly with my team lead, who was more than happy to have me on, because being a team lead of one more guy made him feel a little more important. Then the team lead left, and I reported directly to the boss, who was the founder, owner and also paymaster. And he found out that I was going round and round in circles and going through the motions. That probably didn't help me much. The truth is that we're past the point where software engineers are so scarce that any little expertise they could offer was treasured. We're into the phase where anybody who's not a rock star is weeded out.

I'm just very lucky to have worked in IT and tech in the go-go days, when having a bit of talent would just allow you to coast through life. I've been very lucky for the first 40 years of my life, and there's quite a bit of trepidation about what the next 40 years would be like.

So there's one truth that it hurts me to say this. In IT and tech, housekeeping is 80% of the job. It could well be the case that that's true in any job in the world, and maybe that's why there will never be anything glamorous about working life, ever.

The other thing is that the days of being able to do one thing, to learn one thing and apply that one piece of knowledge that you have over and over again – those days are gone. I thought that I could do that. I think that's why I studied mathematics and arts and sciences and politics and history. I thought I could learn certain rules about the universe, and then use that knowledge over and over again. That is certainly knowledge that will forever be relevant, but I will always have to learn and relearn. I will have to think about the meaning of being productive, and that's something I've struggled with since young. Not in the production of ideas, because I've always been very good at this. But in getting off my ass and doing things. And having concrete measures of your output.

Now that I've gone back to work at the Factory, I was talking again to a guy who worked there, and we knew people from back then. I thought of how I spent my youth, and there was this deep melancholy. I think you'd get it from some movies – there was this movie, “Past Lives”. I don't know how I would have perceived it if I were still in my movie watching phase, but as somebody who has lived two lives in the US and in Asia, there were things I could relate to. There was a review of “Past Lives” which pointed out that the emotional wallop at the end of the movie came about because there was this great weight of knowing that another life, another existence was possible – you just didn't choose that path in life and therefore you never got to see it. Midlife crisis is all about understanding that life is finite. It's about knowing that if you didn't go down that path, then you would never be able to live through it. I don't know how I would have reacted to “Past Lives” if I were to watch it as a young man who was going through his movie phase, but it reminds me of this passage in Edward Yang's great “One and a Two” where the middle aged guy bumps into his old flame and thinks about what would have happened if he had been with his crazy passionate girlfriend instead of his wife. They go on a date together and reminise about the old days, and then plenty of old emotions and old resentments get brought up in a scene that I found astonishing for its emotional intensity. I don't know if “Past Lives” was like that. There was this great cathartic scene at the end, but the lady in the middle knows that she has already chosen her path in life, and that her fate is sealed.

And there are also epics like "In the Mood for Love" where the guy reaches middle age and sees the memories of the object of his desire from his youth fade away. I had a pretty comfortable childhood and probably would have loved to have that lifestyle forever: be surrounded by books and music forever. But people will “grow up” and the outside world will intrude. They'll ask you pesky question about the state of business, transacting with money. I watched with amazement that people will happily discuss things like buying cars and houses with you but when you talk about ideas and books, they'll run away.

But I can't be thinking about ideas and books all the time. I think, at the time I was leaving for Mexico, I was bound for bigger and brighter things. I would be moving onwards, forwards. Now, I'm not sure that's the case after all those years in Mexico. That I was transformed into this rock star programmer. It was a good thing, and an interesting experience. But I have to ask myself - what was this glorious future that I was hankering after, and what has come of it? Other than the standard “getting older and wiser”? It was a relative age of innocence. We knew that the effects of climate change were starting and maybe even accelerating. But it was an age of innocence, of techno-optimism. It was the dawn of the social media and iPhones age, before we understood that that was the path that would lead us to Donald Trump and Brexit. It was before we knew that the Arab Spring would end up in ashes. And it was when China was still behaving like a reasonable (at least to the West) country, before it started throwing tantrums about not getting its way.

So when I look back upon my youth, would it be me going round and round in circles? Would there still be a great epic waiting to be written? I see myself going round and round in circles, because I never developed the mentality that I had to have a goal in life and to move forth towards it. I did that for a few smaller things. But maybe not for the large things. Maybe it was that learned helplessness that brought me down. It was something that was pleasant, but I don't know if it had meaning. When I go to the mall after a whole day of working, it's a great relief. But I don't know if it's a waste of time, or it's something that's necessary for me to keep on living. I used to despise my mother for going to the mall so much when I was a kid. I used to think: is that what you're going to be remembered for when you die, going to the mall? But now I see that it's a form of self therapy that I could not do without.

The last thing I have to do in order to seal the deal... this is something that I have yet to do. Maybe the ability to do it is there, and maybe all the coping strategies that I have at my disposal will be there for me. I just have to conquer it.

Having the Team Lead as my colleague was quite fun, but when was I going to achieve having a life partner I could share things with? In my 20s, I always felt that I was not ready. In my 30s I was a refusenik. And in my 40s, I'm scrambling to get back the career that was handed on a plate for me.