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irarelypostanything · 5 years

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Slice of Life[3]

[Nora]

Nora finished the coding interview question in roughly three minutes, but she still felt a little bit blindsided.

“Congratulations, that works perfectly.”

“But WHY?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you ask me to do this?”

On the whiteboard was C++ code that inverted a binary tree. It was easy as fuck. It was just one line different than traversing a tree normally, and it didn’t take her a whole lot of time to figure out the difference.

“We just wanted to assess your abilities.”

“And is this a...warm-up?”

“Nope, that’s the whole thing. Congratulations again.”

Nora just stood there for a little while, whiteboard marker still in hand. “I just inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard. Does that indicate to you that I will be a good fit for your company?”

“Surprisingly, yes. This question is literally the best metric we have devised.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

They stood there for a little while, looking at each other.

“So what do I wear on Monday?”

[Dan]

The entire meeting room was full of engineers intimidated by Dan, in spite of the fact that Dan was a tiny Asian dude who looked like he could be knocked out by a single punch from a 90-year-old drunken man with a walking problem. His height said two things about him: That he was special in a not-good sort of way, and something I’d rather not say.

“I want to know which of you limp dick pieces of shit is applying to other companies.”

One engineer he hated (Dan hated all of his engineers, but this one he hated especially) started to say something, then stopped.

“Spit it out, you fuck. Who is it?”

“N-N-Nora, probably?”

“Ah, so you’re selling out Nora. Nora is ten times more loyal than any of you treacherous Indeed-easy-applying douche bags will ever be.”

The hated engineer showed Dan his phone. “Look at her status: ‘Started my first day at a new job in San Francisco today.’ Hashtag livelovelaugh. Hashtag girlswhocode. Hashtag MondayMartinis.”

“Holy shit,” said Dan.

“I liked and shared the photo. That’s cool, right?”

“All of you, clear the room. I need to make a personal call.”

Nora did not respond to Dan’s first or second or third call. He decided to text her, instead.

How could you, he texted her. How could you leave?

Better pay, she texted back, almost immediately, better salary, less toxic atmosphere, more fun projects.

Oh okay, Dan texted, I guess that’s fine then.

Funny, texted Nora, I didn’t pick up because I thought you would be mad.

I am extremely mad, texted Dan, it is just very difficult to convey my rage without screaming.

[Ryan]

“This is, without question, the worse code I have ever seen,” said Ryan. Ryan and Kevin were in a conference room. On the projector was an incomprehensible mess of nondescriptive variable names, pointers to pointers to pointers, and comments written to the tune of this line of code is never called, and if it was called it definitely would not work.

“It gets worse,” said Kevin, “just look at this next function.”

Kevin scrolled down on the computer they were projecting. Underneath that was a bunch of incomprehensible 0x values.

“For the love of all that is good and holy,” said Ryan, “What twisted abomination of a human would write something like this?”

“I don’t think it was written by a human,” said Kevin, “I think it was written by some rogue automated script turning against its creator as a final act of vengeance.”

“I can fix this,” said Ryan.

“Really?”

“I’ll refactor the whole thing. We don’t know what it’s trying to do but we know what it’s supposed to do. That will save a lot of time.”

“But they asked us to fix the code.”

“And I’ll fix it. By rewriting it. All of it.”

“How long do you think it will take you?”

Ryan checked his watch. The time was 1PM.

“How many lines is this file, again?”

“In spite of everything it says in the coding standards, 1000.”

“What time do you usually hit the gym?”

“2:30. I return at 4.”

Ryan looked at the code, then looked at Kevin.

“When you get back, I will have all the code rewritten.”

When Kevin returned at 4, all test cases were passed by a mere 220 lines of Ryan’s code.

#short story #fiction

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