Scott Henderson was struggling. He couldn’t understand why his villainous teacher Dr. Chu would expect students to have working software finished and debugged in only 2 weeks. I mean he was at school to learn Computer Science - if he was already an expert why would he need to go to class?
Also, this project could not be any more boring! “Build a simple Human Resources database for organizing applicants resumes. Allow searching by keywords”. This simple description had him nearly falling asleep. In elementary school, where they first tricked him into wanting to do this, they had cool programs where you could drag around blocks and make games. Now, it seemed like 10 times the work to make something that wasn’t even a little bit interesting!
Scott wasn’t a terrible student - when he first got this awful assignment, he spent several hours coding a user interface and designing a database. He figured it was about 80% done but then it got unbelievably boring running it over and over again trying to fix bugs. Where was the fun and excitement?
He made one of the classic blunders and started to daydream about what he could add to the program that would impress his teacher. He could just picture it…
“Scott Henderson, please explain to the class how you were able to take this assignment and build something that any company would pay millions to have! I’ve forwarded your project to some of my contacts in the industry and they are really excited to meet you!” Dr. Chu would say.
Then all the girls in class would ask him out on a date and… OK, why did his imagination always end up going in that direction? He needed to focus and get this done!
So, he made a perfectly reasonable decision to avoid massive scope creep and put the project aside for a bit. He would think of one small, easy to implement feature he could add to make sure he got a good grade.
One week later he realized he had forgotten about the project, and it was time to panic. This was the weekend before his assignment was due. Not only had he failed to come up a great idea to add to the project, now he barely had enough time to finish the original lame requirements! Besides, he was planning to go out to a party with his friends this evening. He would probably want to sleep the next morning, so where was he going to find the time? That sinister Dr. Chu was probably cackling maniacally in his evil lair imagining the suffering of his students as they ruined their weekends finishing up a project due on a Monday! What kind of wretched monster would assign a major project due on a Monday?
It’s not like going to parties was all that great. Usually, he would set out with high hopes of meeting his future girlfriend. Then he would end up talking with his friends about games or television and elaborate schemes for talking to girls which were too ridiculous or embarrassing to actually try. Then the next morning he would wake up suffering and having spent all his admittedly limited supply of money. Maybe he should just use the homework assignment as an excuse to skip out.
“Hey Scott! Are you ready to go?” his friend Matthew called from across the hall. They both lived in assigned Engineering housing - the school claimed this was to help like-minded people share ideas and study together. But the drab, undecorated rooms were probably just designed to keep these socially awkward freshmen and sophomores from interfering with all the fun other students were having. Matthew was one of the few people on his floor who made an effort to escape - most of the other students seemed to be perfectly content staring at computers or textbooks all hours of the night.
“Sorry Matt... that project from Chu’s class is due Monday. I need to knock this out tonight. If I finish, I’ll catch you guys tomorrow and I will be ready to celebrate!” Always looking on the bright side - that was Scott! Matthew looked skeptical.
“OK, see you later!” As Matthew left, Scott felt all his hopes for the weekend die. Naturally, he opened up his homework project then got distracted surfing the web until he fell asleep.
In the middle of the night, he woke up with a start. He had dreamed about dozens of amazing features he could add to his project, and they would be so easy to program! He sprang out of bed and started typing. But as he woke up more, the ideas slipped away even faster. He realized most of what he was coding made no sense. The central idea was to write a program that skimmed code sharing web sites and combined functions pulled from thousands of samples into a finished program. This of course was nonsense - random code combined would not make anything useful and even if it did how could it actually be anything related to his assignment?
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Scott knew this was just one of those dreams where you woke up feeling like everything was figured out, but it was an illusion. The idea was impossible, but he couldn’t fall asleep again, so he decided to keep playing around with it. He even got some code together that would pull out various functions, rename variables to various random Human Resources related words like “Benchmarking”, “Due_Dilligance”, “Onboarding” and other terms. He had a crazy idea that even if his program didn’t work, if it was really long and had the right vocabulary so the teacher might give him some partial credit. Of course, putting a hundred thousand lines of garbage together did not really make a program.
For the next four hours, he modified his code to break the vast bulk into smaller modules and keep substituting lines of code until it would compile. Three hours later he had written a test program that would make sure these modules would actually execute. Then he looked at the clock and realized it was already Sunday evening. Matthew had seen him working hard and left him alone. The assignment was due tomorrow and all he had was a program that generated nonsense code. Even a casual glance could tell it was garbage. He was in full panic mode now.
The code generating program was still running - spitting out nonsense modules that had names indicating they might have something to do with Human Resources functions. Scott tried to kill the program, but his computer froze up. Realizing that he hadn’t saved his work in the past seven hours he had a tough decision. Power off the computer and lose hours of work - it was probably worthless, but it was hard to throw away something you have worked on for hours. Instead, Scott went to the computer lab and got to work on a version of his homework he had saved after the first day. To his surprise, he was able to debug and finish the bare minimum for his assignment within two hours. Scott saved his work and went home to bed.
His alarm woke Scott up to some old music from about 20 years earlier. It was Monday - he sat for a few moments puzzled. Had he finished his project or was that just a dream? Had he really spent most of the weekend trying to write a program to do his homework for him? He walked over to his computer and saw a prompt saying, “Project Complete”. That was odd. First things first, he checked and made sure his assignment was complete - fortunately that had not been a dream. He opened it up and clicked around - minimal UI, no extra features, no bugs. This was a solid B. What a relief!
Out of curiosity he clicked on the “Project Complete” prompt. What looked like a very long invoice appeared. It was over 800 pages. Most of the items were labeled variations of H.R. terms like “Company Synergy Module” or “Skill Assessment Sub-Module 41”. They all had an item name and some number followed by what looked like a currency code - USD, INR, CNH, RUB and about a dozen others. Scott was starting to get a little worried - it just went on and on. Then he skipped down to the totals and his eyes crossed a bit. Some of the numbers were pretty large - even the dollars part was over $3 million. Did he just get a bill for millions of dollars? In growing horror, Scott kept reading. The bill was marked paid… OK that made no sense. Why was he getting a copy of someone’s huge software bill?
He closed the invoice and for the third time that morning almost had a panic attack. His computer was flashing a warning that a virus had infected HRHomework.exe. That was the name of the nonsense program he was generating while trying to avoid doing his homework.
He set the antivirus software to clean the issue - at least his computer was still functioning.
Scott took a deep breath, shut down his desktop PC and went to class. This was way too much stress for a Monday morning.
Dr. Chu’s class was filled with the usual assortment of tired, hung-over college students you would find on a Monday morning. Scott turned his assignment in early and was having trouble staying awake as the professor lectured about crowdsourcing and offshoring. As an example, he showed the class that he had posted the homework assignment that Scott had agonized over for 2 weeks. A programmer in Algeria finished the program in one day for about $50. The teacher said it wasn’t great work, but he would have given it a B+. Unbelievable! All his hard work was probably worth less than what he would have spent going out for dinner with his friends. That Algerian job stealer probably even wrote a better program than Scott. There were more than a few groans around the class as students realized their hard work was not particularly valuable. However, while cruel Dr. Chu was making them question their life choices, Scott noticed the company name that Chu used to find programmers. It matched the logo he had seen on the scary invoice from this morning.
Did his random junk program somehow connect to an offshoring programming firm? Did the virus he picked up pulling random code from the internet have anything to do with that? Despite the depression he was feeling about his current career path, Scott’s curiosity was growing. He opened his laptop and looked through the output folder of his generator program. Ignoring Dr. Chu’s soul crushing lecture, he skimmed through the log files. At some point in the middle of the night while running his testing program on some generated code, files started getting uploaded to a Russian IP address. A few hours later a different version of the code started downloading a large number of files from IP addresses all over the world. Finally, a couple hours before he woke up, the program stopped with the log stating that testing was complete.
And there, sitting in the output folder was a large file called Glitch_HR.exe.