Searching for a CEO that would expect zero salary and cost nothing to recruit, Scott was surprised to find there were actually thousands of candidates. Of course most scored very low on skill potential and experience. In overall ranking a few were actually kind of interesting.
Trinidad Franco was ranked 50,047 in experience, and not much lower in skill potential. Basically he looked like someone who actually knew how to run a company and might consider this a good opportunity despite that lack of any resources. But he lived in the Congo and spoke Kituba and a little bit of French.
Melinda White was rated at #956 in skill potential but way down the list for experience - nearly as low as Scott in this category. But, she lived in Spring Vale which was about an hour's drive from the University!
This was interesting, Scott wondered if this incredibly intrusive software had more information on this candidate - like a resumé or contact information. Glitch provided an address - apparently Melinda ran a shelter for homeless people. It listed her aptitudes as multitasking and genius level intelligence. Wow! Scott wondered how he was supposed to convince someone like that to join a new company which really didn’t have any kind of business plan or funding. His only advantage seemed to be a Human Resources program that was likely breaking a lot of privacy and security laws. Yeah, this whole idea was stupid. He couldn’t imagine going up to some genius stranger and asking her to run his imaginary company.
Scott decided that was enough daydreaming. He went to a couple other classes that day but still kept thinking about this incredible program that had mysteriously appeared on his cloud drive. Did someone put it there accidentally? Were they going to come looking for him? If this was as powerful as it seemed, what kind of company could someone really smart build with it? After class he had an early dinner and managed to distract himself for about 10 minutes playing a video game before he felt compelled to look at Glitch_HR again.
OK - Scott didn’t want to be reminded that he was too scared to approach real people about joining his company (Especially scary genius ladies!). Instead he opened up the Employee Training section. Rudely, his Skill Potential showed up at the top of the screen and he had dropped to about 322 million. How had 2 million people gotten better at being a Junior programmer than him in one day?!! Still, he was curious if his ranking would go up if he finished one of the recommended training sessions.
First in the list was something called “Adaptive UI Localization for Dummies”. That was kind of rude, although he appreciated all the training resources listed were free. Looking at the first 2, then 10 pages, almost all indicated these were classes for Dummies, or Basic level, for Non-Programmers, or even one described as “For People who can’t even find the Power Button”!. Realizing it was pointless to get mad at the heartless and probably evil AI running this software, Scott clicked on the first link.
Huh, it was surprisingly straightforward to add code that would scan your program for UI text and send it to a free API which would identify your computer’s default language and culture and then provide a suggested translation. They also provided some examples for getting it to automatically replace various labels, drop downs, button text with the translated text before showing the screen to the user. This was all described in less than 3 pages and Scott could clearly see a use for this if it worked on Glitch_HR. Well, it was worth a try. About 15 minutes later he added and compiled the code and saw that all the mixed language buttons and labels were now in English. That was surprisingly helpful, and it should also work if he ever shared this with someone from another country.
Marking the course as complete, Scott did not notice a significant change in his skills ranking but he was pretty sure it went up a few hundred. This time he wrote down the number.
The list was updated and now at the top was something called “Cognitive Tricks for Improved Memory Recall - Beginner Level (by Nadia Kucharska)”. Not sure what this had to do with programming, but at least this wasn’t calling him a Dummy.
This training was quite a bit longer. It went into a lot of theory about how the brain worked and compared it to algorithms in computer code. The premise was that most people just dumped facts into their brain comparable to a Heap in computer terms. The author claimed that getting data out of a Heap was slow as you had to scan through every item in a random order even though the brain could search from several locations in parallel. In a computer you could do things like binary searches if you organized or indexed the data when you inserted it. The author then gave some examples of how to “index” items in your brain by making associations in a spatial or sequential way. There were some training exercises to go through, but by this time Scott was getting tired so he set this aside and went to sleep.
The next morning, Scott felt refreshed and seemed to remember some weird dreams where he was pulling out parts of his brain and pinning them on one of those evidence boards they always use in detective shows. Shaking off the disturbing image, he decided to try a few of the exercises in that article. He wasn’t sure if it was helping, but maybe he would try it during his History class instead of his usual tactic of trying to sleep without the professor noticing.
He could possibly attribute it to staying awake and focused the whole class, but Scott found he could remember everything the professor covered including years the events happened. Normally he could never remember those unless he stared at them for a long time while studying for the test.
During a quick break between classes Scott pulled up the training screen. His ranking was now 318 million. It had gone up. That was actually kind of creepy. Even assuming this mind exercise made him a better programmer, how would the software know this? Did it just guess based on how long he was looking at the training. Was it reading his mind? OK, that was just dumb. His score probably went down just having such a stupid thought. He checked - well his score did go down a bit but that was probably just other people learning things. Which actually was maybe even more worrying. Was this program monitoring several billion computers and judging what people were learning or doing? If it could do that it seemed like a huge waste to just use this for Human Resources. It could be solving crimes or helping people find true love or something. Wait a minute…
Scott typed “Scott’s Girlfriend” into the job screen. A message popped up that this was not a valid career choice. Also it referred him to a section called policies and procedures. Yeah, totally not going to look at that. As the only employee of the company he did not have to worry about how inappropriate it would be trying to hire someone to be his girlfriend. He sure hoped there wasn’t a log of his search activity. OK, there would totally be a log somewhere.
Scott spent the next hour during his Data Structures class trying to find where this sneaky program was logging all his bad behavior so he could delete it. The code was way too complex for him to understand. He noticed something else that was odd – some of the code had been changed today. He had made some changes to translate the UI text yesterday, but some of the other code had been modified this morning. He eventually found a screen which allowed viewing the search logs. There was even a “Purge” feature, but it was disabled. Embarrassed, Scott decided if anyone ever went through these logs he would just say he was testing to make sure the program wouldn’t allow inappropriate searches. Yeah, that sounded believable!
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
For the next few days, Scott worked through some more training exercises. The next couple recommendations were too basic and not particularly helpful. Then there was another useful article on data structures which explained some things very well that he hadn’t really understood. This was followed by another useless link that seemed to be some description of someone’s day including what they ate for breakfast. Hrmm - this training program certainly had a few bugs in its algorithm, although it also found some really interesting stuff. Scott figured it was about 50% useful and the rest was junk. Still, he felt like he could usually identify the junk articles and what was left was kind of amazing. Some of the resources it pulled up were even off dark web sites - just an IP address and not any friendly DNS names. That was kind of scary, but also pretty exciting that this tool could find stuff like this.
In his school classes he usually felt like the teachers were spending a long time going over things he already knew. Other times, they would start on a subject assuming he had all this background knowledge and he just sat with a puzzled look on his face before tuning them out and daydreaming. Obviously there were some classes where the teacher actually covered something that he was interested in and ready to understand, but it was probably only about one class in 20. In elementary school and probably middle school he felt like it was much more common to go into a class and learn something useful. He hadn’t really worried about it - just assumed he knew so much there wasn’t a lot left to learn or that he could actually understand.
But the skill training on Glitch was different. Despite a fair amount of junk, Glitch seemed to come up with a large number of recommendations that were bite sized lessons that he could understand and actually caught his interest. He hadn’t really felt this engaged learning in many years. He also kept working on the brain/memory training exercises and was shocked to learn that he could still remember names, dates and events the teacher covered in his History class several days earlier.
The next weekend, Scott once again told his friend Matt he didn’t want to go to hang out claiming he needed to study for a test. He worked through a few more training suggestions and noticed that most of them were no longer labeled for beginners or dummies. Huh. He hadn’t even checked his ranking in several days. Glancing at it, he felt a bit of pride that he was now ranked 208 million worldwide for junior programmer skills. Sure, it wasn’t that great but he had passed up over 100 million wannabe geeks trying to steal his job! Out of curiosity, Scott looked at the top spot and found some guy named Theofanis Zervou, apparently from Algeria. Wait… was this the guy Professor Chu hired to make their class feel bad about themselves? AKA the Algerian job stealer!
Also that guy’s name sounded kind of familiar. Scott obviously hadn’t mastered his memory exercises because it didn’t come to him until he went back to the skills training page. There it was… #5 on his current list of training suggestions was an article about using small scale AI components to replace certain types of tedious coding tasks. It sounded kind of interesting. A quick search through his completed training tasks he found this guy had written one of the other useful articles he had already read. OK, that guy was pretty amazing, but Scott was also pretty proud of himself for remembering. His memory was getting better.
Skimming through the first couple pages of training suggestions Scott found another brain training article by the author who explained the memory exercises which he also somehow remembered - Nadia Kucharska. OK, he actually remembered her name because she sounded hot with that Russian sounding name. Ugh stupid hormones, what was wrong with him?! Anyway, the article was #26 on his recommended list titled “Simple tricks for speed reading retention and comprehension - Beginner level”. Ok, he was totally going to skip ahead to read this since his future girlfriend Nadia wrote it.
When he met her someday he was going to be super rich and famous and he could just go up to her and say “I really owe so much of my success to those articles you wrote”. Of course he would list some of her more advanced articles. Obviously he wouldn’t admit he found her beginner articles so useful. He would be like “Your expert level articles were really helpful, because there were 2 or 3 things in them I didn’t already know”. OK, great way to start a relationship on a foundation of lies.
Scott stopped his guilty daydreaming and started reading the article. It was like 40 pages, but a lot of this was samples of literature or technical writing interspersed with some short exercises to try while reading them. The thought of working his way through this “Beginner Level” exercise was kind of intimidating, but Scott gave it a try and about 3 hours later was surprised that he had started to get the hang of it. There were a lot of tricks from moving your eyes in an order that didn’t actually match the flow of text, and methods to quickly categorize sections of text in your brain without actually trying to understand it all on the first pass. You would kind of digest the information after you scanned it in. With practice you could locate sections of the text that related to questions someone might ask or if something related jogged your memory. It kind of gave him a headache because he had been reading since Kindergarten and this was basically teaching him to do everything in a completely different way.
This was going to take quite a bit more practice and effort than the memory exercises (which he hadn’t actually mastered yet). Also, he was kind of terrified about what this Nadia person was up to. She had to be working for some kind of Russian government think tank and honestly compared to the intelligence of government people we had in the U.S., things were not looking good!
Scott decided not to go out of order again for a little while. He instead struggled to apply his speed reading exercises to the training items. He usually found he had to go over everything several times before understanding and it was slower than just doing it the way he was used to. But he kept at it and after a few days he felt like he was slowly getting the hang of it. It actually is pretty scary unlearning a skill you have had most of your life and trying to do something in a different way. One night Scott even had a nightmare where he was in a library with hundreds of stacks of books and a sexy Russian voice was telling him they couldn’t go on a date until he read them all. Then he turned to look at the speaker and she was some old crone with lots of warts and he woke up with a start. Was his subconscious telling him that Speed Reading was evil? Maybe it wasn’t worth the effort. He decided to keep working on it for one more week - if he didn’t see any improvement he would just go back to normal reading.
Over the next week, Scott found himself skipping a lot of his classes and only showing up for the tests. He used speed reading the night before to skim through 4 chapters of really dull 19th century American history. Going to bed he felt like he didn’t really remember much of it, but it was way too boring to read it again. During his class the next day he felt like the answers were just popping into his head. Even the essay seemed easier than usual. Although he was sure to lose some points on his rambling, pointless interpretation of the significance of the Missouri Compromise, he believed he at least had the events and dates right.
A test in Dr. Chu’s class was also shockingly easy. He was almost certain that the evil Doctor had not covered even a fraction of what was needed to solve his diabolical computer science riddles in class. He pitied the other students. However, most of the questions were fairly easy to solve using material he had learned during his skills training. Possibly his answers were not mainstream, but he was sure they would work.
The weekend was approaching again and Scott decided it was time to give his brain a rest and hang out with his friend Matthew.