This story was originally written for the April 2024 "
On The Job Challenge 2024
" event.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real places, people, companies, products, etc. is purely coincidental.
=========
"By the way, a fun fact," said a tall, sandy blond man in his late thirties, with a narrow face and a long, aquiline nose. "Did you know that some people commute to this office by kayak?"
He pointed outside, through a window of the cafeteria, towards a small pier jutting into a river that was no wider than maybe a hundred feet. Sure enough, there was a kayak stand nearby, and it looked like it could be seeing some use from time to time.
"Cool," Tom said, slicing away a piece of crispy bacon on his plate. "I suppose that's not your method, though?"
"I wish," the other man said with a laugh. "It's just plain ol' traffic for me, half an hour each way."
"What about you, Lingyun?"
"Same as James here, I'm afraid," an older, lightly wrinkled man spoke in a slight Cantonese accent. He had wispy, salt-and-pepper hair that gave his prominent Asian features a look of timeless sagacity. "Only about fifteen minutes, though. My wife and I live in the city, so I usually just take the bus."
"That's not too bad," Tom said, smiling wryly at the two men. It was all idle chit-chat but also a very familiar theme — one that he had heard many variations of, over several years that he'd been working at this company.
Tom couldn't really complain, of course. Straight out of college, he managed to land a great job at a multi-national IT corporation, well known for a friendly yet challenging work environment and lots of generous perks for its talented employees. Fast-forward to now and he was a well-paid software engineer with a few years under his belt, having worked on quite a few projects in his time and visited many of the company's numerous offices.
Anywhere he went, the work environment he'd seen was always tastefully and colorfully arranged, and it also included tons of unusual and amusing features. Their alleged purpose was to stimulate the brilliant minds who worked there on a plethora of very difficult problems, and to foster serendipitous collaboration between them that could leverage all possible synergies — or, uh, something along these lines. But if there was one thing Tom had learned during his tenure here, it was that all those pool tables, climbing walls, onsite gyms, free meals, tropical gardens, well-stocked snack stations, and all the other attractions really had one primary purpose to their existence.
They were there to keep the employees in the office as long as possible, so that they devoted bigger chunks of their lives to the company than they otherwise would. Most people didn't actually use those gimmicks very much, at least if they wanted to receive a half-decent performance rating. Still, if one were fully aware of the associated caveats, Tom thought, working here wasn't exactly a terrible deal.
"Hey guys," said a new voice, much younger and more feminine. Tom looked up and saw a glimpse of two shapely legs clad in navy denim pants, just as the woman set her food tray on the table and gracefully sat down next to James. "Sorry, I'm a bit late. People are always slow at the breakfast burrito station."
"No worries," he said, pointing at Tom. "You are just in time to meet our visitor from the Bay Area."
A beautiful, smiling face of a brunette in mid-twenties turned to Tom, regarding him with a friendly curiosity from behind her black contoured glasses.
"Hi, I'm Julia," she said in a pleasant voice, extending her hand over the table. "Well, I guess you've seen me before, over VC..."
"Tom," he said with a smile, shaking her hand gently. "Yes, but it's always much nicer to meet in person."
He lingered just for a moment, noting how the corners of her lips rose almost imperceptibly, as if in a smirk.
"Julia here will be your main point of contact," Lingyun said. "She has basically taken over maintaining the API microservice, at least for now."
"Really?" Tom asked, a bit incredulously. "I thought you were an intern?"
"Uhm, returning intern," she corrected him, a slight blush coloring her cheeks with a healthy shade of pink. "It's my second time here. And that service is just a simple proxy, so nothing too complicated, really..."
"She doesn't give herself enough credit," James chimed in with a chuckle. "Julia practically wrote the damn thing, because I've been way too busy with user privacy stuff to really contribute much."
Julia's blush deepened, making her cute face even more lovely. "Aaaanyway," she drawled back to Tom, "since your frontend will be talking to this proxy, I guess you'll need to deal with me if you encounter any problems."
Tom found himself totally unopposed to the prospect of collaborating with Julia. Her obvious aptitude, sharp mind, and playful demeanor would definitely make the job easier and much more pleasant than he had expected.
Not to mention that she was absolutely
gorgeous
.
When the whole group stood up and shuffled itself into an orderly file, lining up to drop the dishes before they left the cafe, Tom was finally able to check out the cute intern properly.
Julia was maybe five-foot-seven, a bit shorter than Tom's own five-eleven. She had a seemingly slight build with dainty features, but upon closer look Tom noticed that she was no stranger to exercise. Her body was trim and tight in all the right places, and it was difficult for him not to stare at the delightful pendulum of her peachy, swaying butt. For some reason, probably to make it even harder on himself, he recalled the few glances he'd managed to steal down her open jacket and upon the white blouse she was wearing. Inside, the enticing swell of her breasts stretched the material and molded it around two cantaloupe-sized globes, quite a bit bigger than you'd expect from a girl of her stature.
Thankfully, Tom would eventually find a few distractions on the way to his temporary working area. The onsite coffee shop was one, where he considered grabbing another (free) cappuccino to ease the slight timezone adjustment after his flight yesterday. For now, though, he decided against it. Everyone else, including Julia, was already heading back to their desks.
"Here's your guest workstation," James pointed at the pristine computer desk, two large monitors plus mouse and keyboard sitting on the spotless white surface. "Julia's got one right next to you, which should be quite convenient. If you happen to need help getting the API calls right, you can always just ask her."
"Very nice," Tom said, dropping his backpack and adjusting the height of his new desk. In the corner of his vision, he saw Julia take a seat and practically attack the keyboard with her dexterous fingers, typing what had to be a mile-long password in a blink of an eye. Almost unconsciously, his gaze drifted to the tantalizing curve of her bosom, and he had to deliberately press his eyelids together to stop staring and focus on his work.
Right, work...
Tom was a frontend software engineer. It was a fancy name for a guy who makes websites that both look nice and work correctly, or at least do so most of the time. There was something of an art to it, especially if you didn't have a dedicated designer to mock-up the look & feel of the final product, but most the job was just a specific flavor of software engineering.
And like all such flavors, the job was mainly about code. It meant writing code, running code, testing code, debugging code, fixing code, reviewing code, committing code, and trying not to curse too much when looking at someone else's bad code. Never mind that "someone else" could often be Tom himself, from anywhere between three months to several years ago.
"So, is this the UI prototype?" he heard Julia's voice, next to the sound of wheels rolling on the carpet as she slid her chair next to his. "It looks great."
"Yeah," Tom said, feeling it was him who was blushing now. "With fake data, of course, but it has pretty much all the features. This is the overall route view," he said, gesturing to the screen that showed a map with several pins and a crooked line going through them, "and if you click on any of the points of interest, you get detailed info about the place, the activities you can do there, the pricing, and so on..."
"It's really nice," she said, and for some reason it was making Tom's heart flutter. "Can't wait until we plug the actual data sources in there. Let me know if you need anything, like if the docs are unclear or outdated. I'll be delighted to help!"
He looked at Julia then, and saw her beaming a wide smile. 'Delighted,' huh? What a curious choice of words...
"I... I won't hesitate," he said, not entirely sure why he stuttered.
"Alright, let's see if you can get this to work!" she said, still smiling, as she put on her headphones and concentrated on her own tasks.
Tom let out a quiet sigh, lingering for a moment while he admired the curvaceous profile of his beautiful co-worker, then immediately focused his full attention on the job.
After all, Julia was counting on him.
***
Tom's project — or rather, the project that his home team was working on, in collaboration with the server crew he was visiting now — was a kind of entertainment / travel app.
You'd give it an area, like a city or a national park; a particular time frame, like an afternoon or a week; the maximum amount of money you were willing to spend; and some short list of categories, like sightseeing, hiking or clubbing. It would then build you a route that hits as many affordable places of interest as it could fit, all matching your criteria.
In theory, you could make it act as a guide through the most interesting monuments of Rome from the times of Julius Caesar, or as your virtual wingman while you hit the trendiest clubs in Ibiza.
This was the elevator pitch at least, or a short summary that a product manager could hammer into a feasible app design. But to someone like Tom, who was far removed from the nitty-gritty of gathering and organizing all the billion pieces of information that made it possible, this was basically an app like any other. It took input from the user, fetched the necessary data from the server, and displayed the output in some predefined fashion.
Input and output. In, and out.
"You are giving it an invalid category_id," Julia said, frowning at the long list of labels and values where each pair was separated by a colon. "It has to be something you get from that other request."
"Oh, I see," Tom said, a little flustered. "So I can't just assume that those category IDs don't change..."
"Nope, sorry," she replied, flashing him a quirky, half-apologetic smile. "I can't make it too easy on you now, can I?"
