The Interview

Working from home, that had become the new normal in the year 2020. Leo stared out of his small
San Francisco apartment building window. He had moved there right after graduation the previous year
in a flutter of excitement and promises of avocado toast and small batch coffee. He never imagined
that the world would change so quickly in just 8 months. Despite living in an 800
square foot apartment with a shared bathroom and microkitchen (cough, cough, microwave and portable fridge)
his monthly rent was almost 2.5K. It was fine at first, but there was one problem…

Leo had lost his job, along with the other 30 people at the startup. It was a sexy, promising app that would
help to optimize travel plans and find cheap ticket and lodging prices. Not surprisingly, travel wasn’t
really a thing anymore and the company went under. Unless you wanted to be trapped in a metal tube airplane cabin with other people’s
sneezes and halitosis. He sure didn’t.

And now, the walk of shame for any recent graduate that obtained and lost a tech job - finding another one.
He’d sent in at least a hundred resumes on LinkedIn, and was in correspondence with several recruiters.
Sometimes he got through to an interview, and then it was an awkward series of virtual chats followed up
by cold “Sorry we’re not interested” emails, or just being ghosted entirely. Even his cat, who was previously
excited to have his owner mysteriously at home for much more time, was turning to give him the butthole of
death. The ultimate insult from a feline friend that now sees you as impeding him from a keyboard nap.

Today was no different from any other day during the apocalypse. He woke up late, browsed around his phone,
the little internet, looking for hope, only to get a notification that he was spending now 3 and a half hours
on his phone. Is that the best you can offer me, littl internet? You fruit branded Traitor. But actually, he
realized, maybe today was different. You see he had managed to get an interview with a VR company,
Toolie, as a virtual reality engineer. It was a highly sought after specialty these days, even more so
with the stay at home orders. You know, if you can’t go to a restaurant, or take a walk in the park,
why not do it virtually? And take a step further and leave behind your flawed self and go as a unicorn instead.
Or an ogre with purple hair. Turn it into an episode of your favorite action series where the dinner
turns into a showdown and you roll under the table and start catpulting mashed potatoes across the room
to use as a weapon against the zombie transformed wait staff. Anything goes in VR.

But I digress! Leo was excited for this opportunity. He fishes around for his development headset to
test out a new VR technique he was trying - an effort to create an illusion of falling by combining
nausea inducing visuals with a sense of acceleration. He placed the headset over his eyes.
He was at the grand canyon. He’d never been there in person,
but thankfully tiles from geographic services gave him the basic scene that he needed to reproduce it.
He stepped to the edge of a rock - it was so real that he could almost feel the sun beating down on his pasty white skin.
And then, he stepped forward.

The fall was instant. He was spinning, tumbling, accelerating, and so nauseous that he wondered if it would
be too much for some future poor player of his game. His body flipped around and then was stuck looking
at the sky. The amount of blue grew, grew, increased, until it was the entire screen. There was a sharp flash
of bright blue and then everything went dark.

Leo opened his eyes, some time later. He was tired - had he fallen asleep during the simulation?
Was it so neuronally charging that it had knocked him out? Oh no, look at the time! He
was going to be late for his interview! Leo lunged forward and did a barrel roll to get onto his
feet. Pants. He was going to be on video. There was a good chance he’d want to show off something
in VR which would require him to stand up and possibly reveal his Ninja Turtle boxers.
He hopped over to his dresser by the window, and paused. The window. He looked outside and
the sky was… red. It was beautiful, but… why? Did the wildfires reach San Francisco already?
Wait a minute, wouldn’t it be a bright orange instead? He didn’t bother to think too hard about it -
he’d already stocked up his apartment with high quality air filters and had a respirator handy.
Hashtag 2020. Yet another set of needs he never anticipated having in 2019. Just as he was turning
away from the window, a dark creature flew by. Was that seriously a bat? Do we have those in Silicon
Valley? It must be something related to the changing climate, or confusion about the time of day.

Okay, Leo thought, sitting down in front of his laptop. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.
Coffee, check, but it’s old. Pants, check. Extra paper if I need to write, check.
The Zoom call opened up, he started the audio and his video. The other party wasn’t there yet. This first
portion would be the technical interview. He was told to expect 2-3 problems with the same person.
He was so tired of doing practice problems for algorithms. It’s like he was being tested to be a competitive progrmamer or something,
so far from the actual detail oriented, slow thinking kind of work that was his actual day to day.
He was just praying it wasn’t too strongly that. If he had to implement binary search one more time
he was going to scream. Oh! Someone entered. That sounded like a doorbell.

He saw the background first. His interviewer had a house that he can only describe as dr Seuss like.
The walls were covered with posters that looked like grids of numbers. Hugging them tightly were
sets of red and orange trees with bright fruit. Was this a virtual background? He had never quite seen
a plant like that, but when you are programming 12 hours a day in your cave it’s not exactly the case
that you go outside very often. The interviewer then moved, and came into Leo’s awareness. “Sorry I’m late!”
He chirped. Leo had taken a sip of coffee, and almost spit it out. This guy had a beak and bright,
red and yellow feathers to match the trees. He knew it was almost Halloween but seriously, interviewing
in a costume? This company was… different. He grinned. Ok. Just pretend it’s totally normal.

The first question asked him to design a building to satisfy having some number of elevators operating
all all times, with some capacity of people. That seemed reasonable, because he suspected that the company
created VR simulations for other companies, maybe even for disaster preparedness. That could be cool - it would
be nice to show up to family holiday events and tell Grandma that he was doing something positive for the world,
and not just building games for adrenaline junkies or a high paying job that really came down
to advertising. He walked the interviewer through his logic, and he seemed satisfied with the answer.
But the next question threw him off a bit.

He had to calculate the maximum force that any single elevator would have when impacting the bottom from a free fall.
He knew the height and the mass, so the question seemed relatively straight forward. But what the heck?
His mind quickly moved to rationalizations for such a question. It could be that this particular question
wasn’t for disaster preparedness, but rather some VR experience. He had thought that his obsesssion with
simulating near death experiences was a symptom exclusive to him, but this question begged to differ.
There were clearly many other weirdos out there working in VR. “Anything goes!”, he thoguht.

For his last technical question he needed to find the shortest path to escape from a maze.
This first part was straight forward, how do you say it …

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