The game of Three Towers Company has officially begun.
Once the bosses of the four groups have been selected, everyone else received a number between one and twenty-nine, excluding the bosses themselves.
The area where Wen Xishu is located is Zone C, so the employee numbers for Wen Xishu’s team are c01 to c29.
His own number is c00.
[The first day is about to begin. Countdown, five, four, three, two, one...]
Zero.
The electronic screen suddenly made a ding sound.
Then, a calendar appeared.
The first day began.
No one felt something was off; everyone sat at their assigned workstations according to their numbers.
Soon, their computers displayed the tasks they were to complete.
"What the hell is this?" said c01, Li Weiwei.
"Is that it? It seems quite underestimating," said c02, Clark.
"If this is our task, it doesn’t seem too bad. At least it’s very, very simple," said someone from Tang Zhe, c03.
This was someone Wen Xishu had noticed earlier, who showed no interest in choosing the boss and was even yawning.
The speciality of Tang Zhe is calculation.
And this time, the task is arithmetic problems.
Wen Xishu said:
"It seems like each of you is the same, arithmetic problems."
All the tasks presented at each workstation were arithmetic problems.
At this moment, Wen Xishu did not feel like a boss but more like an examiner.
Survivors in the apocalypse may not be academic geniuses, but being able to do some calculations is quite easy.
Wen Xishu quickly inspected everyone’s computers and discovered a problem...
The tasks each person needed to complete were actually different.
"Is it adjusted based on everyone’s computational ability?" Wen Xishu quickly concluded.
For example, c22, a Black man named Turte, has a talent for running fast.
It is said he lived in a primitive tribe, chased by beasts daily.
Due to its primitive nature, his tribe was scarcely affected by the apocalypse.
Turte isn’t dumb, but frankly, arithmetic isn’t his strong suit, so his tasks mostly consisted of single-digit addition and subtraction, and they weren’t traditional numbers but shapes.
They were so simple that almost anyone could solve them easily.
But conversely, c03, a young man named Tang Zhe, had much more difficult problems.
His arithmetic ability was on par with that of mathematicians worshipped as gods, soaring in the skies.
At this moment, Tang Zhe was calculating missile trajectory. Those symbols looked like whispered pollution when Wen Xishu glanced at them.
Even he, as a boss, couldn’t make sense of them.
Thus Wen Xishu came to a conclusion.
The difficulty was dynamic; there were no unqualified employees here.
Each employee could complete their assigned tasks.
Employees just needed to maintain their pass rate.
Indeed, the work had a pass rate requirement.
Three Towers Company seemingly scanned every person; they clearly grasped everyone’s computational power.
Here, slacking off was difficult.
You might think arithmetic is simple, but work demanded accuracy and efficiency.
Accuracy couldn’t be below ninety-five percent, and efficiency required finishing a question within the prescribed time; unanswered questions couldn’t exceed five percent of the total.
In this setup, if Wen Xishu could choose, having twenty-nine Turtes would be far better than twenty-nine Tangs.
Because, for Turte’s tasks, he could solve them at a glance.
But Tang Zhe’s tasks, he couldn’t solve.
If a boss could help employees... then Wen Xishu could certainly help Turte solve all problems.
But this thought was also wrong.
On the first day of the thirty-day interview journey, at noon. After three hours in the morning, everyone had completed a fair number of problems.
Wen Xishu was surprised to find... the number of problems each person faced was completely different.
Even though Tang Zhe’s tasks were infinitely more complex than Turte’s... the number of problems Tang solved was also not proportional to Turte’s.
But the displayed progress was the same.
Fourth hour.
Turte had already solved two hundred problems.
But Tang Zhe was still on his sixth problem.
Yet everyone’s progress showed thirty-three point three three three percent and so on...
"One-third, I understand now."
"The number of problems isn’t fixed, nor is the difficulty; as long as you solve them seriously, without errors... the only metric is time."
"In other words, four hours have passed, marking one-third progress."
"It implies that each person’s daily workload amounts to twelve hours."
At this moment, Wen Xishu suddenly understood the range of ’not difficult but not easy either.’"
Even the simplest arithmetic, doing it continuously for over a dozen hours, makes it very easy to err.
Back in the day, when he was younger, Wen Xishu encountered a challenge booth, where you got fifty bucks for a single chance. If you could count from 0 to 200 without mistakes, maintaining a smooth speed, you would win two hundred bucks. Only kids could participate in this game.
This was essentially betting on "stability."
Under the watchful eyes of many, and with hints from the boss, the kids attempting the challenge would often make mistakes due to nervousness.
This is definitely not difficult, perhaps even very simple, but the repetitive, tedious process often leads to errors.
There are indeed many challenging and daunting tasks in this world.
But truly... there are quite a few tasks that are neither difficult nor easy, where the main challenge is overcoming monotony and fatigue.
Relatively speaking, math could already be considered less tedious.