"Wait! Why are you going to ask? Who asked you to?" Wang Ye wasn't stupid. He knew Tang Dong had bad intentions, so he hurriedly called after him.
Tang Dong ignored him.
The more Wu Tianming and Wang Ye tried to stop him, the more determined he was to get to the bottom of it.
Maybe Wu Tianming and Wang Ye were both covering for Luo Yao!
If this interview knocked out Wu Tianming and Wang Ye, then he could basically be 100% certain of getting into the project.
After Tang Dong told Xia Qing about Luo Yao, he had assumed she would thank him for the warning.
But unexpectedly, Xia Qing sternly told him, "Don't concern yourself with Luo Yao's affairs in the future."
Don't concern himself?!
What was going on?!
"But, Professor Xia, Luo Yao..."
"Enough. Don't you have anything else to do? If you don't want to attend the interview this afternoon, I can send someone else." Xia Qing was already overwhelmed preparing for the upcoming meeting with the Semiconductor Alliance, yet Tang Dong was still here tattling.
After leaving Xia Qing's office, Tang Dong couldn't understand why she had told him not to mention Luo Yao.
But he figured it out soon enough.
Luo Yao must have dropped out, which was why Professor Xia Qing didn't want to bring him up.
After reaching that conclusion, Tang Dong didn't forget to tell Wu Tianming and Wang Ye.
When Wu Tianming and Wang Ye heard, they assumed Xia Qing had told him. They hurried to the Luo family's restaurant, only to find its doors tightly locked and even its sign removed, as if all the meals they had eaten there had been nothing more than a dream.
"Boss Ye, looks like Santuo really left." Wu Tianming felt somewhat disappointed. They hadn't known each other for long, but Luo Yao had left without saying a word, which genuinely hurt him.
"That brat is such a damn bastard! If he left, did Luo Zhu leave too?!"
"No wonder I haven't been able to reach Luo Zhu lately. I thought she was too busy studying to check her messages." Even Wang Ye, a rough-and-tumble guy, showed rare dejection as he squatted by the roadside.
"Forget it. Since Santuo has already left, we should focus on getting our own affairs in order."
"There's still an important interview this afternoon. I wonder if we can pass?"
Wang Ye said angrily, "Pass! We have to pass! I'm going to show Santuo just how outstanding the two of us are!"
"He actually left without even saying goodbye. What an ungrateful bastard! After everything your big brother did for him!"
Watching Wang Ye vent, Wu Tianming found it amusing. "You're upset because Luo Zhu left too, aren't you?"
"Sigh, I got dumped before I even got the chance to date her. My heart hurts," Wang Ye sighed.
"Give it a rest. Stop trying to build yourself a devoted-lover image. Get yourself together for the interview this afternoon. If love isn't going your way, then make sure the interview does."
Wu Tianming couldn't be bothered with Wang Ye anymore. He got up and walked away, but before he had gone far, he heard Wang Ye howl, "Come back and give me a hand! My legs are numb from squatting!"
Soon, afternoon arrived, and Xia Qing brought the three of them to Liushangpo.
The first time they saw Liushangpo, all three of them gasped in amazement.
"Tech companies really are different from ordinary companies. These facilities absolutely crush my dad's company!"
"I've never thought of myself as a country bumpkin, but seeing this place today, I finally understand just how extravagant Huaji is."
"I have to work here! I absolutely have to get this internship today!"
Xia Qing led them to an enclosed terrace at Liushangpo. Several white chairs sat there, and a tall figure was seated in one of them, reading a book. A middle-aged man sat beside him.
The cover of Newton Studies blocked the reader's face. Even with Wang Ye craning his neck, he couldn't make out what the person looked like.
"The interviewers are over there. Follow me."
The three of them followed Xia Qing over.
The person reading hadn't noticed they had arrived.
"Luo Yao, the interviewees are here," Peng Xun reminded him from the side.
Wait?!
Who had that man just called?!
The reader slowly raised his head from behind the book, revealing a face that Wang Ye and the others knew all too well.
"Luo... Luo Yao?" Wu Tianming's mind went completely blank. Everything he had prepared for the interview vanished without a trace.
"Let me introduce him. Luo Yao, the person in charge of the chip laboratory, is also your interviewer today." Peng Xun introduced Luo Yao for him.
Looking at Luo Yao's familiar face, Wang Ye took a deep breath before finally speaking. "No, how did you become the lab director? And our interviewer too? Isn't there some mistake?"
"What happened?"
"Did the world update too fast for me to keep up?"
Wu Tianming looked even more toward Peng Xun, convinced that Peng Xun should have been the interviewer.
Luo Yao fell silent.
He knew there was no way to explain it clearly right now, and he couldn't openly talk about Pangu EDA either. So he simply reminded them, "Are you still interviewing?"
"Yes, yes! How do we do this? Just tell us." Wang Ye had been nervous at first, but the moment he saw Luo Yao, all that tension vanished.
What could possibly feel better than seeing your own classmate during an interview?!
Nothing, okay?
"I'll give you a question, and you answer it."
"Alright, then go ahead!" Wang Ye grinned and winked at him. He had thought Luo Yao would cut him some slack, but Luo Yao was like a block of wood and clearly had no idea what going easy meant.
Luo Yao picked up the questions he had prepared in advance and handed them to the three of them.
The moment Wang Ye looked at his, he nearly fainted.
Prove that there are infinitely many primes of the form 4k+3, where k is an integer.
As everyone knew, the fewer words a math problem had, the bigger the trouble.
Neither Wang Ye nor Wu Tianming was a math prodigy. The moment they saw the problem, they could only stare at each other helplessly. Tang Dong, on the other hand, picked up a pen and began scribbling away.
He had initially doubted that Luo Yao was really the interviewer, but with Xia Qing and another person standing nearby, he figured Luo Yao had no way to pull any tricks, so he cooperated and started solving the problem.
Seeing Wang Ye chewing on his pen, Luo Yao reminded him, "If you don't know how to solve it, you can still write down your approach. I mainly look at the reasoning."
Luo Yao believed that someone with sound logic could still be trained. But if their logic was flawed, then it wasn't a matter of training anymore—they needed to start over from scratch.
Luo Yao gave the three of them half an hour. Once time was up, he asked them to hand in their papers.
Tang Dong had finished long ago. He looked at Luo Yao smugly and said, "I believe my answer will definitely satisfy you this time."
Luo Yao gave him an emotionless glance and accepted his paper.
Then, under Xia Qing's gaze, Wang Ye and Wu Tianming forced themselves to hand in theirs as well.
They had assumed that after handing in their papers, they would go back and wait for notification. Instead, Luo Yao began reading what they had written the moment he received it.
Wu Tianming and Wang Ye instantly grew nervous.
Was he going to announce the results on the spot?!
Did it have to be this humiliating?!
Wu Tianming and Wang Ye thought the usual practice of companies telling applicants to go home and wait for notification was much more normal.
Announcing interview results face-to-face—wasn't he afraid people would object?!
Amid their anxious anticipation, Luo Yao finally raised his head.
"The two of you have no problems with your logic, but you made calculation errors. I can explain them to you in detail later."
Wu Tianming and Wang Ye froze. Did that mean they had passed?
After saying that, Luo Yao turned to Tang Dong and said, "You used the wrong theorem in your solution. You should have used Fermat's Little Theorem here, not Fermat's Last Theorem."
Tang Dong shot to his feet. "Impossible! How could I have gotten it wrong?!"
"First, we assume there are only finitely many primes of the form 4k+3. We can list them and denote them as p1, p2, p3, ..., pk."
"Then, consider the number N = 4p1p2p3pk - 1. Clearly, N is an integer of the form 4k+3, because it is 4k+3 minus 1. Now, we want to prove that N is not divisible by any known prime of the form 4k+3: p1, p2, p3, ..., pk."
"We can use a special case of Fermat's Little Theorem. If p is a prime and a is a positive integer, then a^(p-1)≡1 (mod p). This theorem shows that if a is not a multiple of p, then the remainder when a^(p-1) is divided by p must be 1."
"Then we have N≡(-1)^(p1-1)(-1)^(p2-1)(-1)^(p3-1)(-1)^(pk-1)(mod p1p2p3pk)..."
As he spoke, Luo Yao wrote on the paper.
With every part of his explanation, Tang Dong's expression grew uglier.
Luo Yao's logic was incredibly smooth. One look was enough to tell it was correct.
And the middle section of Tang Dong's own answer really had been somewhat forced.
But Tang Dong didn't think that mattered. "At least my answer is correct. That proves I wasn't wrong!"
Luo Yao had kindly explained where the problem lay, but he hadn't expected Tang Dong to be so stubborn that he refused to admit his mistake.
The people Luo Yao hated most were those who made mistakes and refused to admit them. Math itself had shown Tang Dong that he was wrong, so why wouldn't he admit it?!
How could math lie?
The liar had to be human!
Looking at Tang Dong, who was trying to muddle through, Luo Yao gradually lost his patience.
"I could solve this problem using Fermat's Little Theorem when I was in elementary school, and you still managed to use it wrong?"
Tang Dong's expression turned even uglier upon hearing that.
He could solve it in elementary school?
What kind of joke was that?!
Xia Qing, Wu Tianming, and Wang Ye were all stunned as well. They hadn't expected Luo Yao to speak so bluntly.
"So what if you got the correct result?" Luo Yao continued without stopping.
"Is robbing a bank for five million yuan the same as earning five million yuan through hard work?"
"Sorry, but I'm not someone who only cares about results."
"It may look righteous on the surface, but in reality, this is just a struggle for the right to speak. You're merely trying to claim dominance over the conversation by insisting that you're right."
"For a mature product, if even the process can't be perfected, how can the result possibly be good?"
"You might be able to muddle through a single problem, but you will never get away with that when making products!"
"Customers will never pay for your mistakes."
Luo Yao didn't speak loudly, but every sentence struck straight at Peng Xun and Xia Qing's hearts.
Huaji's products served both individual and corporate clients. People spent real money to receive service, not a terrible experience.
No matter how flashy a product looked on the surface, people still wouldn't pay for it if its system logic didn't work.
Electronic consumer products were already expensive, and the cost of trial and error was high. Once customers got burned, they would become resistant. Getting them to buy again would be dozens of times harder than persuading a new customer to make a purchase.
Thinking of this, Peng Xun nodded repeatedly.
In his view, Luo Yao had spoken a little too bluntly, but his reasoning was crystal clear.
Forget about Luo Yao accepting someone like Tang Dong—if Peng Xun encountered such a person during an interview, he wouldn't hire him either.
He didn't even understand what the job's objective was. Was he joining the lab just to pad his résumé with experience?
At that moment, Tang Dong angrily turned to Xia Qing and said, "Professor Xia, I think Luo Yao is targeting me!"
The moment Xia Qing heard that, she immediately felt this person was beyond saving.
No matter what, accusing the interviewer during an interview was a sign of low emotional intelligence.
Luo Yao's emotional intelligence was low too, but at least he had intelligence to make up for it.
Besides, Luo Yao had explained everything perfectly clearly.
The products developed by the chip laboratory would inevitably need to serve customers. Otherwise, why would Huaji support a laboratory for no reason?
Did they have nothing better to do?
Since the products were meant for customers, then the process truly did need attention.
She hadn't expected Tang Dong to still think Luo Yao was targeting him even after Luo Yao had explained everything.
He was acting like a child.
Someone like that couldn't be entrusted with important responsibilities.
Xia Qing shook her head and said, "I think Luo Yao is right. In this situation, I also believe the process matters more than the result. You came to Huaji to make products, not academic reports floating in the air."
"If research results can't be turned into practical applications, then why should Huaji support this project?"
"Tang Dong, come back with me. Study for a few more years before coming here again."
Xia Qing had put it tactfully, but Tang Dong knew that he had failed this interview.
Tang Dong was unwilling to accept it. He couldn't accept the fact that Luo Yao was better than him and could see further ahead than he could.
Angry as he was, Tang Dong quickly calmed down. He knew he would still be staying at East University of Technology for some time, so now wasn't the time to offend Xia Qing.
Seeing that Tang Dong had fallen silent, Xia Qing prepared to take him back to school. When she asked Luo Yao about Wu Tianming and Wang Ye's interview results, he said, "They both passed."
"Then we'll head back to school first. Wu Tianming and Wang Ye, stay here. From now on, follow Luo Yao's arrangements every day. I'll help you request leave from the school."
After Xia Qing left with Tang Dong, Peng Xun took Wu Tianming and Wang Ye to get their intern employee cards, then handed them over to Luo Yao.
"Santuo, I still feel like I'm dreaming! I don't even know how I passed the interview." Wang Ye clutched his precious intern employee card, unwilling to put it down for even a moment.
Wu Tianming still seemed unable to process it. "I really never expected the interviewer to be you. That brat Tang Dong even told me you had dropped out!"
The moment Wang Ye heard that, he got angry and cursed along with him. "That bastard never says anything good! Good thing he got eliminated!"
"Actually, I didn't favor anyone. You really did answer better than Tang Dong. Your answers weren't perfect, but your reasoning was sound."
Seeing that Luo Yao didn't want to answer how he had become the interviewer, Wang Ye decided not to dwell on it.
He joked, "So, Boss Santu, now that we're all in your lab, what are we researching next?"
"Chip EDA Software."
"That won't be easy. I heard my dad say that a lot of medical equipment still doesn't dare use domestic chips because they're afraid something will go wrong."
"If we make EDA design software, will anyone use it?"
Luo Yao silently looked at his phone. It displayed a text message from Rao Xueling.
"They will. If they don't, they'll regret it." Luo Yao put his phone into his bag.
P.S. Thanks, everyone, for your support and for getting me onto the recommendations! Bonus chapter today! Please vote and keep reading—it helps a lot. The better the numbers, the more bonus chapters this little author can write!
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