Chapter 5: The Interview Gauntlet of Doom

“Kenji-san, do you ever tire of being so extraordinarily skilled?” Kai Nakamura asked earnestly, jotting meticulous notes on a holographic tablet.

Kenji Yamamoto, known at HeroTech Solutions merely as an unremarkable hoodie-wearing developer who somehow always had perfect code reviews, shrugged listlessly. He stared into the depths of his lukewarm coffee from Infinite Loop Café. “I guess. It’s not like I ever get asked to do anything interesting. Just trivial stuff.”

A sudden commotion erupted from the Developer Corner. Lucas Hart, his hair fashionably disheveled, bolted upright, almost knocking over his ‘I ❤️ Frameworks’ mug.

“Everyone, emergency meeting!” Lucas shouted dramatically, eyes wide. “We have… a situation.”

Within moments, the entire HeroTech Solutions team gathered in the Main Conference Room, their faces tense.

Emily Chen, the meticulous DBA, anxiously twisted her stress ball. “Did the database crash again? Is it my replication scripts?”

“No, way worse,” Lucas said gravely. “Corporate has sent us an impossible technical interview candidate. A coder so ruthless, he’s left even senior engineers sobbing. He destroyed the codebases of three startups during his interviews!”

“Interview candidate?” Emily asked, confused. “How can an interview cause that much damage?”

“He insists on live pair-programming during the interview,” Lucas explained, wiping sweat nervously. “And then…he brutally criticizes every line of code, injecting so much doubt into the coders’ minds they lose confidence forever.”

Gasps filled the conference room.

“Who is this monster?” someone whispered anxiously.

“They call him… The Interview Gauntlet,” Lucas declared dramatically. “His real name is Hiroshi Tanaka.”

Kenji yawned. “Sounds annoying. Can’t someone else handle it?”

“No, Kenji,” Emily said gently. “He specifically requested you. Apparently, he’s heard rumors of your perfect code reviews.”

Kai stood up solemnly. “Sensei! You must accept this challenge to defend the honor of HeroTech Solutions.”

Kenji sighed deeply. “Fine. Whatever.”

Minutes later, Kenji sat in a cramped interview room across from Hiroshi Tanaka. Tanaka adjusted his glasses ominously.

“I’ve heard of you, Kenji Yamamoto. They say you’re a genius, but I’ll be the judge of that,” Tanaka sneered, fingers steepled.

“Sure,” Kenji replied blandly, opening his laptop.

“Let’s start easy,” Tanaka smirked. “Implement a simple algorithm to reverse a linked list.”

Kenji typed silently for twenty seconds.

“Done.”

Tanaka blinked. “No edge cases? No memory leaks?”

“None,” Kenji replied.

Tanaka reviewed Kenji’s PR, desperate to find flaws. Nothing. The code was…perfect.

“Luck,” Tanaka muttered. “Let’s move on. Now, implement a concurrency-safe producer-consumer queue—”

“Done,” Kenji said immediately, pushing another flawless PR.

Tanaka stared, eyes narrowing. “Fine. But you’ll fail here. Implement an optimized distributed cache invalidation algorithm with eventual consistency—”

“Already merged,” Kenji said, checking his Slack notifications. “Lucas approved it instantly.”

Tanaka’s breathing quickened. “Impossible! No one writes code that fast!”

“I do,” Kenji shrugged.

Outside the interview room, Lucas and Emily nervously paced.

“He’s been in there too long,” Emily fretted. “What if Tanaka broke him?”

Kai stood calmly, eyes closed. “Sensei cannot be broken. His code is unbreakable.”

Suddenly, the door slammed open. Tanaka staggered out, pale and sweating.

“What happened?” Lucas gasped.

“He…he’s not human,” Tanaka stammered. “Every algorithm, every edge case…perfectly solved before I finished speaking. It’s… impossible.”

“So, he’s hired?” Emily asked timidly.

“Hired?” Tanaka laughed bitterly. “I would never dare insult him by offering a mere job. Kenji Yamamoto is beyond coding interviews. He’s… unstoppable.”

Kenji emerged behind Tanaka, yawning. “Are we done? That was boring.”

Lucas clapped Kenji’s shoulder. “Another lucky day, Kenji! Good thing you got easy questions.”

Emily nodded. “Yeah, everyone knows reversing linked lists is trivial.”

Kai stared in disbelief. “But…it wasn’t luck. Sensei’s talent—”

“Come on, Kai,” Emily chuckled softly. “Nobody’s that good. Kenji just got lucky again.”

Kai sighed deeply, jotting down notes. “Luck…again.”

That evening, as the team left for the day, Emily’s pager beeped urgently. She gasped.

“Oh no…the ancient legacy codebase just triggered a massive production outage. The COBOL scripts are replicating infinitely!”

Lucas paled. “Not again!”

Only Kenji looked interested, eyes finally sparkling.

“Infinite COBOL recursion loops,” he whispered, cracking his knuckles. “Finally, a real challenge.”

Kai watched his sensei with admiration. “Sensei…you’re smiling.”

Kenji nodded, a slight grin emerging. “Maybe today won’t be so boring after all.”