Rebirth 10: I can become stronger by slacking off at the company

Chapter 19 Special Forces Team

"Brother Shen, is there really only fifteen days left?"

After leaving the meeting, Lin Shen sat at his workstation, watering the pothos plant with a slow and deliberate motion. Lu Chuan moved closer to him, his voice low.

"Yes." Lin Shen nodded in affirmation.

"Then... is it too late?" Lu Chuan seemed a little uncertain, but looking at Lin Shen's state, he felt inexplicably at ease.

Lin Shen put down the watering can, turned to look at him, and said, "Lu Chuan, if you have to learn to swim within fifteen days or you'll drown, can you learn?"

"I... I'll probably study really hard."

"It's not about 'fighting desperately'," Lin Shen corrected, "it's about 'learning by any means necessary.' Fighting desperately might mean floundering around aimlessly and eventually sinking from exhaustion. But 'learning by any means necessary' means finding the best coach, studying the most efficient techniques, analyzing your weaknesses, practicing the basics in shallow water, and cultivating courage in deep water."

He paused. "We're like that drowning guy right now. But the good news is, we know how to swim—we have the technology, the product, the team. What we need isn't panic, it's a solution."

Lu Chuan nodded, seemingly understanding but not quite.

"So, now it's time to find a solution!"

Lin Shen pulled up a file on his computer and walked towards Chen Mo.

"Teacher Chen, I have a suggestion regarding the two functions I'm responsible for."

"explain."

"Although I proposed these two features, their implementation requires close collaboration between the front-end and back-end teams." Lin Shen's gaze swept over Wang Hao and Zhang Wei. "I suggest forming a temporary 'special task force.' Lu Chuan and I, one guy from the back-end team, and one guy from the client team will work together on the development. This will reduce physical distance and lower communication costs, just like—"

He thought for a moment: "It's like braiding three separate ropes into one. The ropes are still the same three, but they're much stronger."

Chen Mo hesitated for a moment, then said, "Okay. Wang Hao, send someone; Zhang Wei, send someone too. We'll move over this morning."

Wang Hao looked up from behind the screen, his voice hoarse: "I'll send Xiao Li over; he's most familiar with the messaging protocol."

Zhang Wei nodded: "Cheng Xiangdong, I guess. He's worked on message lists and has experience with client-side state synchronization."

"Okay." Chen Mo looked at Lin Shen, his meaning clear: now that you've coordinated things for him, it's time to come up with your plan.

A temporary special operations team was set up around Lin Shen, and he began to assign his own tasks.

"The three of you," Lin Shen rubbed his hands together, "our mission is essentially to build two small houses."

He drew two crooked squares on the whiteboard.

"This one is called '@Everyone's Hut.' Its function is: when the group owner or administrator sends a special message, this message must 'kick open' the doors of all members, jump onto their faces, and shout 'Look at me!'"

Xiao Li adjusted his glasses: "Technically, it's about defining a new message type, and then the server identifies it and forces a push notification."

"Yes, but not only that." Lin Shen drew a few little figures next to the house. "The difficulty lies in two things: First, how to 'kick down the door' without annoying people? It needs to be obvious, but not scary. Second, if someone locks the door (in 'Do Not Disturb' mode), should we tear the door down, or slip the message under the door?"

Cheng Xiangdong continued, "Visually, we'll design a special style of bubble with vibration or a strong alert. The Do Not Disturb mode... can be made an exception, or it can remain the same; it's a product decision."

"Good question." Lin Shen drew a question mark on the house. "So we need to go to the 'Product Department' and borrow a ruler to measure the force of kicking the door. Leave this to me."

He pointed to the second box:

"This place is called the 'Undo Regret Shop.' Its function is: the person who sent the wrong message can take a 'regret pill' for a short period of time to make that message disappear from everyone's memory—digital memory, of course."

Xiao Li frowned: "Technically, recalling isn't true deletion, it's marking the message as deleted. The original message is still on the server, but it's not displayed on the client. Time synchronization is the biggest problem."

"That's right." Lin Shen drew a crooked timeline in front of the pharmacy. "A sends a message, B and C are online at the same time, and receive it instantly. A recalls it within 5 seconds. Ideally: on B and C's phones, the message disappears with a 'whoosh,' like magic."

"But what if B was in the elevator at the time, with no signal, and only received the message 10 seconds later?" Xiao Cheng raised the key question, "Would he see a message that had already been 'retracted'? That would be even stranger."

Lin Shen drew two parallel timelines on the whiteboard, one labeled "Online" and the other "Offline".

"So our 'regret pills' come in two types." He circled them with different colored pens. "The first type is for people online to 'disappear instantly'; the second type is for people offline to 'never existed'."

Xiao Li's eyes lit up: "You mean... the server needs to make a judgment? If the recipient is online at the time, it will perform real-time recall and synchronization; if they are offline, it will simply not push that message to them the next time they come online?"

"Yes, but there are more complicated situations." Lin Shen drew several more branches on the timeline. "If B goes offline 3 seconds after sending the message, and A retracts it 5 seconds later, and B comes back online 10 seconds later—what should he see?"

The three fell silent.

It seems they didn't expect that developing a small feature would have such a problem.

Lu Chuan seemed to suddenly understand something. "Brother Shen, it's like three people in different time zones trying to light a firecracker at the same time. If the ignition time is a few milliseconds apart, some people will hear a 'bang,' some will only see smoke, and some will have just covered their ears when the firecracker has already exploded."

Lin Shen gave him an approving look, saying that the kid had some talent.

Cheng Xiangdong then asked, "Then what should we do? Unify the time zone?"

"No." Lin Shen shook his head, his eyes sharpening. "We have to accept the existence of 'time differences.' The essence of retracting a message is not to make it 'never happened,' but to make it ineffective 'on a social level.' Therefore, our design principle should be: to make the retracting effect visible to everyone as much as possible, but to accept inconsistencies in a very few marginal cases."

He wrote several large characters on the whiteboard:

"Retraction is not time magic, it's a social contract."

Xiao Li stared at those words for a few seconds, then slowly nodded: "I understand. Technically, we can design it like this..."

Over the next two hours, the three men's discussion moved from abstract metaphors to concrete agreements. Lin Shen used his seemingly eccentric analogies to break down complex technical issues into vivid scenarios, eliciting frequent nods and even occasional knowing smiles from the three men.

As Chen Mo passed by with his water glass, he overheard Lin Shen saying:

"...Therefore, we need to add a 'recall flag' to our messaging protocol, like putting a 'I'm dead' hat on the message. When the client sees this hat, it hides the message. But if the client hasn't seen the message writer yet, and only receives the hat—"

He shrugged and said, "Then hang the hat on the wall. When the person in question arrives, they'll look at the hat, think, 'Oh, I'm dead,' and disappear on their own."

Cheng Xiangdong laughed and said, "What if the person in question never comes?"

"Then the hat will remain forever," Lin Shen laughed. "A cenotaph, to commemorate a message never heard before."

Chen Mo was stunned. He picked up his water glass and walked back to his workstation, muttering under his breath, "These four people... what are they doing... oh well, let them be crazy, I'm going crazy too!"

Having sorted out the logic, Lin Shen walked towards Li Ting.

"Sister Ting."

Li Ting looked up and saw Lin Shen. Her expression paused subtly for a moment before she regained her professional composure: "What is it?"

"Manager Li, we need your approval for the two product details regarding @ and withdrawal." Lin Shen got straight to the point, listing the key issues they had just discussed on a piece of paper and pushing it in front of Li Ting.

Li Ting glanced at it quickly, her brows furrowing slightly: "Should we make an exception for @ messages in Do Not Disturb mode? That is indeed a question."

She thought for a few seconds, then looked at Lin Shen: "What's your opinion?"

"My opinion is..." Lin Shen paused, "It depends on what kind of 'group leader authority' we want to create."

Li Ting raised an eyebrow, signaling him to continue.

"If we compare the group owner to the captain, the members are the sailors." Lin Shen drew the outline of a ship on the table with his finger. "Normally, when the captain shouts through a megaphone, the sailors can choose not to hear—for example, by wearing earplugs. But if the captain sounds an 'alarm,' it means there's an iceberg or pirates—"

He looked at Li Ting: "Should the earplugs be forcibly removed at this point?"

Li Ting paused for a moment, then slowly said, "You mean, @messages are categorized by level? Regular @messages and urgent @messages?"

"That's one way to design it," Lin Shen nodded. "Or it could be simpler: the group owner's @ mentions are always an exception, but the administrators' @ mentions are not. The message this conveys is: the group owner has the 'final emergency call right,' but this right should be used cautiously. If used too much, sailors will think 'the wolf is coming,' and when the iceberg is really there, they may have already learned to ignore the alarm."

Li Ting tapped her fingers lightly on the table, a habit she had when she was deep in thought.

"That makes sense." She finally nodded. "Let's follow this approach: group admins can be mentioned as exceptions, but administrators can not. However, this needs to be clearly explained in the product description to avoid misuse."

"Okay." Lin Shen jotted it down on the paper. "The second question: the time window for withdrawal. How long should it be?"

"How many minutes do competitors usually take?" Li Ting asked in return.

"Most of the time it's 2 minutes, but after discussion, we can make it longer, or even unlimited, as long as the message isn't read."

Li Ting shook her head: "No time limit is too dangerous. Imagine you said something stupid in the group yesterday, and you regret it when you wake up today and try to recall it with one click—the context of the conversation would be completely messed up. Two minutes is reasonable, enough to correct a typo without ruining the historical record of the conversation."

She paused, then added, "Moreover, the recall function itself carries social pressure. Recalling a message is tantamount to publicly admitting 'I said the wrong thing.' The longer the window of opportunity, the longer this awkward exposure lasts. Two minutes is just enough time for you to react and make a decision, without causing you to agonize over it repeatedly."

"Then it's settled." Lin Shen made the decision immediately. "By the way, Sister Ting, you can definitely put this sentence in the feature description."

Li Ting paused for a moment, then gave a very faint smile. It was the first time she realized that this technically skilled newcomer was also good at socializing: "Really? Then I'll write the copy for you once you've finished the feature."

"The third question," Lin Shen continued, "is that after a successful retraction, should we leave a trace? For example, 'So-and-so retracted a message'?"

"You must keep it," Li Ting answered quickly this time. "It's part of the social contract. If you exercise your right to withdraw, you have to bear the public record of 'you withdrew it.' Otherwise, the conversation will become like a history book that can be arbitrarily altered, and who would dare to believe the contents?"

Lin Shen nodded and wrote "leave a trace" on the paper.

Having confirmed all the issues, he put away his pen and paper and prepared to leave.

"Lin Shen," Li Ting suddenly called out to him.

Lin Shen turned around.

Li Ting looked at him with a complicated expression: "At the last version planning meeting... your point of view was correct. The data feedback is back, and there are indeed a considerable number of users who have concerns about 'read' status."

She paused for a moment, then softened her voice: "Thank you for your persistence."

"Thank you for your professionalism, Sister Ting. Teacher Chen said that our team has a great atmosphere, which I really like."

After saying that, Lin Shen left. Li Ting sat in her seat, watching Lin Shen's retreating figure as he walked towards the special forces team, and suddenly remembered what Zhou Botao had said to her yesterday:

"Lin Shen's way of thinking is quite different from ours. But sometimes, that difference is the key to breaking the deadlock. As a product manager, you need to learn to utilize this 'difference' instead of resisting it."

She let out a long breath and looked back at the requirements document on the screen.

Perhaps it's time to change our approach.

Lin Shen's special operations team is making rapid progress.

By evening, the basic shape could already be seen.

Lu Chuan went to run tests, Xiao Li was writing server-side message protocol extensions, Cheng Xiangdong was debugging client-side recall animation effects, and Lin Shen insisted that "recall should not simply disappear, but should have an elegant exit, like a magician's handkerchief disappearing with a 'whoosh'."

Lin Shen himself is currently writing the core state machine for the withdrawal logic.

His fingers flew across the keyboard.

Xiao Li, standing next to him, looked up and rubbed his sore eyes: "Brother Shen, the protocol extension is finished. Can you take a look?"

"Okay." Lin Shen leaned closer, quickly scanned the code, and pointed out several possible boundary cases. "Here, what if there's a message ID conflict? And here, the timing of the revocation command and normal messages..."

Xiao Li listened and nodded, quickly making the changes.

Cheng Xiangdong also chimed in: "The client-side animation is all set up. What do you think of this 'whoosh' effect?"

On the screen, a message bubble disappears with a smooth shrinking animation, as if it's being sucked into an invisible point.

"Not bad." Lin Shen nodded. "But add a faint, semi-transparent afterimage that lasts for 0.1 seconds, so that people feel the 'disappearance process' rather than it disappearing in an instant."

"That makes sense." Cheng Xiangdong sat back down and continued adjusting.

Just then, a suppressed gasp suddenly came from the other end of the office area.

It's Wang Hao.

"What's wrong?" Chen Mo strode out of his small office.

Wang Hao's face turned pale as he pointed at the screen: "The voice encoding... the parameters are messed up. The generated voice file is now 30% larger than before, but the sound quality is even worse."

The air froze instantly.

Voice functionality is the core component of Light and is planned for update in version 0.9. This is one of Light's key advantages against micro-mail.

But now, it seems there's a problem...

Chen Mo quickly walked behind Wang Hao, staring at the data and waveforms on the screen with a furrowed brow.

"When was it discovered?"

"Just now," Wang Hao's voice trembled slightly, "I tried all the known optimization combinations, but none of them worked. In fact... the more I adjusted them, the worse it got."

Those who remained in the office area stopped what they were doing and looked this way.

Lin Shen stood up and walked over.

"Brother Wang, may I take a look?"

Wang Hao glanced at him and silently moved aside.

Lin Shen sat down and quickly browsed the code and test data.

His gaze lingered on several key parameters, his brain racing.

[Moyu Coin Balance: 8.2]

[Use the "Inspiration Capture" skill? Consumes 2 Lazy Coins.]

"use."

In an instant, the chaotic data, waveforms, and code logic were automatically categorized, associated, and reorganized in his mind. Fragments of memories from his past life working on voice issues in the WeChat team were awakened and collided with the predicament before him.

Ten seconds later, he opened his eyes.

"Brother Wang," he pointed to a line of parameters on the screen, "this isn't turned up, it's turned down."

Wang Hao was taken aback: "What?"

"This parameter controls the attack threshold of the psychoacoustic model." Lin Shen spoke quickly but clearly. "You might think that turning it up will make the sound 'fuller,' but in reality, in the low bitrate encoding environment of mobile devices, turning it down will preserve more transient information—those parts that make the sound feel 'crisp.'"

He paused, then used an analogy: "It's like when you're making soup. You might think that adding more salt will make it more flavorful, but actually, the key to whether the soup is fresh or not lies in the heat and that tiny pinch of sugar to enhance the flavor."

Wang Hao stared at the parameter, then looked at Lin Shen, his expression shifting from doubt to realization.

"I'll give it a try." He sat back down, quickly made the changes, and rerun the coding test.

Five minutes later, a new waveform was generated.

The sound quality score jumped from 68 to 82, while the file size actually decreased by 5%.

Wang Hao let out a long breath, his shoulders slumping.

"Thanks, Lin Shen." His voice was weary, but also filled with sincere gratitude.

Chen Mo patted Lin Shen on the shoulder without saying a word, but the approval in his eyes was self-evident.

Lin Shen smiled and walked back to his seat.

In the dim light of the screen, he gently typed a line of annotation:

"Retraction is not about erasing mistakes, but about giving an opportunity to correct them. This applies to technology, and it applies to life."

Save.

Compile.

by.