Chapter 3The Core Developer's Counterattack

The investors arrived right on time.

There were two of them, a man and a woman.

The man was in his fifties, with graying hair and gold-rimmed glasses. His business card read: Vanguard Capital, Partner, Richard Sterling.

The woman was around thirty, with a sharp bob and a black suit. Her card read: Vanguard Capital, Investment Manager, Olivia Vance.

David was all smiles, practically fawning as he rushed to shake their hands.

"Mr. Sterling, Ms. Vance, thank you for coming all this way!"

Richard nodded, his gaze sweeping the room before finally settling on me.

"And this is?"

David hesitated for a fraction of a second before quickly introducing me. "This is our technical staff, Fiona."

He said "technical staff," not "core developer."

Richard simply gave a noncommittal "Hmm" and said nothing more.

Olivia, however, lingered on me for a moment.

Her gaze stayed on my face for a few seconds, her brows furrowing slightly as if she were trying to recall something.

But she also remained silent.

Once everyone was seated, Chloe stood up and walked over to the projection screen.

"Hello everyone, I am Chloe, the project lead for this initiative. I will now present our progress—"

Her voice was sugary sweet, and the PowerPoint was undeniably beautiful, using trendy Morandi color palettes.

I sat quietly in the corner, listening to her.

"Our core algorithm utilizes a hybrid architecture combining collaborative filtering and deep learning. In cold-start scenarios, we enhance precision through user profile completion—"

She spoke fluently, rattling off technical jargon one after another.

I knew she had copied every single word from my documentation.

Because she made a mistake on one specific term.

She said "completion," but my original text used the word "compensation."

The meanings are entirely different in this context.

For the cold-start problem in collaborative filtering, we used a profile compensation mechanism, not completion.

I kept my mouth shut.

I just listened.

Chloe presented for fifteen minutes. Richard remained completely expressionless the entire time.

When she finished, Richard flipped through the printed materials in front of him and suddenly spoke.

"Manager Chloe, what loss function does your recommendation model use?"

Chloe froze.

"Loss function..." she repeated, her eyes darting around frantically. "It's the... the function that calculates the error..."

Richard waited.

Sweat began to bead on Chloe's forehead.

"Specifically... regarding the technical details..."

She turned her head and looked at me, her eyes screaming for help.

The conference room was so quiet you could hear the low hum of the air conditioning.

I didn't move.

I just sat in the corner, exactly as she had instructed, "You don't need to say anything."

David's face had already completely changed color.

He let out another dry laugh. "Mr. Sterling, the technical details are quite complex. We can organize a detailed document and send it over to you later—"

"No need." Richard cut him off, turning his gaze to me. "Ms. Fiona, you are the technical staff, correct? You answer."

Everyone's eyes snapped to me.

Chloe's face went white.

David looked like he was going to be sick.

I slowly stood up, keeping one hand firmly on the back of my chair for support.

The pain from my incision was making me break out in a cold sweat, but my posture was rock solid.

"Mr. Sterling, our loss function utilizes a BPR loss combined with a second-order regularization term."

I paused for a second before continuing.

"BPR stands for Bayesian Personalized Ranking, which is used to address ranking problems in implicit feedback scenarios. Building upon this, we incorporated a negative sampling strategy, adjusting the negative sampling rate from the standard 1:5 ratio to 1:20, significantly improving the model's coverage of fringe users."

A spark of genuine interest lit up Richard's eyes.

"With a 1:20 negative sampling rate, how do you handle overfitting?"

"We implemented a two-layer approach. First, we applied a dropout rate of 0.3 in the embedding layer. Second, we performed time slicing on the training set, using the first six months of data for training and the last two months for validation, effectively preventing data leakage."

Richard nodded slowly, then asked, "Have you conducted live A/B testing? What were the results?"

"We have. The click-through rate increased by 23%, and the conversion rate increased by 17%. The testing period ran for two weeks, with a sample size of 500,000."

I spoke at a steady, measured pace, every number crystal clear.

This data was burned into my brain.

Because I was the one who generated every single bit of it.

Richard set the documents down and leaned back in his chair.

He looked at Chloe, then looked at me.

"David," he finally spoke, "this Ms. Fiona is your actual core developer, isn't she?"

David's face flushed a deep, embarrassed red.

"Mr. Sterling, Fiona is indeed a core technical team member, but she is currently on maternity leave, so—"

"Maternity leave?" Richard interrupted. "Isn't she sitting right here?"

The conference room descended into a deathly, suffocating silence.

I watched Chloe lower her head, staring fixedly at the tabletop.

Olivia, sitting next to Richard, suddenly spoke up. "Ms. Fiona, forgive me for asking, but how many days postpartum are you?"

I replied, "Seven days."

The color drained from Olivia's face.

"C-section or natural birth?"

"C-section."

She took a sharp intake of breath and turned to look at Richard.

Richard didn't say a word, but his expression had grown dangerously dark.

David, realizing the situation was spiraling out of control, desperately tried to do damage control.

"Fiona just has an incredibly strong sense of responsibility. We tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted on coming—"

"David," Richard cut him off sharply. "We invest in projects, but more importantly, we invest in people. Forcing an employee who is seven days postpartum from a major surgery to attend a presentation—is this indicative of your company's management style?"

David opened his mouth but couldn't force a single word out.

I stood there in complete silence.

Honestly, my incision was hurting so badly I could barely stand.

But I endured it.

I wanted them to see this scene unfold with perfect clarity.