Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

June 10th, 11:30 PM.

Hong Jun, head of the Market Department; Zhou Xia, head of the R&D department; and Xie Rui, head of the testing team, all lived near Fast Taxi’s headquarters. After receiving a risk control text alert, they immediately rushed to the office.

Meanwhile, Zhang Yunni knew she had made a huge mess, and she looked fraught with worry.

Usually, for a feature that hasn’t gone through testing, taking it offline quickly is all that’s needed, provided it’s caught in time.

But after a ten-minute delay, the number of users participating in the Yanjing Region had already surpassed fifteen thousand.

”Why are so many users opening the app this late at night!” Zhang Yunni grimaced. With Q2 about to end, she knew her quarterly bonus was gone, and her promotion in the second half of the year was likely off the table too.

”What’s the situation?” Hong Jun, the first to arrive, asked Zhang Yunni.

”I’ve hidden the event for now. I did a full check of the red packet distribution, collection, and usage processes in the test environment, and there were no bugs. Compatibility is fine, too; it runs normally on all mainstream phone models, browsers, and operating systems.”

From 10:00 to 11:00 PM, Zhang Yunni hadn’t just been sitting there in a daze. First, she hid the ”Fast Red Packet” event in the production environment, then she rushed to run tests.

If the functionality and compatibility were both normal, her responsibility would be significantly reduced.

”What’s the total number of red packets distributed and the number of users who participated?” Hong Jun continued to ask.

”The misconfiguration lasted for 11 minutes and 39 seconds. The total amount was 124,000 yuan, affecting 15,000 users, 3,400 of whom were new,” Zhang Yunni quickly replied.

”The user acquisition numbers are that good?” Hong Jun was stunned for a moment. His brow smoothed out, and the heavy weight on his chest was finally lifted.

’Good, no bugs. That means the incident’s severity can be downgraded.’

To put it bluntly, this situation could be seen as either a huge deal or a minor one. On the one hand, Zhang Yunni’s unauthorized operation had caused the company a loss of 124,000 yuan—grounds for termination. On the other hand, she had simply launched an event, originally scheduled for June 12th, two days early.

Just then, Zhou Xia and Xie Rui arrived. With no time to blame Zhang Yunni, they plopped into their chairs and started getting people online to conduct comprehensive functional, boundary, and compatibility testing on the ”Fast Red Packet” event.

Gao Qiang, who was in charge of the Yanjing Branch’s operations, reported to Cheng Weixing the moment he got the news, then rushed to the office.

Fortunately, the risk control system had caught it in time, preventing any major losses.

As soon as Gao Qiang arrived at the office, he beckoned to Zhang Yunni and led her to a conference room.

This incident might have been an unintentional mistake, or it might have been deliberate.

In the world of internet business wars, it wasn’t unheard of for competitors to plant corporate spies in each other’s companies.

”President Gao, I’m sorry. This was my fault,” Zhang Yunni said, her head hung low, her expression a mixture of fear and anxiety.

Gao Qiang stared intently at Zhang Yunni. She looked exhausted, her eyes were bloodshot, and her expression was a mask of tension and fear.

”The test environment and the production environment use different backend links. Why did you configure the wrong one?” Gao Qiang demanded coldly.

”The links are different, but the backend UI is identical. I was logged into both backends at the same time and wasn’t paying attention when I switched between them,” Zhang Yunni explained weakly.

Gao Qiang frowned, pushed the door open, and shouted, ”Xie Rui, bring a laptop in here.”

”Okay, President Gao, right away!” Xie Rui answered, walking into the conference room with a laptop.

”Pull up the system backends for the production and test environments, separately,” Gao Qiang ordered.

Xie Rui nodded. His fingers flew across the keyboard, and in less than twenty seconds, he had both the production and test environment backends logged in on the browser.

Gao Qiang took the laptop and stared intently at the screen, constantly switching between the production and test environments.

Aside from the link having an extra ”test” suffix, the page UI, including the function menus, was identical. It was indeed easy to mix them up.

After three minutes, Gao Qiang stood up and sighed. ”Alright,” he said with resignation. ”I’ll explain this to President Cheng for you. The final decision on how to handle it, however, will still come from headquarters.”

He knew that recently, because of the subsidy war with Tiantian and DiDi Dache, the folks in the product department hadn’t had a day off in two weeks.

Mistakes at work were understandable under the circumstances, but a mistake was still a mistake, and punishment was unavoidable.

After all, the company paid overtime at 1.5 and 2 times the normal rate; they hadn’t shorted anyone a single dime.

”Thank you, President Gao,” Zhang Yunni said, filled with gratitude.

”Go home and get some rest for now,” Gao Qiang said with a wave of his hand. The exhaustion on her face wasn’t something she could fake.

Zhang Yunni opened her mouth, but swallowed the words she was about to say. She wanted to wait for the incident analysis report before leaving, but she knew it wouldn’t be sorted out anytime soon.

As for going home to rest?

The thought never even crossed her mind. After leaving the conference room, she headed straight for the testing team’s area and voluntarily joined their work.

1:00 AM.

Hong Jun walked up to Gao Qiang and explained quietly, ”President Gao, there are no issues with the red packet feature, and the customer service team is placating the users. The current problem is that this batch of red packets doesn’t become active until midnight on June 12th.”

Gao Qiang glanced at the time and urged them, ”Give each of the affected users a 10-yuan ride voucher with no minimum spend as compensation. Alright, it’s getting late. Good work, everyone. Let’s all go home for now.”

”Hong Jun, Xie Rui, Zhou Xia... I’m so sorry for dragging you all into working overtime. I’ll treat everyone to KFC tomorrow,” Zhang Yunni said, her face a picture of guilt as she bowed repeatedly in apology.