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My colleague Julius

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MY COLLEAGUE JULIUS
by Ploum on 2024-12-23

https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

Traduction en français
https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-fr.html

Do you know Julius? You certainly know who I’m talking about!

I met Julius at university. A measured, friendly young man. He always 
wore a smile on his face. What struck me about Julius, aside from his 
always perfectly ironed clothes, was his ability to listen. He never 
interrupted me. He accepted gratefully when he was wrong. He answered 
questions without hesitation.

He attended all the classes and often asked for our notes to "compare 
with his own" as he said. Then came the infamous computer project. As a 
team of students, we had to code a fairly complex system software using 
the C language. Julius took part in all our meetings but I don’t 
remember witnessing him write a single line of code. In the end, I think 
he did the report formatting. Which, to his credit, was very well done.

Because of his charisma and elegance, Julius was the obvious choice to 
give the final presentation.

He was so self-confident during the presentation that the professors 
didn’t immediately notice the problem. He had started talking about the 
C virtual machine used in our project. He even showed a slide with an 
unknown logo and several random screenshots which had nothing to do with 
anything known in computing.

For those who don’t know about computing, C is a compiled language. It 
doesn’t need a virtual machine. Talking about a C virtual machine is 
like talking about the carburettor of an electric vehicle. It doesn’t 
make sense.

I stood up, interrupted Julius and improvised by saying it was just a 
joke. “Of course!” said Julius, looking at me with a big smile. The jury 
was perplexed. But I saved the day.

Throughout our studies, I’ve heard several professors discuss the 
“Julius case.” Some thought he was very good. Others said he was lacking 
a fundamental understanding. Despite failing some classes, he ended up 
graduating with me.

After that, our paths went apart for several years.

I’ve been working for nearly a decade at a large company where I had 
significant responsibilities. One day, my boss announced that recruiters 
had found a rare gem for our team. An extraordinary resume, he told me.

From the perfect cut of his suit, I recognised Julius before seeing his 
face.

Julius! My old classmate!

If I had aged, he had matured. Still charismatic and self-assured. He 
now sported a slightly graying three-day beard that gave him an air of 
wise authority. He genuinely seemed happy to see me.

We talked about the past and about our respective careers. Unlike me, 
Julius had never stayed very long in the same company. He usually left 
after a year, sometimes less. His resume was impressive: he had gained 
various experiences, touched on all areas of computing. Each time, he 
moved up in skills and salary. I would later discover that, while we 
held similar positions, he had been hired at twice my salary. He also 
got bonuses I didn’t even know existed.

But I wasn’t aware of this aspect when we started working together. At 
first, I tried to train him on our projects and internal processes. I 
assigned him tasks on which he would ask me questions. Many questions, 
not always very relevant ones. With his characteristic calm and his 
signature smile.

He took initiatives. Wrote code or documentation. He had answers to all 
the questions we could ask, regardless of the field. Sometimes it was 
very good, often mediocre or, in some cases, complete nonsense. It took 
us some time to understand that each of Julius’s contributions needed to 
be completely reviewed and corrected by another team member. If it was 
not our field of expertise, it had to be checked externally. We quickly 
had a non-written rule stating that no document from Julius should leave 
the team before being proofread by two of us.

But Julius excelled in formatting, presentation, and meeting management. 
Regularly, my boss would come up to me and say, “We’re really lucky to 
have this Julius! What talent! What a contribution to the team!”

I tried, without success, to explain that Julius understood nothing of 
what we were doing. That we had reached the point where we sent him to 
useless meetings to get rid of him for a few hours. But even that 
strategy had its limits.

It took us a week of crisis management meetings to calm down a customer 
disappointed by an update of our software. We had to explain that, if 
Julius had promised that the interface would be simplified to have only 
one button that would do exactly what the client wanted, there was a 
misunderstanding. That aside from developing a machine that read minds, 
it was impossible to meet his complex needs with just one button.

We decided to act when I heard Julius claim to a customer, panicked at 
the idea of being "hacked", that, for security reasons, our servers 
connected to the Internet had no IP address. We had to forbid him from 
meeting a client alone.

For those who don’t know about computing, the "I" in IP address stands 
for Internet. The very definition of the Internet is the network of 
interconnected computers that have an IP address.

Being on the Internet without an IP address is like claiming to be 
reachable by phone without having a phone number.

The team was reorganised so that one of us was always responsible for 
keeping Julius occupied. I never wanted to speak ill of him because he 
was my friend. An exasperated programmer had no such restraint and 
exposed the problem to my boss. Who responded by accusing her of 
jealousy, as he was very satisfied with Julius’s work. She was 
reprimanded and resigned shortly after.

Fortunately, Julius announced that he was leaving because he had 
received an offer he couldn’t refuse. He brought cakes to celebrate his 
last day with us. My boss and the entire human resources department were 
genuinely sad to see him go.

I said goodbye to Julius and never saw him again. On his LinkedIn 
account, which is very active and receives hundreds of comments, the 
year he spent with us became an incredible experience. He hasn’t 
exaggerated anything. Everything is true. But his way of turning words 
and a kind of poorly concealed modesty gives the impression that he 
really contributed a lot to the team. He later became the deputy CEO 
then interim CEO of a startup that had just been acquired by a 
multinational. An economic newspaper wrote an article about him. After 
that episode, he joined the team of a secretary of state. A meteoric 
career!

On my side, I tried to forget Julius. But, recently, my boss came to me 
with a huge smile. He had met the salesperson from a company that had 
amazed him with its products. Artificial intelligence software that 
would, I quote, boost our productivity!

I now have an artificial intelligence software that helps me code. 
Another that helps me search for information. A third one that 
summarises and writes my emails. I am not allowed to disable them.

At every moment, every second, I feel surrounded by Julius. By dozens of 
Juliuses.

I have to work in a mist of Juliuses. Every click on my computer, every 
notification on my phone seems to come from Julius. My life is hell 
paved with Juliuses.

My boss came to see me. He told me that the team’s productivity was 
dangerously declining. That we should use artificial intelligence more 
effectively. That we risked being overtaken by competitors who, without 
a doubt, were using the very latest artificial intelligence. That he had 
hired a consultant to install a new time and productivity management 
artificial intelligence.

I started to cry. “Another Julius!” I sobbed.

My boss sighed. He patted my shoulder and said, “I understand. I miss 
Julius too. He would certainly have helped us get through this difficult 
time.”

Picture by Max Gruber/Better Images of AI
https://betterimagesofai.org/images?artist=MaxGruber&title=Clickworker3d-printed



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