Chapter 3: Chapter 2

"You... You... You're telling me... What?"

"I automated it! See, see, see!" CK turned his laptop away from him so it was now facing the baffled Joppe. 

"Wait... No... I'm... You what?" Joppe rubbed his temples until it almost bled. 

"This button here. Try clicking."

Joppe reluctantly clicked the giant red button on the screen. 

Suddenly, a chrome window popped up from nowhere and hundreds of tabs opened at the same time. But not a second later, all the tabs were closed, leaving the then-empty-spreadsheet now filled with numbers. 

All the flashing colours and images made Joppe dizzy. 

"O-Okay, CK. Go back to your seat. I'll... I'll have a look later-"

"So what I did is I pulled the data from the list of twelve startups you gave me. Oh and a few hundred more but that's besides the point. Anyway, I programmed a web scraping bot that gathers all, and I mean it, all of their financial data available online. And, hey, Joppe, did you know what I did with the data? Did you know? I plugged them all into a giant neural network. What I ended up with, is a highly accurate financial model for our company!"

"A... a neural network? How did you even train the neural network? What happened to my financial model?"

"I knew you would ask that!" CK's excitement was equivalent to dread for Joppe. "I trained the neural network using my university's server! And for your model, I've actually done some analysis, and well it's... sufficient to say the least, but my model is a whole 12% more accurate! And if I run this..."

Once again, dozens of web pages opened at the same time on the laptop. Because there are less web pages this time than before, Joppe managed to catch a glimpse of a few of them. LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, The Verge... Familiar interfaces to a senior financial analyst like Joppe. 

"Voila! Sentiment analysis on social media, news article, and the company's very own blog website. On a side note, I tracked the traffic on the company's blog using a third-party software but that's another story."

"I... I need a break... Seriously, I really can't take this..."

"Except you can! Because with these data accounted, the model performs even better. Empirically, the 95% confidence interval for our net profit is as narrow as 1k Euros! Of course, I do acknowledge that the confidence interval exponentially widens as time goes on, but I will do more analysis on that to make sure it performs even better. Plus, the way I integrated these data into the model is still not ideal. I might need your input on that. Do you think differencing the time series once is enough to detrend it? Argh, but how would we know to difference it once or twice? I really need your help."

"CK."

"Yes?"

"Leave."

"I'm... I'm sorry? Can you repeat that?"

"Get out. I don't want to see you today."

"But... the model! I was so excited to show you about it!"

"Please. You're about to cross my line."

"No! The model will aid the company. I... I promise! If there is anything you don't understand I don't mind spending time to teach you-"

"Get the hell out of my office!" A loud roar shook the entire floor. "And leave the laptop here! It's company property."

"Wait... Does this mean..."

"If you don't leave now, then yes."

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CK carefully put the laptop onto Joppe's desk. In it contained the hard work he spent his free time doing. Yes, he knew that all of these were outside his job responsibility, so that's why he used his free time to do these. There were quite a few sleepless nights where he worked on the neural network alone. 

Staring at that laptop which was still on automation, CK had the hunch that he would never touch the laptop again. 

"I'm..." Say that you're sorry, CK. 

"I'm really..." Sorry. Sorry. It's not that hard. 

"Joppe, I just..." Am very sorry. CK, say it! 

"I'm not saying sorry," CK muttered, but just loud enough for Joppe to hear it. 

A few days later in CK's home, he received an email from Joppe. 

"This letter is to inform you that as of 14/07/20XX, our company, TechBits, are terminating your employment contract that was executed on...

"...The reasons for such are listed as follow:

"1. Insubordination

"2. Using third-party hardware/software/servers without authorisation

"3. Leaking confidential information

"Since you have violated the clauses stated in your employment contract, the company is not required to give a month's notice before terminating your contract. For more information, please refer your employment contract..."

And so, CK was fired. 

"Really? After all I've done?" CK furrowed his eyebrows. "I just hope those people actually know how to use my bots and model. I should've worded those docstrings properly, shouldn't I?"

Not even getting fired, but having people not understand his bots and model was the thing that bothered CK the most.

"It was a pretty good tech company too... What a shame..." Slowly but surely, CK realised the gravity of the situation. This was his second internship. In his first internship, although his manager also had some problems with him, that internship ended without too much trouble. This was his first time getting fired. 

"Is this going to look bad on my CV? What if they ask me if I was ever fired from a company?" CK let out a deep sigh. "Well, I guess no use crying over spilt milk. Time to apply for new internships."

CK applied to over forty internships overnight, drafting a new cover letter and even introducing key words in his CV for each company. However, a handful of the companies asked whether there was a previous case of early contract termination. He answered all these questions truthfully and with utmost transparency as well, including the reasons for getting fired. Needless to say, he didn't receive a reply from those companies. 

Why did he not lie, you ask? Who knows. Maybe CK was an honest person at core. Or maybe CK hated lying. Or maybe CK was too prideful to conceal anything about him. But the reason did not matter, because his unwillingness or maybe even inability to lie would in the future cause him a lot of trouble working in the only company which gave him a job offer. The influencer agency Stage Fright. 

 

Woohoo, CK's first appearance in the story! It's the second chapter and there's already a lot of Maths... I'll dial it back a bit. Remember to heart and comment before moving on!

Maths extension: 

For some Maths-heavy chapters, I'll include this part so people can learn more if they want. Skip this if you don't want extra Maths detail. Before getting into the Maths part, I would just like to say that I study Maths in university, so to an extent I know what I'm talking about. But obviously, don't trust everything I say. 

CK's use of neural network and sentiment analysis is certainly possible in creating an accurate financial model. But in reality, financial models should be as simple as possible, even if it means sacrificing accuracy. After all, financial models should be read and understood by humans. We cannot keep track of tens of millions of parameters, can we? A good model doesn't just offer an accurate prediction, but more importantly lets you understand why the numbers go up or go down. CK's model is very "correct", but in the context of a company's financial model, it is not suitable. 

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