"There's nothing left to say! Absolutely nothing!"
"Alright, alright, that meeting over there is about to end! Everyone, get to work quickly! We've got to be decent folks; if we've taken the money, then we've got to do the job well. Otherwise, the bigwigs will have something to say again!"
"Exactly! Hurry up and work, earn more personal contribution points, and I think I could even buy an apartment in Xilin after graduating!"
"No way, Yu, didn't you say you wanted to develop in Linhai after graduation? Why would you buy a house in Xilin?!"
"That was before they started constructing the Xilin Material Science Research Base. With what we're studying, if we don't take this opportunity to find a calibration job in there, what else can we do? In the future, the salary in this field in Linhai might not be as high as Xilin's."
"Actually, if one could seize the opportunity, it would be best to stay at the university. Of course, going to West Forest Licheng Technology wouldn't be bad either..."
Listening to the discussion outside, Xu Zhengxing let out a breath.
Well, his 900,000 was secure now.
But what irked him was that renegotiating the contract seemed to have nothing to do with their materials lab after all.
Indeed, one fears choosing the wrong profession!
If he had studied remote sensing or information technology back then, it would have been better.
Although calibrating this kind of work really isn't for amateurs, the problem is that the threshold isn't that high anymore. At most, it would take half a year to understand the basic theory and another six months of practice to train a skilled hand.
What's most infuriating is that sometimes, small mistakes in this job can lead to great discoveries. The model relies mainly on computing power, so even if there's a mistake, it just costs a bit of time, but if it simulates some super-performing material, that's a big win.
The only bit of technical content left is probably in experimental replication.
The graduate students with lab experience definitely have the edge over makeshift teams, but the sad part is the industry doesn't need that many people anymore.
After all, when the model gives out lab plans that detail the quenching and annealing temperatures down to the second, there's indeed not much room left for human intervention. This has led to a high degree of replaceability in the field.
The biggest change is probably that their promotions are no longer tied to papers and outcomes, at least for now.
And considering the rapid changes in the industry, the future promotion model is still under study.
It's all quite disheartening to think about.
He's still an associate researcher now, and with his qualifications and contributions, he had hoped to be promoted to full researcher next year or the year after.
But the normal route to promotion has been temporarily blocked, leaving him speechless.
However, thinking of the 900,000 he was about to receive
Xu Zhengxing's mood suddenly improved considerably.
The students outside weren't wrong, after all; staying at the university is quite good. Out there, you'd have to go out of your mind competing for that kind of money, whereas they got it easily!
But these students are still too young to grasp the essence of the problem,
blowing Dou Dou's rhetoric out of proportion.
The real reason the rewards could be implemented according to the announcement was actually because Qiao hadn't attended the meeting at all!
Isn't that attitude clear enough?
Make all the fuss you want, but remember the lessons of the past!
Probably at the start of the meeting, those bigwigs were dumbstruck to see that Qiao Ze hadn't shown up, and a robot had come to represent him. Then wouldn't everything go exactly as Dou Dou said?
Yes, Xu Zhengxing himself didn't realize that he had also joined in the hindsight.
Indeed, before everything was settled, he was just as anxious, fearing that the 900,000 within his grasp would vanish into thin air or would be reduced...
We're all just mortals, after all.