Liang Jianyue was thirty, had earned her PhD, and had spent three years working on autonomous driving at a major tech company when she was told on Friday afternoon that she was being "let go."
On Monday, she took the subway to Yizhuang. A private company making reusable rockets had just crashed its third test rocket the previous month. Online, people said it "came down like a drunk."
The interviewer asked her to find the cause of the crash in four hours. She did, and also discovered that the error was in a module the interviewer himself had designed.
That interviewer, Jiang Zhi, was the man who had humiliated her with a single remark at an academic conference six years ago.
"I spent a long time working through the question you asked that year."
Rockets have to come back down to earth. So do people.
