[S6E17] Their Story ((BETTER))

As the hospital's attorney, Ted gets involved in an argument between Dr. Kelso and the nurses, led by Carla, who demand a cost-of-living raise. Kelso refuses, because he knows that the nurses would never strike because they care about the patients. In response, the nurses initiate a slowdown. Dr. Kelso then tells Ted that he will have to fire three nurses to give them their raises. Ted attempts to get the nursing staff to stop the slowdown, but they are "too busy" being slow. In the end, Ted gives the nurses some leverage by anonymously getting them an invoice for needles that reveals that Sacred Heart has been purchasing $50,000 worth of needles for $50 for the past thirty years. The nurses then blackmail Dr. Kelso, and he gives them their raise, and keeps them all employed.

[S6E17] Their Story

In Stringer, Mississippi, inmates are being made to prepare and fortify a prison farm for a series of devastating tornadoes, which are due to pass through within the next few hours. An argument breaks out between Wilson "Pinker" Rawls (John Diehl) and another inmate, causing Pinker to nail the other prisoner's hand to a wall. After being reported to the warden for the incident, Pinker is made to sit through the tornado in a tiny outdoor shack. Afterwards, the prisoners and guards emerge from their shelters and discover that the shack has been totally destroyed. One of the guards later finds the warden's body split in half around the waist, propping his office door shut from the inside.

After the episode was submitted, several re-writes were requested. Originally, the story was supposed to take place in a "conventional" state prison located in Oklahoma, but because securing such a set would cause the episode to go over budget, the writers decided to set the story on a Mississippi prison farm instead. Another scene, originally scripted to take place at a motel, featured Pinker taking a short cut through a wall. This scene was cut not only because it proved too expensive, but also because the writers were hoping "to shift the episode's emphasis from the supernatural to the emotional."[3]

Critical reception to the episode was mostly negative. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode two stars out of five, calling it "The X-Files at its most generic".[8] The two noted that the episode had only one good visual gimmick; the ability for Pinker to walk through walls, which, they argue, was never exploited to its full extent.[8] Ultimately, the two concluded that, "'Trevor' is just a bit too disposable and routine to hold much interest".[8] Emily VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club awarded the episode a "C" and wrote that the story "almost works", but that it "focuses too much on the 'monster' and not enough on Mulder and Scully."[9] She called the finished product "something that has a very manufactured quality to it".[9] Furthermore, she criticized that the title of the episode - given that half-way through the episode no one called Trevor has turned up and the antagonist is not motivated by money - suggests the idea that he "must have a son", who then however only gets 10 minutes of screentime. The review also criticizes that the episode tries "a reversal and make Pinker an object of the audience's sympathy, rather than the story's villain".[9] VanDerWerff did, however, positively compliment the death sequences as well as the corpses, calling the latter "nicely gruesome".[9] In a comparative list between Fringe episodes and The X-Files episodes, UGO Networks writer Alex Zalben named "Trevor" as the least effective "walking through walls" story, being beaten by the Fringe episode "Safe".[10]

Laurence Bradford 1:09Hey listeners. In today's episode, I talk with Clement Mihailescu. At the time of this recording, he was a software engineer at Google. And he's now started working at Facebook. Clement is also the founder and CEO of algo expert, a platform that helps you prepare for tech interviews. I want to speak to Clement for a number of reasons. He has a very inspiring story. He went from having never written a line of code to getting hired by Google in a matter of months, all while building a successful business on the side. I hope this story will inspire you by showing that you don't need a computer science degree or a technical background to break into tech, let alone to work at a tech company like Google or Facebook. In our conversation, we talk about Clements journey into tech. his advice for nailing technical interviews, why he started his side gig. What it's like running a side project and working full time, and what it's like to work at Google. Whether you want to land a job or start your own business, I think you'll get a lot from this interview. During our conversation, you'll hear more about Clements side business Algo Expert, which helps people prepare for coding interviews. Learn to Code With Me listeners get 30% off Algo Expert using my special affiliate link, just go to learntocodewith.me/algoexpert and enter the coupon code LTCWM. That stands for Learn to Code With Me and you'll get a 30% discount. If you end up buying algo expert I will get a small commission for referring you and that goes towards running the costs of Learn to Code With Me. Again, the URL where you can get this discount is learntocodewith.me/algoexpert. And that spelled all is one word. A-L-G-O-E-X-P-E-R-T. With that said, let's get into the interview.

Clement Mihailescu 3:51Sure. Well, first of all, again, thanks for having me. But my background is pretty unique or unconventional. Rather, I would say I went to college, and did not study computer science. So I do not have a computer science degree. And in fact, I never learned how to code until after college. I did do a stem degree, I did a degree in mathematics that was only after having dabbled in a bunch of different fields in college, and out of college, all the things that I was interested in doing, whether it be you know, trying to start my own business, or maybe get into something like product management, all these things sort of required coding skills. So I decided it was kind of time to take the leap. And I discovered these things called coding boot camps, which we mentioned just before, which were sort of up and coming at the time. This was about three years ago in 2016. And yeah, I enrolled in a coding boot camp kind of fell in love with software engineering, and the rest of sort of history.

Clement Mihailescu 13:30And that's when I realized, okay, yeah, we really have something here because these people share the same frustration that I had when I was preparing for my coding interviews. But since then, yeah, we've really expanded the website from all points of view, way more content, no way more questions, way more features, way more sort of marketing and growth. You know, we've paired up with affiliates and online influencers and so now I'm super happy to say that we've got No, we've, we've helped thousands upon thousands of people prepare for their coding interview, or their coding interviews and land their dream jobs. So it's been really exciting.

Laurence Bradford 14:12Yeah, wow. Um, so let's see here that have so many other things. I would love to ask about this, especially with like, interviewing and data structures and algorithms. So to algo. expert, it's so it helps you prepare for their coding interview. Is it just questions around algorithms and data structures? Or do you guys do other things as well to help people prepare?

Laurence Bradford 15:28Yeah, I mean, I think it's awesome that you guys are so specialized and niche because like, there's so many books, there's so many products on prepping for interviews, you know, General tech interviews, or just interviews in general, not even tech specific, like the soft kind of questions. So I think it's really cool and probably helps people even more that you're just so specific on, like algorithm kinds of questions. So I think it's really neat. And I'm curious, like, is he is it is it meant for anyone at any level right now or is it really geared towards beginners, kind of going on? For their first interview.

Clement Mihailescu 17:37Right. So what, and again, this sort of all came from what I felt would have been amazing to prepare with back when I was preparing for my coding interviews. But what I would have loved would have been to be able to sort of open some kind of online editor, be given a list of questions that I can pick from, and then start putting out my answer to them. question and then you know, have a run code button where I can sort of execute my code and see if it passes, sort of premade test cases. So that's what we give to people. That's what we give to people who use the platform, they can write out their code for all of our questions. And they can actually execute it against premade test cases that we use that we have.

Clement Mihailescu 18:20So they can know whether or not you know, their, their code is correct. And then we have a bunch of other features like hints and you know, other things for the online editor. And then we also have a part from our written solutions. We have these very comprehensive video explanations that are filmed by me were really go in depth and the sort of conceptual overview of the algorithm like how does this work conceptually, I use a whiteboard to kind of explain it out. And then I go into the actual code and explain line by line. Why I'm doing something like why am I doing a for loop here? Why am I doing Why am I using recursion here? And that's sort of how we get to explain to people you know how these complex algorithms work through an online platform.

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