Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

When folks think about where to take someone out for a date, they usually think about a nice restaurant, movie, show, outing etc. Some more adventurous would go for a hike or outing together. But apparently there is a group of men who think that taking their dates to their office is a good option for a first date. It boggles my mind that anyone would think that. Imagine being so one dimensional that you think taking a date to your office to show off the perks at work is a good idea.

Taking people to work on a date

The above popped up on my feed over at Mastodon and folks are rightly making fun of the folks who do this. What I take away from this is that these folks have almost no existence outside their work and their ‘achievements’ over there. What is especially interesting is that this guy is not the only one taking folks to their office for a date. I actually feel sorry for the folks they are dating because that is the only interesting thing/place these folks know.

Out of curiosity I checked out the posts by @VCBrags over on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) and they are as bad as expected. I especially liked the following:

You have hobbies and interests outside of startups and venture capital?

Redflag 🚩

Being a well rounded human is considered a red flag by these self defined geniuses. So it is a good idea to keep away from them, because they are literally incapable of having thoughts outside of work. I mean I am a workaholic, I love to geek out on things and have spent weeks of my free time writing code for personal projects but that is not all I am capable of. I travel, I write, read books, trek, listen to music, go out with friends and generally have a life.

The problem is that these folks are stuck in a sort of echo chamber with other such folks who encourage and promote such behavior and then they wonder why folks don’t want to date them. Then they blame the other sex for the lack of interest and call themselves ‘incels’ and demand that they be given sex because they deserve it. Basically they do everything other than take a look at themselves and don’t realize that they are absolutely uninteresting because they really don’t have anything to contribute to any conversation that is not related to work (or their very specific niche field of interest).

– Suramya

In my career I have heard the following way too many times:

Where is the Documentation? I am the documentation.
When asked how to perform a task people will tell you to talk to Person X

Sometimes things are not documented because people are busy, other times they don’t like writing documents, others feel that if they tell folks how to do something they are no longer the critical dependency and thus are in danger of being made redundant etc. Some others get a power boost to their ego when people have to come ask them how to get things done. This is especially true for the old style ‘neck-beard’ ‘gurus’ or the 10x developers.

Personally, I feel that unless I train people to replace me I can’t move up to the next interesting role or get promoted. In one of my previous companies when we would tell my manager that person X is the only one who knows how to do a task and they are working on it she used to respond asking “what if they get hit by a bus tomorrow and can’t come to work for a month. What are you going to do then?”. So We then started documenting everything and cross training on other systems in our department so that we could at least answer basic questions about it. If people were not giving us the information because they wanted to keep it to themselves, we were told to call them up whenever we needed the work done regardless of the time difference. Once folks got woken up at 3am a few times most of them were more than happy to train others. The couple of folks who still didn’t collaborate were warned and then ultimately let go.

I keep a running document of how I do things at work which is shared with others in the team. For personal projects and work I usually end up posting a blog entry about it so that I have a record of how something was configured/setup/fixed.

Moral of the story is that you should document everything, because otherwise 6 months or a year from now you will be looking back at a system wondering why something was done in a particular way. Or trying to figure out how to do something because you didn’t touch it for a while. Also, if things are documented then folks wont be bothering you answer questions about the same things and you can focus on more interesting problems/work.

– Suramya

Saw this in my feed a little while ago, and honestly if a company is using how you format code/your code formatting style to select people then I don’t think I would want to work with them in any case. That is because if they are that nitpicky about stuff that doesn’t really matter instead of focusing on actual skills then who know what kind of mess you will be dealing with when you are in their system.

Who would you choose?

I get it that you would want a consistent coding style across the codebase and there are scripts out there that let you reformat the code to the ‘correct’ style at the click of a button. In one of my previous companies I worked with 2 coders who each preferred a different code formatting style and had written macros in Emacs to format the code to their liking. Whenever each of them worked on a file, they would change the formatting and then make the changes. It was a bit annoying because when they changed the formatting the entire file would show up as modified when looking at the diff between the versions making it harder to code review. But that was still better than working with people who will judge your code quality on the formatting you used in it.

Also, for the record I prefer the 2nd option for code formatting 🙂

What do you think?

– Suramya

If you have a bank account in India, you will be familiar with the daily Spam messages you get from them about their loan services etc. HDFC sends about 3-4 messages a day not just via email but over Whatsapp too. It had gotten to the point where I ended up blocking their number to stop the spam. Same with Citibank and other banks.

But the best is yet to come, I opened a new bank account at a different bank and I have not yet received my welcome kit. However, I have started receiving emails offering me “8.45%* exclusive home loan starting rate”. This is after I specifically selected that I don’t want to receive messages about their offerings etc.

I think I will just create a filter to move all these messages to the spam folder automatically, otherwise it gets annoying to receive so many useless messages.

– Suramya

PS: Not naming the bank because I don’t like people knowing where I have accounts 🙂

If you think pretending to be a recruiter on LinkedIn to get a phone number is a reasonable way to talk to a lady then you need to get professional help ASAP. See the screenshot below that came up in one of my feeds on Mastodon (I think).

Messaging on LinkedIn as a recruiter to get phone numbers

Can folks not understand how messed up/creepy this looks? It is bad enough that people keep messaging on there as if they are on a dating site and not a professional network, but this is next level of messed up. Even worse is the real life example that Shelly shares in the screenshot where the guy actually setup/borrowed a physical office to talk to this girl.

A lot of this is due to movies and TV shows romanticizing borderline stalker behavior. Earlier this week I was watching a show where this guy liked a girl who worked at the library and this guys asks her out for dinner. The girl says no and the guy asks her out everyday for the next few months till she gives in and says yes and this was shown as a positive thing in the show because the guys father did the same thing to his mother. Actually, he was worse because he stalked her for years before she said yes for the first date… There are numerous such instances that I can quote, in fact it is bad enough to the point that some shows actually make fun of it. I remember a line for a show that I was watching where this girl told another guy to not follow the examples of romantic behavior as shown in movies to show his affection to another girl because that is creepy/stalker behavior. Then the whole Alpha male/Pickup Artists/Incel groups make it even worse as they share these tactics as a sure shot way to hook up with women.

If you thought about using these or similar techniques then please rethink as they are not as romantic as you might think they are.

– Suramya