Help me I’m on Tinder: I don’t want to see your code
People who work too much and who might have a hard time meeting others as a result is a huge demographic within Tinder users. This applies to myself, and it applies to many other programmers. In the current economic state, many employers expect their devs to work at least 50–60 hours per week, not just on paid work, but on contributing to open source software.
I’m self-employed as a web developer. I work with a lot of Ember apps, write SCSS, and Ruby on Rails (hire me!). I have the majority of a degree in Computer Science (I dropped out for a job). I genuinely enjoy my job and I’m grateful that I can do it with the flexibility that I have.
I love to talk about programming. I spent 2 years doing the conference circuit, I teach courses on it as often as I can, I have organized meetups and judged hackathons. I’ve put a lot of effort into participating in and creating spaces where developers can come together and discuss their work and share their knowledge.
Tinder isn’t one of the spaces where I want to do this.
It seems like every time I join Tinder I receive a barrage of men (mostly — I’m pansexual but the majority of non-dudes I’ve matched with haven’t been problematic and thus it’s unlikely they’ll appear here) who immediately want to get into discussing my stack and work.
This might be appealing to some developers. I understand the appeal of dating someone who works in the same industry. Yet, the men who approach me remind me of men I’ve worked with. The ones who get excited in the wrong kind of way when there’s someone that they could potentially be attracted to on their teams. The ones who seem to only be able to talk about work. I’ve worked hard to achieve some semblance of life balance, and honestly after 6PM, it’s rare that I want to talk about my work.
I don’t think being a programmer makes me particularly special. I don’t think being a programmer or knowing how to code makes anyone particularly special. It’s fucking dope if you do it, or if you want to learn how. It’ll help you get ahead in your career, but I struggle with the concept of allowing it define who you are. Who you are defines whether you’re going to enjoy programming or not. Your ability to code does not make you more or less intelligent, valid, or neat.
So no, when your opening line is a link to your github repo, I’m probably not going to be interested in pursuing anything:
Frankly, just as I don’t want to immediately be approached to smooch in a work context, I don’t want to immediately be approached to work in a smooch context. I don’t want to think about bugs when I’m trying to have a cute time with a new friend. I don’t have the energy to do that 24/7.
I love to teach people how to code. It is my favourite source of income that I’ve ever had the opportunity of having. But I don’t want to teach you to code right now. I’m looking to smooch. It is smooching time. Not Python time. Wrong snake.
Because just as my gender identity doesn’t define me (which, honestly, I’m really tired of talking about on Tinder too), my job doesn’t really say anything interesting about who I am.
While these things are important, and are labels that describe how I feel and what I do, they do not encapsulate me as a person. There are much more interesting things about me than my knowledge of sorting algorithms.
To see all of my posts on Tinder, find the list here:
