Drunken Ramble
So as part of the whole unemployed, job-seeking experience I got to chat to some developers behind a fairly large dating site. They were interviewing me with regards to a fairly data-analysis-centric role i.e. a role where I’d be analysing the characteristics, choices and profiles of people on the site and using this data to further their business model and the services offered.
I didn’t get the job. For which I’m honestly glad.
But throughout, I found myself wondering: at some point, someone has defined the parameters of this company’s business model. Someone, at some point, has said: people are looking to find a match to their personality. At x% percent match, given that we charge £10 a month ‘finders fee’, we can guarantee that someone will at least go on a date and thus justify their charge. If we charge more/less, or widen/narrow the range of ‘match’ via this website, we will directly affect not only our profit margin, but the likelihood that someone will end up with ‘adequate’ service (i.e. a date they don’t entirely hate) and, on a more sentimental note, might end up with someone they genuinely like, and will, if we play it just right, pay again the next month without actually having found someone.
And I found myself wondering how exactly someone could spend day weighing up these statistics - tabulating these numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, weighing profit versus customer satisfaction versus genuine potential happiness - and not go home to their wife and kids and wonder, “What would have happened had I weighed her and I in this scenario and taken our company’s profit into account? Would I have widened the margin? Would we have ended up together?”.
Wouldn’t that be odd to have running through your mind? Wouldn’t you worry? Wouldn’t you be concerned that your job was, essentially, to put a price on the hopes of the lonely?
I don’t know.
People.
This century.
Right now is a fucken funny time to be alive.
