035 | Surveydonkey

A tale of draconian survey design firms

Silver linings in post-apocalyptic hellscapes

Once upon a time, I lived and worked in a post-apocalyptic hellscape known to us as Gurgaon / Gurugram.

Yes, grapes are sour. I didn’t enjoy living there and as a result, I choose to rant.

In hindsight, it wasn’t all bad.

One massive silver lining was that I had friends from B-school who were kind enough to invite me to their parties and social gatherings. I had colleagues whose company I enjoyed, though the work itself was boring.

Boring beyond words.

Work that was packaged in a series of abstract terms that those in senior positions used to confound customers and employees alike. Nobody dared say that the emperor has no clothes.

I kept my mouth shut for the most part. I was an analyst with an education loan, and while I had no massive hopes and dreams from that job or my time there, I did feel left behind when friends were finding partners, settling down, making progress in their jobs and on the surface, having a lot of fun.

On the other hand, there was yours truly. I was mostly alone. I often felt lonely.

There were other silver linings too.

On some evenings, when people were allocated to cabs on our commute back home, I’d ask to sit with Vinay, my favourite cab driver, and have him drop me off last even though I lived the closest to the office.

That’s because after driving around for 90 minutes, he and I would go to the alcohol shop near my home and have a beer each with peanut masala and garlic chicken. My treat. After which he drove home. Vinay used to tell me all the fun and naughty things his three children were up to. I got to listen to stories of his life and got good company.

As an analyst, I had to spend most of my time wading through docs, PDFs and spreadsheets, I had to make reports and create surveys.

What’s in a name?

I used to work for a firm named Corporate Executive Board. It has since been acquired by Gartner.

I was hired in my role when I received a job offer at B-school. It was late 2009 / early 2010. The financial crisis was in full bloom. Jobs that paid well enough to afford a reasonable quality of life while paying off my education loan were hard to come by.

I hadn’t heard of the company name until they showed up on campus. I applied because I just wanted a job. Plenty of us were whoring ourselves out because we had to make bank.

If 2010 Hari knew how 2025 Hari was ostensibly going be chill as fuck and take a pre-retirement break to figure his shit out, he would’ve popped a vein because of extreme stress.

When I finally got a job offer and signed out of the placement process, I was overjoyed.

I called my Mum to tell her that I had a job. This is that place in my life when I felt compelled to challenge my buddy, Billy who wrote a play in which his character Juliet said “Yo what’s in a name?”

Me: Ma, I’ve accepted a job offer and now I get to chill!

Mother: Congrats, where will you work?

Me: In a company called Corporate Executive Board.

(prolonged silence)

Mother: Listen, the job market is tough. It is okay if you don’t get a job soon. Wait it out. Don’t make things up to make us feel at peace.

Another friend of mine referred to the firm I worked at as “GNC” (Generically Named Company).

ConfirmIT sucked in 2010

One of the tasks I was entrusted to do was prepare a lengthy survey for respondents to take. Respondents were part of the Fortune 500. The survey hoped to find out how respondents were looking at tech infrastructure spends over the next five years.

What that means in simple terms is - how much money were they hoping to spend on technology? What were they going to spend it on?

Fifteen years ago, words like cloud computing, public, private and hybrid cloud, telepresence, bring your own devices, multifactor authentication etc were being thrown around the way people now talk about all things AI.

Humans and their fascination for obfuscating buzzwords will never change.

The survey had to be done on a software called ConfirmIT. The firm I was working for had got a license.

I had been struggling with the software, because the 2010 version wasn’t designed keeping in mind the needs of a hapless analyst who was good at finding faults outside of him and was eager to get the fuck out of the office as soon as possible.

After many hours of designing something, it all somehow got erased and I had to start from scratch.

Way late in the evening, hunched over my desk, tearing my well-groomed cut-once-a-month hair out, I hit peak exasperation.

I wrote a tweet which said - “ConfirmIT sucks so bad, it should be named Surveydonkey.”

The ugly side of Online Reputation Management

I went back home, ready to re-do the survey the next day.

When I got to the office the next day, I was asked to go meet the head of HR.

I was not looking forward to that conversation.

Within my first month of joining the firm, she had said to me - “You are jumping around a lot, mind it.” or something to that effect. It translates better in Hindi. It sounded like a threat, but also wasn’t, implying that she had serious issue with me being cheerful.

I then began to dress sober AF, keep my head down and avoid eye contact with most folks.

(You may have experienced it too. Have someone with more power in a firm you worked in choose to exercise their authority over minions in places and spaces they didn’t really need to.

I hope you’ve not turned into one such person yourself. If you have, there’s still time to turn the tide.)

My boss was also in the HR head’s cabin with her. On the audio conference call (yeah 2010 didn’t have video calls), my boss’ boss and another higher-up. This was me in the room with highly paid people in Gurgaon, London and DC.

I walked in not knowing what I did but with an “I didn’t do it please don’t fire me” look on my face.

HR: “Did you write a tweet saying ConfirmIT should be called Surveydonkey?”

Me: “Yes I did.”

HR: “Why did you do it?”

I explained the struggle I had with the software, not knowing where the conversation was going.

Guy in London: “Someone from the ConfirmIT team saw your tweet. They took a screenshot and sent it to [some other highly paid important person at the firm I worked in]. The ConfirmIT team is not happy. They want you to delete the tweet and send them an apology note.”

I deleted the tweet.

I sent them an apology note. I didn’t mean a word I said in that.

I stand by 2010 Hari. ConfirmIT sucks. They should’ve named it Surveydonkey.