San Francisco, 3/11/2026
Dear ${SENDER},
First of all: Thank you so much for reaching out to me. That is: If you took the effort to write this message yourself instead of foisting a soulless AI bot onto your list of contacts 🙂. Kind of funny, me “complaining” about AI outreach, given that I am hard at work to make AI outreach better than ever before. Starship may have sung that we built this city on rock and roll, but we know better, don’t we? Surely we built this city on irony.
But, I digress…
As you may or may not imagine, I actually get a lot of these sort of cold (or at best: lukewarm) outreach messages from people that want to sell something to me, offer me a job, use me as an introduction to sell something to OpenAI, or get a referral for a position at OpenAI. I completely understand that: OpenAI is the hottest company in the hottest field in the known universe today and it stands to reason that it is a valuable potential customer or employer. I feel very blessed to be there and believe me, that is only partly due to the fact that I am amazing (warning: This is a controversial opinion). If you were instead seeking to sell something to me, I also understand that, since I am clearly a middle-aged white man working in the tech sector and therefore potentially in need of financial advice, a real estate agent, a new job, or maybe something else.
I really respect your sales and business development cycles, as well as your responsibility towards these processes. I am a firm believer in capitalism, seeing as everything else that I know about (sometimes from first hand experience) failed harder and faster.
Side story: Most of the companies I have been at in the last few decades offered breakfast, lunch, and sometimes even dinner to their staff. During peak times, when lines are forming at the popular stations in the restaurants, I walk past these lines and say: “We did not defeat communism to stand in line for food”. This gets weird looks from my younger colleagues and approving smiles from the older ones. Trust me, I have done enough standing in line for food while backpacking behind the iron curtain in the eighties. Thank you Interrail!
But, I digress again…
Unfortunately, I am not interested in pursuing this particular avenue of communication with you as I cannot help you and/or I do not need it.
Starting with my own “needs”: I really have all the jobs, real estate, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, investment advice, and whatever else I need. The only thing I really need more of is time, and this message is one way in which I am getting more of that. Also: If there suddenly arises a need in my life for something I do not have yet, I am confident in my ability to go out and get it. Except for the Steam Deck of course, which is currently sold out due to RAMageddon, which people tell me is our fault anyway.
As per everything related to OpenAI: In the interest of efficiency and privacy, I kindly decline to refer you, your products, or your services to anyone else in the company. I assume you, your product, or your service are awesome, but in all humility: So are we and if there is anything we need, I have full faith in my colleagues to either build it or find you on their own if we are in the mood for an external solution. On top of that, I am really unimportant in the company, so my endorsement or referral would be meaningless anyway. Trust me, I am actually doing you a solid by not leading you onto a wild goose chase that is going to end nowhere anyway.
With respect to jobseekers seeking a referral for open positions in the company: I really only refer people I worked with closely for a respectable amount of time, so that I can write a referral that is meaningful and based on first hand experience. This policy even applies if we overlapped at the same company for a while; we need to have worked together more or less closely and I need to remember you. This last condition might sound terrible, but I literally worked with hundreds of people in the last five years alone and as you get older, you really tend to prioritize in-brain storage for things that are very meaningful to you, such as song lyrics from the 1980s and the embarrassment and shame you felt whenever you did something dumb. This is 80% of my memory capacity right now and I am operating on a one-in-one-out policy when it comes to remembering new things. I really wish you the best of luck with your job search and if I can give any advice please buy the book “Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview” by my friend Aline Lerner and her associates.
So, there it is, I am really sorry to have to send you this standard message because in an ideal world I would have time for a meaningful conversation with everyone who did me the honor of reaching out, but as current affairs regularly indicate, we do not live in an ideal world. But then again, if this were an ideal world, you would not have to reach out to me in the first place because you already had whatever it is you wanted. In an ideal world, you and I would not have to work because, let’s face it, work sucks, which is why we call your salary “compensation.”
I know that you probably have the perfect comeback to this standard message that might entice me to continue our conversation, in which case I respectfully reserve the right not to respond because I literally do not have the headspace. And yes, I know about the app.
With that said, I hope you are not too upset by receiving this standard message. I did my best to make it as respectful and entertaining as possible so that reading it is not an entire waste of your time.
Kind regards,
Josephus C. Visser
”Amazing” (controversial opinion)
