Bengaluru Engineer Used His Whoop to Officially Rank His Most Stressful Coworkers, and It's Glorious

You know that particular kind of dread when a certain name shows up on your meeting invite? The instant tightening in your chest, the slow scroll to see how long the meeting will run, the silent hope that it gets cancelled at the last minute. Most of us just live with it. A Bengaluru-based software engineer named Pankaj decided he wanted to actually measure it.

So he hooked his Whoop fitness tracker to his work calendar, lined up the heart-rate spikes with his meeting attendees, and ended up with what might be the most petty and relatable side project of the year. It's a literal leaderboard of coworkers ranked by how much they stress him out, and yes, he checks it daily.

"I Hooked My Whoop to My Work Calendar"

The project started with a single line of intent posted on X that pretty much went viral on its own merits: "I hooked my whoop to my work calendar to find which coworker gives me the most stress."

It's the kind of premise that sounds like a joke until you realise he actually built the thing.

The Engineering Behind It Is Surprisingly Clever

Here's where it gets interesting. Whoop doesn't openly expose granular per-minute heart-rate data to users. You normally get summaries, recovery scores, and broad strain numbers, but not the kind of minute-by-minute breakdown that would let you correlate a specific spike with a specific moment in your day.

Pankaj got around that limitation. He says he used Fable (a developer tool) to reverse-engineer the Whoop's data stream and pull per-minute heart-rate readings directly. Once he had that data, he matched the timestamps against his work calendar entries, then cross-referenced who was actually in the meeting at the moment his heart rate jumped.

The result, in his words, was this: "Thanks to fable, I reverse engineered whoop to pull per minute heart rate, and matched spikes with cal events and attendees."

What he ended up with is essentially a stress attribution engine. Meetings that consistently make his heart rate climb get tagged, and the people who keep showing up in those meetings climb the leaderboard.

"I now have a leader board and I think about it daily," he said.

The post included a photo of his Whoop on his wrist, plus a screenshot showing code snippets and a mercifully blurred ranking of colleagues. Whoever's at the top of that list has absolutely no idea, which is somehow the funniest part of the whole thing.

The Internet Did Not Hold Back

The replies are where this really took off. One person suggested Pankaj should immediately turn this into an enterprise SaaS product, pitching it as a workplace analytics tool that companies could use to identify which employees create the most stress for everyone else, particularly when layoff decisions are being made. Dark, sure, but you can absolutely see a startup pitching this with a straight face within the next year.

Someone else joked that somewhere out there, a product manager is already quietly adding "coworker stress forensics" to a roadmap deck, which feels less like a joke and more like a prediction at this point.

Not everyone was sold on the methodology though. A few users fairly pointed out that heart rate isn't a clean signal for stress on its own. You could spike your bpm by climbing a flight of stairs to a meeting room, by eating something sugary right before, by being under-slept, or just from caffeine finally kicking in. Pankaj's system doesn't really know the difference between "this coworker terrifies me" and "I just sprinted up four floors carrying a coffee."

It's a fair critique, but also kind of beside the point. The fun of the project isn't whether it's clinical-grade accurate. It's that someone actually went and built it.

What It Says About Where Wearables Are Going

There's a slightly bigger story underneath all the jokes here. Wearables have quietly become incredibly data-rich over the last few years. Devices like the Whoop, Apple Watch, Galaxy Ring, Oura, and Garmin are all collecting continuous physiological data that most users barely engage with beyond glancing at a daily summary screen.

What Pankaj did is the kind of thing more developer-types are starting to explore. They're ignoring the polished consumer dashboard, pulling the raw data, and asking weirder, more specific questions of it. Questions like "is my morning standup actually stressing me out or do I just hate Mondays?" or "does seeing this one person's name on a calendar invite genuinely affect me, or am I imagining it?"

You could easily see this turning into a small wave. Personal health data crossed with calendars, emails, even Slack DMs. The implications are part funny, part slightly dystopian, especially when you imagine the same idea being applied not by an employee tracking their own stress, but by an employer tracking everyone's.

A Side Project That Probably Isn't Going Near HR Anytime Soon

For now, Pankaj's leaderboard is firmly a personal experiment. There's no indication he's planning to share it with anyone at work, and presumably his coworkers will continue to live in blissful ignorance of where they rank on his physiological scoreboard.

But the post has clearly hit a nerve. The replies are full of people half-joking, half-serious about wanting their own version, because deep down most of us already keep a mental version of this leaderboard anyway. Pankaj just had the audacity, and the engineering skills, to actually go and quantify it.