Maybe
Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#52I'm a recruiter who's been a CTO, contract developer, consulted for most of the large international staffing companies, run (very) occasional courses on career development for developers, and have hired many people as a technical interviewer. I give a lot of free advice to developers I represent. I will be curious to see if there's an actual market for this.
Do you work in or around the Bay Area? I don't actually know very many recruiters who are more than just salespeople.
Afraid not. While I've technically got global reach, I focus on London, and a particular niche in London.
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you have a team of insulated Silicon Valley scalleywags that are going to help _me_ with my job in another reasonable part of the country? Unlikely. Cmon, we all know the bourgeois hipsters giving advice to normal people is like throwing a subway sandwich to ducks in a pond.
We are aware of bubbles and are proud to say we help people across many different industries and socio-economic statuses.
But what are you doing about your bubble? The bubble that colors your bias on what makes good career advice? That's what the parent was talking about and you talked straight past him. That doesn't bode well for your bot's performance!
I don't think this is the right format, but I do think computer-assisted political strategy is an interesting prospect. The problem with trusting other humans for political advice is that you can't know how much their own political ambitions play in, but the bot is really just once-removed from the people who made it, so the issue of human meddling is not entirely out of the picture. It would need to be very transparent, explicit, and clear to be trustworthy, and preferably highly tunable.
How are you ensuring that your bot is providing a valuable, localized analysis for the person asking for advice? If Boost tells me to do something that would get me promoted in California but fired in Boston, who's liable? What kind of cultural accounting is performed? Can I adjust it based on the political/cultural leanings and backgrounds of my subordinates, peers, and superiors?
Also, politics depends heavily on unpredictability. You almost need a reverse bot, telling you the worst solution, so that your political enemies don't accurately predict your moves and set traps. Does Boost have a "surprise" mode?
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#54Cool idea. I like it overall.
I don't know about the idea of having "experts" talk to you. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my career and talked to a few experts and it's a real mixed bag. In some ways I see this in the same way I see most formal mentoring programs - the best way to get an amazing mentor is to arrange it yourself. There's a way to do it, but it's hard.
That said, there's a massive amount of potential to change the way that recruiting is done. Traditional job boards suck - they don't work for candidates - it's a blind stab in the dark, they don't work for hiring managers because you get the same 100 applicants who didn't read the job description every time you post up an ad.
Getting people to front-load the work before they look for jobs and making that introductions to companies would totally change the game. Recruiters aren't suited for that (I am a sales recruiter). You'd eat LinkedIn's job postings for dinner as well.
If you were able to get a userbase of high-quality candidates, who you worked with to improve their careers and then put them into additional jobs you'd be able to charge thousands for each successful hire. There's a market for helping move the smart, overworked, underpaid millennials who are grinding it out at professional services firms from their first jobs at $50k to jobs paying $120k a year (which will more or less happen naturally for a lot of them as they move through their 20s). These people are likely to pay for it, plus their employers would pay on the other end.
The hardest bit is making it a habit for young professionals to check into your platform. Right now it's a weird concept, but hey, the idea of dating online amongst 22 year olds was weird until Tinder changed the entire game.
If you could turn Boost into a career coach firstly and then into a reliable pipeline of candidates for professional firms, I'm convinced you could make this massive.
Damn, I want to work on this now haha.
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#55And I came here thinking this was about a C++ class library..
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#56In the "Communicate Better" section, did the imaginary employee really attach business confidential information in a Boost topic? i.e. "I've attached a PowerPoint full of sensitive information that I'd love you to read and profide feedback. Soon afterwards I'll be needing job search advice since my employer will fire me for having such terrible judgement." Sounds like a terrible idea and a poor example of how to use…
Boost is 100% confidential. People talk about complex power grabs and political situations all the time. For Boost to work well, people need to be able to trust it with Information thy want confidential.
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#57[deleted]
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think impostor syndrome can be a huge self imposed mental barrier for some software devs. Unsure on the right price point to help over come it.
It's a huge mental barrier for a lot of people... but can it overcome by talking to something you know is a bot?
Boost is _not_ a bot -- it's a team of AI-enhanced, real-life career coaches. Think Facebook's M.
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#59In the "Communicate Better" section, did the imaginary employee really attach business confidential information in a Boost topic? i.e. "I've attached a PowerPoint full of sensitive information that I'd love you to read and profide feedback. Soon afterwards I'll be needing job search advice since my employer will fire me for having such terrible judgement." Sounds like a terrible idea and a poor example of how to use…
Boost is 100% confidential. People talk about complex power grabs and political situations all the time. For Boost to work well, people need to be able to trust it with Information thy want confidential.
Talking about complex power grabs and political situation is a bit different than encouraging employees to upload confidential information, which is what I think tIONTamINariciA.
Would you consider adding anything to the UI to discourage your users from those potential lapses in judgement? And if not, what do you do to protect the sensitive information you may find in your hands?
Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach
#60Roll eyes . I'm sorry but this is a ridiculous idea. I can see potential use for this once or twice a year, and even at that I wouldn't reach out to anyone unless I know them personally. How insecure and in need of validation someone needs to be to seek career advice from a chatbot four times a month?
Hey! Founder & CEO here. Love the emotional response. Hey -- some people have to think it's incredibly stupid for it to be a good idea, right? #vclogic ;) Anyways, we don't see this as just an advisor/coach that you use once or twice a year. That's thinking by the old school rules of how career coaches work. But Boost is very, very different. The vast majority of our users use Boost to analyze internal workplace situ…
What do you think about providing performance coaching to whole teams at companies? Something like Wendy on the show Billions (a must watch) but very scalable, you gain more savory knowledge across industries, track market trends, become a valuable partner at big corps.
Also how valuable would you say this tech is for people that are going about things their own way, say new or future startup founders looking for advice and mentorship?