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Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

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Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found). Functionally the website would be a wasteland of white sameness without portraits, no way around that I think. I'm not entirely convinced this service solves the linkedin pitfall of mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats and polluting the signal.

> mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats What does this mean?

Social media obsessed people who are great at clicking buttons and getting followers but add no value to the network. They only fill up a feed with noise.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#212
post #172
post #110

Definitely beautiful and would love for something simple and clean to eat LinkedIn's lunch. I don't have much to add in addition to everyone else except this: I am really disturbed by the common meme of faces-inside-circles. Why do we need faces? It just distracts from the content. I love the idea of being able to link former colleagues together - that's neat - but I'm very anti-face and there are any number of ways…

Around ten direct replies to your post and I still don't feel like the reason why pictures on CVs is a bad idea has been explained explicitly. I'm in the UK, where race, age, gender, religion, disability are among protected characteristics. As such, that information, should it be included, is often either stripped from the CV automatically or the CV discarded entirely to obviate the risk of being accused of discrimin…

But gender can often be derived by first name...

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#213
post #110

Definitely beautiful and would love for something simple and clean to eat LinkedIn's lunch. I don't have much to add in addition to everyone else except this: I am really disturbed by the common meme of faces-inside-circles. Why do we need faces? It just distracts from the content. I love the idea of being able to link former colleagues together - that's neat - but I'm very anti-face and there are any number of ways…

Yeah, I'm a fan of anyting to replace LinkedIn, but if your site requires a picture that I'm not going to sign up. I don't particularly mind if you make it available for people who want to do that, but it's a hard pass for me.

This site does not require a picture. I tried it.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#214
post #110

Definitely beautiful and would love for something simple and clean to eat LinkedIn's lunch. I don't have much to add in addition to everyone else except this: I am really disturbed by the common meme of faces-inside-circles. Why do we need faces? It just distracts from the content. I love the idea of being able to link former colleagues together - that's neat - but I'm very anti-face and there are any number of ways…

What if the photo is optional and displayed at the bottom? Showing a practically mandated photo first puts a lot of unconscious biases in your head. This is a relatively new trend, and probably has something with social media to do.

Yeah faces-in-circles is another one of many design tropes and fads that will soon be so dated, or look like lame Facebook knock off

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#215
post #172
post #110

Definitely beautiful and would love for something simple and clean to eat LinkedIn's lunch. I don't have much to add in addition to everyone else except this: I am really disturbed by the common meme of faces-inside-circles. Why do we need faces? It just distracts from the content. I love the idea of being able to link former colleagues together - that's neat - but I'm very anti-face and there are any number of ways…

Around ten direct replies to your post and I still don't feel like the reason why pictures on CVs is a bad idea has been explained explicitly. I'm in the UK, where race, age, gender, religion, disability are among protected characteristics. As such, that information, should it be included, is often either stripped from the CV automatically or the CV discarded entirely to obviate the risk of being accused of discrimin…

People’s names can also be used to racially discriminate.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really tough - humans are hardwired to form connections and remember people by recognizing faces. This, of course, is also exactly the problem, in that it allows for bias or prejudice of many different types to influence our judgements. I think I agree with you that the downsides and inherent unfairness of the genetic attractiveness lottery outweigh the upsides of attaching a name to a face. It's an empirical…

With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people (and we could debate further what would it mean if a face wasn't found). Functionally the website would be a wasteland of white sameness without portraits, no way around that I think. I'm not entirely convinced this service solves the linkedin pitfall of mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats and polluting the signal.

Wasteland of white sameness? That's a funny way of saying simple and uncluttered.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#217
post #169

Would love an option to remove photos. Employment discrimination is absolutely rampant, and I would hate for someone who is perceived by Western society to be more attractive to be given a leg up on platforms like this. Scary enough the first thing many people do on dating apps is to hit the ethnic filter button ( proud to say I've been social media / dating app free for years), but now that same mindset's going to g…

Hiring, by definition, is mostly discrimination. Otherwise, people would just hire the first person you received a resume from who had the solid qualifications and experience you needed. But no...of course that's not what happens. Managers go through the Kabuki dance with the potential employee just trying to find a small "chink in the armor" to quickly disqualify them. It's called the "initial screen" of course, and…

> Hiring, by definition, is mostly discrimination.

Either you mean that "everyone discriminates illegally", in which case I'm glad we've never worked together, or you're equating "differentiating people at all" with discriminating against $PROTECTED_GROUP ", in which case, no.

> Otherwise, people would just hire the first person you received a resume from who had the solid qualifications and experience you needed.

...yes? How are you getting enough applicants to waste any?

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#218

This is a good start, but I'm not a huge fan of this the way it is now. First, the font is tiny for my old eyes. Not all of us, especially hiring managers, are still in their 20s and can read these tiny fonts. I measured it with a ruler and the text is 1mm tall. Also, the font is gray on white, which is pretty but hard to read. In contrast, Linkedin is three times bigger and black on white, much easier to read. Secon…

> Steal their good stuff and leave their dark patterns behind.

Their dark patterns make them money. That said, at this point, a LinkedIn competitor would look nothing like it...

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#219

CVs should be done in times new roman font or some basic font that doesn't scream. As boring as possible. Use a LaTeX, microsoft word, or some basic document layout tool and make a resume. If you need to make the resume look pretty, you're making up for something. No offense meant. This is how the real world works - try applying to jobs with a beautiful resume.

> This is how the real world works - try applying to jobs with a beautiful resume.

Not in my experience. I got interviewed at top tech companies and joined a well-respected one after submitting a 'beautiful' resume which I really only spent a few hours designing. One of the tech interviewers thanked me for putting the time and effort into it, especially not trying to fill the entire page with as many bullet points as possible. A good design can't make up for a lack of experience in a field, but I don't think it's nearly as detrimental as you're making it to be.

Re: Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great feedback - some other sections that have been requested are patents, teaching, and languages. Will likely be adding these soon.

Agreed. And I can't fit my professional title within the character limit either. But that's probably more of a sign of a personal/professional problem than a bug... :)

My longest official title was 56 characters, and my second-longest was 52. Absurd!
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