Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by cloverich » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

saberience wrote: post #321

Shoue wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You realise that someones race, age, gender, disability etc are all easily inferred as soon as you meet someone in person? It doesn't matter what you do here, if someone wants to reject someone based on gender, race, etc, they can do so easily and just say they weren't good enough. This is the ultimate elephant in room with hiring and it's always been there and always will be unless we somehow do hiring while never t…

Ten minutes ago I agreed. There is bias to be fixed, but perhaps this is not the place to do so. But then, do you really need to know their name and gender _before_ the interview? I think there is an argument here for obscuring the face and other PII from the resume and letting people clear the initial screen bias free. It of course won't cure all or the most severe forms of discrimination, but it might reduce the subconcious biases that we all have. There's certainly a level of fuzziness here, but PII seems a reasonable line to draw for the in / out.

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

#332

Post by sojournerc » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #325

vbtemp wrote: 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…

We should do away with names on applications as well. Names can tell me about the gender and often the ethnicity of the applicant, which are both also ripe for discriminating against. With an online application, we can just replace the applicant's name with an ID number and associate the two in some database that the employer doesn't see until the applicant is hired. Actually, now with remote work, even after the app…

> "never have to see or hear them at all!"

Not sure if you're joking, but IMO this is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

I like the idea of hiding details from the hiring filter and selection process that may contribute to bias, but never seeing or hearing the people I'm working with!? Sounds truly terrible.

Also, unless your voice changer actually selects/changes the words/pronunciation of the speaker, it will still be easy to identify details about them.

Accent, word-choice (soda vs pop), urban fast-talk, rural drawl all can be picked up even with a distorted voice.

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

#333

Post by ramblerman » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #325

vbtemp wrote: 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…

We should do away with names on applications as well. Names can tell me about the gender and often the ethnicity of the applicant, which are both also ripe for discriminating against. With an online application, we can just replace the applicant's name with an ID number and associate the two in some database that the employer doesn't see until the applicant is hired. Actually, now with remote work, even after the app…

I couldn’t initially tell if your second paragraph was meant sarcastically or not.

I also want to do away with discrimination. But people’s faces and voices express emotion, character, and warmth

Your utopia sounds absolutely horrible.

I met my wife at work, she is a different ethnicity and culture than me.

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

#334

Post by pbronez » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #325

vbtemp wrote: 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…

We should do away with names on applications as well. Names can tell me about the gender and often the ethnicity of the applicant, which are both also ripe for discriminating against. With an online application, we can just replace the applicant's name with an ID number and associate the two in some database that the employer doesn't see until the applicant is hired. Actually, now with remote work, even after the app…

That would eliminate bias, but also totally de-humanize work. People are shitty to each other sometimes, but is it worth throwing out all human connection to eliminate a subset of undesirable behaviors?

I think there's definitely benefits to making open application positions more anonymous, but purely anonymous employment sounds terrible. You can already kinda get that with some outsourcing firms, and it's only useful for a very limited set of tasks.

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

#335

Post by cloverich » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

jedimastert wrote: post #327

maratc wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Force people My god. Even on LinkedIn it is optional. I was out of work for a year and a half for personal reasons, and I conceal that fact from clueless tech recruiters by having my previous place "2013-2016" and my next as "2017-now". As soon as service "forces people" to fill their form as "tech recruiters" designed, they can just go south.

If I were a recruiter, I would find the fact that you were trying to hide a year and a half much more sketchy than just seeing that you were "out of work" for that period...

I understand your sentiment but you are missing the point. When recruiters of any sort are going through thousands of CV's, they will filter on anything that helps them find candidates more likely to match a job. Regularly out of work because they are bad at a job, regularly out of work because of a one time issue (family death, illness) look exactly the same when filtering for work gaps, but only one of those is a meaningful signal. But its sufficiently uncommon that you may not lose many quality candidates by doing it. This is what bias looks like, and how it is propagated as well. Desigining a system that may be used by thousands of recruiters has to make decisions on these tricky points, and thoughtfully design around them.

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

#336

Post by checkyoursudo » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

pestaa wrote: post #329

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should do away with names on applications as well. Names can tell me about the gender and often the ethnicity of the applicant, which are both also ripe for discriminating against. With an online application, we can just replace the applicant's name with an ID number and associate the two in some database that the employer doesn't see until the applicant is hired. Actually, now with remote work, even after the app…

Sounds like how Illuminati meetings are depicted. You won't hear objections from me.

Yes, this is how we run them ... erm, I mean, what?

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

#337

Post by cloverich » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #204

dimgl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are fantastic criticisms. Almost exactly what I was thinking verbatim.

Back in 1960's, my dad worked as a draftsman. His work was impeccable. But once in a while, he got told, pretty harshly that this is a piece of shit. And he had to work 15 hours to fix a mistake. No, I am not talking about a typo which can be marked with a white marker. Hard-to-objectively-evaluate things like "Dimensions are just not as readable as they can be. You could arrange them this way, look. It's better." He…

Its always to the advantage of the entrepreneur who can at once be passionate about their work and yet also take criticism in stride, turning it into the kind of useful feedback you describe. That being said, we all know constructive criticism will be likely uptaken, so its also on us (as a community) to foster it if we want the best outcomes all around. Though in general I agree, and have found this is the hardest part of both evaluating friend's works, and also getting friends to evaluate yours. I always feel the need to say "Please, don't be nice. I'm not looking for handouts. I don't want to spend time on this if no one is going to like it."

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

#338

Post by vonmoltke » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

acct776 wrote: post #258

grogenaut wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet unless you were an actor resumes didn't have pictures attached for well forever.

But you handed them in, in person, and had an in person interview. If anything, a picture is a loss of historically available visual data on a hire.

> But you handed them in, in person

I have done that exactly once, at a college recruiting event in 2002, and the person who took it and gave me the pre-screen interview never saw me again until after I was hired.

> and had an in person interview

Are you under the impression this has gone away?

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

#339

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

fedd wrote: post #285

dylan604 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might I suggest something more appropriate where other users are looking for it like Insta/FB/etc. Maybe if you're so special, try looking for an agent and get on a billboard on the side of the highway so that I can show you my improvemnts with a can of spray paint

I'm translating this as "don't you dare to joke with me"

You'd be incorrect in that translation.

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

#340

Post by vonmoltke » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #307

schwartzworld wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 months is a write-off? By the time I was 6 months into my first software gig I had 5 months and 2 weeks of being a contributor. It was made clear to me that I was as entitled to voice wrong opinions as anyone else, and also entitled to own as much responsibility as I wanted. I found a niche that nobody else wanted to own and learned way more than I would have being spoon-fed the way you describe. Then again, I gues…

Yup, 6 months is a write-off. I'm guessing you had the luck of joining a new project, or a company doing very small projects very fast. I personally only know one developer who seems to be able to onboard himself in a week or two, and that's in frontend webdev. In my experience, even if all the bureaucracy and ops goes smoothly, any kind of reasonably sized existing project will take weeks to months before one can re…

> Yup, 6 months is a write-off ... any kind of reasonably sized existing project will take weeks to months before one can reach anything approaching full capacity

I won't speak for the GP, but I think you and I have differing definitions of "write-off". I don't consider all time spent below full capacity to be a write-off because, to me, "write-off" means "net unproductive". I believe someone should hit net productive well before it hits full capacity.