Apply HN: TheyMadeThat – Non-Spammy Linkedin + IMDB | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: TheyMadeThat – Non-Spammy Linkedin + IMDB

43 pointschaostheory17 comments

Problem:

1. The traditional resume is out of date. Digitizing it and overlaying a social network on top helps, but underneath it's still an old resume. So what's the problem with the traditional resume? The traditional resumes focus too much on job titles and the companies that gave you those job titles. It just doesn't convey what you actually did well enough.

2. People don't get credit for their work. What do we mean by that? Is everyone still willing to believe that only Steve Jobs and Jony Ive developed the iPhone? What about the hundreds of other engineers, designers, and executives behind it?

Enter TheyMadeThat:

We solve both problems by:

a. Focusing on your work instead of your tenure - even your kids (HR & recruiters) can more easily understand what you do:

http://www.theymadethat.com/people/tony-fadell

b. By giving your work their own profiles, with important details such as history and evolution:

http://www.theymadethat.com/things/nest-learning-thermostat

http://www.theymadethat.com/things/apple-macintosh

To reduce the noise and spam; unlike LinkedIn, your social network on TheyMadeThat is simply the people that you have directly worked with on a project. It doesn't matter if they worked at the same company as you, if you didn't work with them on something then they're not part of your network. Most importantly we are not going to spam you about whether or not you know 'yet another random person'.

Feel free to test drive our alpha: http://theymadethat.com

(Just please don't delete any data or add garbage data to our site. Yes we have database backups as well as version history for everything but we'd rather not have to roll anything back, since we already have mountains of other work to do.)

This looks nice and clean. However, I don't think there is enough information about the projects a person had worked on. For example, if you search "IBM Research," one project that comes up is Watson. Two people are associated with it, and there is a general description about each person that sounds like it came out of their bio pages. If I was looking to recruit someone, I would like to know a little bit more about what he did for that project, rather than a broad description about machine learning. Linkedin provided a much better description of his role with the Watson project.

Also, I assume this is because the page is still in its early stages, but the page was out of data. One of the persons in question has moved on from IBM Research to another company. This leads me to my second question - is every piece of information on the page entered by the user or do you have some crawler that finds relevant information for each person and adds it automatically? Some type of big data analytics algorithm (graphs or tensor decomposition algorithms maybe) would probably be useful in gathering information so that each person only needs to edit rather than add information for himself one by one. (e.g., google scholar page)

Yes, data is something that we're really lacking at the moment. Ideally as time passes, our users will enter it themselves. However for now to simultaneously perform both QA and UX testing, we're manually entering the data ourselves. This is also really more to have data for demonstrating and showing people the platform as opposed to just writing about it.

As for project data, just like LinkedIn people are free to more or less information for their projects. I'm assuming that people who aren't as well known will be entering a better description than people who are well known. We'll see once we formally launch.

I like the simplification around the three central entities (things, people, organizations). The site seems clean and professional. I think it would be really helpful if you had a LinkedIn OAuth setup to allow users to import their prior "organizations" into your site. That way they would just have give details to the "things" they've worked on (if they hadn't yet been entered by a prior user).

Yeah once we have the basic features fully working, we'll probably move on to adding features focusing on convenience

As a consultant (and this situation is very similar for the growing army of contractors out there), it's very difficult to be able to even say specifically what you have made for clients due to NDAs and other legal obligations. I do like this concept, though, for the less-restricted employees out there.

I am curious how you would see this working for something like finance or accounting, though. There are many jobs where you don't produce visible projects that you can point to, but your work has nonetheless been of high value to your employers.

This is a good question and before I continue IANAL, and anything in my response could be inaccurate.

This is one example:

http://www.theymadethat.com/people/ryan-porter

In particular click on the 'AMA Capital Automated Trading System' project and projects related to 'Palantir Metropolis'. Both products are sensitive in nature and unlike say a Netflix platform, you can't provide as much detail since you can't provide trade secrets or classified information. However as hopefully shown in the link it's still possible to provide a really high level overview that gives a gist of the work you accomplished.

Here's another incomplete example: http://www.theymadethat.com/people/margaret-hamilton

Look at the 'NORAD Semi-Automatic Ground Environment' project. Another way to get around this is to simple list your involvement in building something but not provide any details of your work.

Still, there may be situations where you can never list your work (and we do comply with DCMA requests). Unfortunately, TheyMadeThat just isn't a magic bullet for every project and person's work situation.

What sort of QA function is there? How much trust in the data can we have? Can I claim to be the real genius behind Unix, or will someone catch me? Reckless exaggerations in resumes aren't uncommon....

Good question. How trust worthy is LinkedIn? Does LinkedIn verify the data people enter? I could be wrong but I don't think they verify data either.

"Can I claim to be the real genius behind Unix, or will someone catch me?"

You can initially, but unless there's proof we'll probably add an 'unverified' tag to your submissions that are related to really well known items like 'unix' and other modern marvel.

It is definitely a known issue, most of the industry, that we'll be tackling more in the coming months.

How does this compare to https://makerbase.co ?

The main difference is the (optional) level of detail that TheyMadeThat has over Makerbase:

https://makerbase.co/m/171236/janl

http://www.theymadethat.com/people/jan-lehnardt

There's more than just his picture and a listing of what he's built.

This gets really apparent once you dig down into the details of what he's built:

https://makerbase.co/p/38o67a/couchdb

http://www.theymadethat.com/things/apache-couchdb

https://makerbase.co/p/uz051b/couchbase

http://www.theymadethat.com/things/couchbase-server

Unlike Makerbase which just features a sentence, a picture, and a list of people; TheyMadethat has version / evolution history as well as predecessors and successors (of the thing).

There's more that I'll try to show later, like additional details that people can enter on a project by project basis that is unique per person.

You have some nice ideas on how to improve on LinkedIn. However, you're not offering functionality which is fundamentally different. Thus, I strongly doubt that you'll be able to overcome network effects.

In my opinion, you need to come up with a unique "hook", a feature unlike anything offered elsewhere. The hook will bring in new customers, and they'll stay for the better experience.

I disagree. TheyMadeThat may have a ton of weaknesses, but being too similar to LinkedIn is not one of them. The fundamental difference between TheyMadeThat and LinkedIn is that we focus on the actual work being produced and not mainly on tenure.

I may have missed it but does LinkedIn have an equivalent feature to this? http://www.theymadethat.com/things/apple-macintosh

Are these two pages that similar?

http://www.theymadethat.com/organizations/apple

https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple

LinkedIn is a social network for old school resumes; we're a portfolio on steroids. Still I'm not too surprised that the perceived differences may be subtle, just as they were initially for Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.

This is you on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwporter

This is you on TheyMadeThat: http://www.theymadethat.com/people/ryan-porter

http://www.theymadethat.com/things/emobie

I thought your first response was a bit confrontational, but this one was very effective. Point taken. :)

I didn't mind that you said that we'll probably fail; I hear it a lot. Specifically your point about not being able to overcome LinkedIn's current network effect is valid, especially when one of our goals was to try really hard to not spam our users and their contacts. However, when you mentioned that we were fundamentally the same as LinkedIn, I mistook your comment as a troll given that I've provided examples in my post.

"In my opinion, you need to come up with a unique 'hook', a feature unlike anything offered elsewhere."

Depending on how much information you enter or for how long you explore our site, we do have a hook. It's related to giants.

why do you need this instead of wikipedia?

So from a feature point of view, Wikipedia's strength is that it's super flexible, which is needed given the huge range of topics that it covers. However the weakness with the wiki format stems from this freedom. Even for pages within the same topic, you will get wildly inconsistent formatting which also leads to inconsistent content e.g. For some notable people, authors will include their education but not for other notable people even when the data is available.

Another problem with Wikipedia is its notability threshold, meaning you have to be famous enough in order to deserve your own entry on Wikipedia. Most people just don't meet this requirement.

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