Follow up on the reverse job application.
reversejobapplication.com
reversejobapplication.com
Could the real answer be that you are just the kind of person who considers spending time on a reverse job application and then advertising it to be time better and more efficiently spent than working on a portfolio? And that is at least one of the reasons that you were probably hired by hopefully one of the better employers that were able to recognize that.
Who cares? Generally the last thing I do is try to get practical with my portfolio just to impress some third party; depending on who you are, what field you're interested in, and everything else in your portfolio, the projects you produce will only vary as much as you originally imagined them.
If you're projects aren't interesting to you, are they really worth doing? All this aside, if I were OP I wouldn't be shy about chalking-up this experiment as a "project" since most ad agencies and creative types eat this stuff up.
That said, we obviously saw Andrew the way that cosgroveb and mcknz. He seemed opinionated, smart, and very creative. We were pretty sure he'd fit culturally and be interested in learning the type of development we do.
Is he a master of OO design patterns? Probably not. Were you when you just graduated college? Once again, probably not.
Should he have developed more of a portfolio and completed a few personal projects? It might have shortened his job search. Was putting together reversejobapplication.com a very creative and effective solution to the problem of getting hired without said portfolio or personal projects? Yes. Yes it was.
See you Monday, Andrew.
I'm just going to say thanks and congratulations.
On a job application, it's ordinary to praise your own accomplishments and abilities. So you declare things like "excellent writing skills", and nobody really bats an eye [1]. However, if you were at a dinner party, and you praised your own "excellent cooking skills", it would probably rub people the wrong way. Blogs fall more into the second category, I think, which may account for some of the reaction.
All in all, this was a clever approach that worked out well, and maybe it should be more of a norm. Unlike Andrew, I've been in the workforce for well over a decade, but I think that I may have a skill set that doesn't match up neatly with a most job descriptions. As a result, want ads don't do much for me. I always figured that this is just because really good jobs are never listed on recruitment sites - they're the jobs you create and grow into. But who knows, a reverse job application might be a good way to see if there's one out there.
If I try it, I'll make sure to heed the lessons I learned from this first go-around, which is when many of the mistakes are first made.
[1] Watch out, though. In the tech world, describing yourself as an expert in a programming language may be a bit like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
To everyone who still thinks he's arrogant, or narcissistic, or whatever... Meh.
The positions currently listed on the Jobs page for that company are:
* RoR developers
* Customer Acquisition / Marketing
* Loan processing
I imagine that he'll be trained for the first category.
Hope this isn't too intrusive - kind of reminds me of that analysis of patio11 from a month or two ago. Willing to remove this post if requested.
Lo and behold. She has said 'yes' to moving things forward. Its not an official engagement or anything like that, but suffice to say, i've gotten further than i have ever before.
So there you have it! :D
Congratulations :)
1. Use your creativity and imagination.
2. Make the people (and employers) get curious about you.
3. There are a lot of ways to achieve the goals you desired.
At the end of the day, we should simply be happy that he shared with us something we can learn a lot from and he was able to get a job with a company that realized his potentials.
I'm glad he got a job, and working at a start-up will definitely be a great learning experience. But I wish the followup focused on things he did both right and wrong, and how he or other people could improve the experience next time, instead of acting so defensive.
And who cares if you're self-centered, anyways? The world you see is your world. You can take control of it and make your life what you want it to be, or you can float along on the tides of fate and call the ones who don't self-centered.
The funniest part, to me, is that you call him self-centered, but at the same time you expect him to write his article in a way that gives you value.
You do three things in your post: claim that I can't tell he's self centered, claim that self-centeredness isn't important, then call me self-centered. Which is it? Is it all three? If so, what does it matter that I think he's self centered, since it doesn't matter?
As for the final statement, I gave my opinion as to how I think his post could have helped more people, including me. Is it self-centered to lament that there could have possibly been a better way to go about the followup? Or should critique not be part of any article or post at all?
The top comment on HN (with 136 karma) was run4yourlives decrying his generation's lack of humility and saying "You are not fucking special in any way shape or form." You mean to tell me you wouldn't be a little bit defensive? Don't kid yourself.
Also- just because you, psych degree and all, think he is self centered doesn't mean anything more than you, eggbrain, feel he is self centered. Give him some credit. He was in a rut, tried something new, and was successful. And now you want him to feel bad about it?
That being said, while some of the comments in the original thread were in poor taste, his defense came off sounding petty, rather than well thought out. Instead of addressing the concerns people had with him thoughtfully (maybe I worded my orginal post too strongly, I never meant to come off as being being arrogant, simply someone frustrated with the job search process. Next time I'll also add my qualifications as well, so that way I can get applicants for X, etc), he basically just retorted back with "everyone is wrong, they don't know me" kind of mentality. He basically does no self-critiquing, but rather puts it off on other factors (it was a joke/you are all wrong/you didn't understand) vs taking blame (or talking about improvements) that he could use for next time. So it came off as sounding like "Hey look, I got a job, I was right, the haters can hate" kind of thing, which didn't really improve his image from what some people thought was self-centered.
When I read the original I thought it was all good, apart from:
1. <<Possess strong written, verbal and interpersonal communication skills. If you can't tell the difference between "you're" and "your", your never going to be able to get you're points across to me.>> There are plenty of people out there who have correct grammar but terrible communication skills.
2. he seems to think that people are unable to type their e-mail address correctly and that they have not yet figured out how to copy and paste their e-mail address on web forms.
These seemed very arrogant to me and the anonymous psychologists comments in the follow-up re-inforce that.
Ideally. In practice, I think HN lends more credibility to some things that don't deserve that extra credibility.
I'm not trying to suggest that the original article was wrong or not credible. Rather, would it be successful without the HN influence? While I don't think the original idea is bad, I think the success was due to HN.