Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles

read.cv

938 points_andychung358 comments

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 to do it that does not involve people's pictures.

Edit: Wow this got a lot of upvotes. So, I'll continue for a sec: There is so, so much conscious and unconscious judgment and game playing with pictures, I don't even know where to start. Let's leave this to be simple, clean and beautiful without the faces.

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 question then whether this works for users.

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.

> 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).

But it becomes an added hassle for those people, thus making it UX hostile for stalkers. Who is actually going to Google each and every other name on somebody else's collaborator list? Some determined stalkers I guess, but they are not going to be deterred anyways.

On the point of faces not being found, as a counterexample, some of my former MDs did not put pics in their LinkedIn. Yet people in the industry knew them by name, even if they weren't rockstar investors or something. Having heard someone's name from other sources such as word of mouth or from newspaper articles is a much better signal than using names to recognize them.

what did I just read

mask the photo and the name. use regional locale detection and user choice to make fake names for everyone, use GAN to create fake profile pictures.

> regional locale detection and user choice to make fake names

Presumably you're talking about locale detection of the hiring company/reviewer rather than locale detection of the CV submitter.

I really like the idea, although practically it's probably not a good one in small companies where people are likely to actually work with the person whose CV they're reviewing.

I would say stick to placeholders that are obviously placeholders in order to avoid confusion. And obviously there are some people who do need to see the real names, so give them a clear deanonymise step.

You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media, but you can present the information so that you’d first read the text and then see a photo.

Move the photo on the profile to the bottom of it, and make it optional.

> With real names, faces are just one google search away for most people

> You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media

Hey, some of us worked pretty hard for this to not be true, so at the very least the photo should be optional. I’m blessed with a common first and last name and outside of my HN username I am pretty un-Googlable. Someone very motivated could probably find an old photo of me or two but it’s not universally true that everyone’s photo is a simple search away.

Others aren't exactly common, but I spent a good bit of time a while back removing my own information from the public internet. It's not easy removing yourself from all the Spokeo clones, but most of them have some way to do so, or at least remove the information from the public.

I agree - like only show a persons face AFTER you’ve connected somehow (I agree we’re hardwired to recognize faces - but I don’t want to try to recognize all the people as I’m browsing etc. - but when they become part of my Rolodex, then I wanna recognize their faces)

> 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.

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

> With real names

Most people reviewing CVs don't need to see the real names. It'd be great to have a CV service that could render the CV either with or with out them.

Also, maybe I'm the only one, but I'm starting to experience a bit of 'mindfulness' fatigue. Seems like it's mindlessly being added to everything regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, so I dislike 'Mindful professional profiles' as a subhead.

I agree with what you've said. I like the site and I think it's very nice, but I dislike headshots. https://twostepsforward.co/2015/10/on-web-authorship-trends/

They're definitely overused in a lot of designs. They can be useful to portray some information at a glance in some data-heavy designs, but I don't find them helpful here -- I find them distracting.

Comparison CV with/without faces: https://i.imgur.com/u6FVLqr.png

i don't even get what the faces should indicate? former coworkers? people that the person was managing?

The best intent I can think of is showing 1) team sizes, and/or 2) potentially-recognizable faces that a recruiter might interpret as "oh, s/he worked with someone I know is good at X".

But both are likely wishful thinking: I'm sure it's just a list of faces of other users who've put that company/product on their own CV on that particular site, which 1) is an incomplete and unverified potential-subset of people (and therefore not a good representation of team sizes), and 2) hugely unlikely for it to ever be relevant to a recruiter (because how likely is it for your audience to recognize effectively-random faces?).

But yeah, could just as well be people they managed, or people from that company, or people who endorsed them for their specific work in that role, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Distracting for sure.

It's also useless to the vast majority of readers, but since it is useful to some, a better option would be to have "X connections" (or "X colleagues") note that expands into a list on click. Color it gray, right-align and you now have a secondary info for those who need it, but out of the way for those who don't.

One could even go with a series of dots (or other visualisation), preferably in a neutral colour, that can be expanded to include faces, so you still get some visual indication of team/network size.

As is, it definitely just is visual clutter.

I absolutely agree that faces should not be an available option.

LinkedIn is unusable without faces. It's often the only way to know that you found the person you were searching for.

Perhaps this site doesn't need that functionality though.

maybe you see portraits of connections, but something else for those who've yet to connect. Or maybe portraits if it appears that you likely know the person? Similarly, maybe you can search by name or know the names of those you are connected to, but, by default, you don't get a pic or a name. Hmmmm.

The picture still helps to disambiguate which of the three John Smiths that went to University of Foobar was the one that you met at the mixer yesterday.

If you look at it as a tool for recruiters, you won't be searching for specific people. You'll be searching for attributes/skills you're looking for, and then get a list.

If you're an individual applying for a job, you'd link to your profile, so the recruiter who receives your application won't need to search.

If you're connecting with someone you know personally, then you should already have enough information at hand in order to know you have the right person based on their listed work experience.

The only time you might search is when you're doing professional networking and only have a name. But you usually have some other piece of info, like the company they work for, and possibly their broad job function or title. 99% of the time that should be enough to disambiguate people with the same name. And if all you have is a name, maybe you haven't really "networked" with them enough to warrant a connection?

>If you're connecting with someone you know personally, then you should already have enough information at hand in order to know you have the right person based on their listed work experience.

But the point isn't to connect to those people. They're a phone call/e-mail away. It's to connect with and maintain the connection to the randos that you briefly meet.

Not a linkedin fan and I like the idea of focusing on what people use / want and not on what they don't.

That said, I suspect you underestimate the importance of pictures in terms of memory building and many other networking steps.

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?

For the privileged of this board, yes.

Tech jobs are all remote, all the time now.

You would mail in your CV, and the HM wouldn't be the one receiving them if you did hand them in.

I actually always made the name part big if I could - not to remember it but for the visual sort of like a face.

Note: I've also seen that for minority / female hiring, a face can really jump your resume up as it makes clear you may help add some diversity to a team.

Speaking as someone who profits tremendously from the halo effect: I'm pro-face, but I remain anti-circle. Can we consider heptagons? They're like a less bellicose pentagon.

It's actually the norm in some parts of the world to have pictures on resumes

True, but I think there's a strong case to be made that it shouldn't be. It (further) opens the door to subtle biases on the grounds of ethnicity, age, and attractiveness, and has no obvious upside.

I do agree with you, I'm part of a visible minority, but some may argue that if the company have already a toxic environment I'd rather be off. This is especially true for small companies that media don't care about.

What do they use the picture for when they get them?

I don't know maybe someone from europe can answer ... I was just point it out that north america is not the world.

but what if my face is quite pretty and I want to share its outlook in some circle?

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.

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

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 discrimination.

I mean no one's made an argument why it shouldn't be _optional_ if it already isn't either, as well as people are confusing the context of HR/Hiring Manager's shifting through resumes and traversing their own social graph on LinkedIn whether by search or connections list.

This site could even, when it gets up to supporting some social graph, separate the two views, HR is using bookmarks/folder organization/some other means of solving that problem anyway so "photos key to memory" is irrelevant

> I mean no one's made an argument why it shouldn't be _optional_ if it already isn't either,

I'll give you an argument against optional headshots: Adverse selection.

Given the advantages and disadvantage of having a headshot, most of the folks omitting them will have good reason to do so. Which means that those who don't have a headshot will be disadvantaged further.

IOW, not having a headshot signals one of three things: "I care about my privacy more than most people", "I couldn't be bothered to include a headshot", or "I am a member of a group that experiences prejudice based on superficial characteristics, such as weight or race, and wish to avoid this". There is a long tail of possible reasons and variations on these, for example the privacy one could actually be more along the lines of "I am hiding from my violent ex", but you get the drift.

None of these possible reasons are ones that give a reader warm fuzzy feelings. If the profile owner is very lucky, the reader will treat the absence of a headshot as largely irrelevant metadata, but that's the best case scenario: one of merely avoiding negative associations. There is no actual upside (the one exception I can come up with is an employer actually looking for candidates who are fanatical about their privacy for some reason, perhaps for security-related positions).

At least when you include a headshot you are only going to get hit with the actual relevant prejudice (which is a social filter that can be useful to you), rather than a stew of prejudices attached to all the imagined or assumed reasons for the image's absence, none of them consciously or coherently articulated.

> There is no actual upside

...unless the "I would experience prejudice" reason is correct.

That's the absence of a downside, which isn't quite the same thing. There is practically no scenario where not having a headshot gives you an advantage over those who have headshots.

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

And ethnicity by last name, age by looking at the education section of the resume, etc.

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

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 talking to someone or seeing them or knowing their real-name.

Even if it wasn't expressly forbidden under law, no one was ever rejecting someone from a job "because they are black/white/female/etc/etc/", that's always been obviously wrong, but it's easy enough to simply say "They're not a culture fit." or "Not experienced enough" or "Didn't answer the technical questions well enough."

I don't think banning people's faces on resumes or CVs would fix anything, the only thing that would "fix" this is changing our implicit and unconscious biases from childhood onwards, i.e. a major change to our teaching culture, and across all the media, TV, movies, books etc.

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.

But this is not about eradicating all opportunities for bias, it is about reducing them. Making e.g. the filtering of resumes blind to race and gender would likely improve the situation, even if e.g. the interview still provides opportunity for biases to creep in.

I agree about the faces but I’ll go further - even if it were a list of names, it’s a distraction. My professional profile is about me. I can mention partners and collaborators in my position/project descriptions. You can drill down to find out who my colleagues are. But nobody has ever wished LinkedIn had a MySpace-style top eight.

All else being equal, isn't attractiveness also a marketable asset in most if not all industries?

How does being pretty make me a better, or even more marketable programmer or sysadmin? I'm not user-facing, and interaction is mostly done by textual messages.

It may not. But where it is a marketable asset, is it somehow wrong to trade on that fact?

all the people standing up for faces are attractive, i myself like my face on a resume only because ive seen in the past how managers sort resumes, most of the time the face pics go to the top.

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.

Hi,

In the view of replies posted, I think profile pics (hereafter avatars) in colleague section are fine to have but dIefinitely not a necessity.

IMHO, here is an optimal solution:

Couldn't there be a two way option: whether i want to share my avatar in the circle, and if i want to look at other avatars?

It would be pretty effective.Lets say, I'm not interested in avatar of your colleagues, so i can turn them off or they would be in a drop down list. And say if I don't want you to see my avatar in colleagues section/list, I can turn it off from my side. So, you would only see a default avatar associated with my profile.

I'm of relatively strong opinion.. but why just not have faces-in-circles anywhere? It would feel so liberating from all the social network gimmicks out there. To me it would then feel so real and down for business, rather than have a whole status/appearance signaling sub game.

Without forced connections, how do you prevent people from tagging others in their profile without permission?

I’m not sure how this plays out, but I know of one company that has an HR policy, stating that résumés that come in with photos or images of the applicants are to be immediately rejected.

I was told it was because they want to avoid bias charges.

Discard just the photo or the résumé entirely?

If the latter - do they acknowledge the irony?

The latter.

And what is this "irony" of which you speak?

The irony of attempting to avoid bias, by using "has photo" bias.

NM. It was a joke.

Yeah, it is whacky, but most HR departments are run by lawyers, these days, and lawyers have a strange set of rules.

Damn, I figured it could have been. :)

You found the hot-button topic...

If it was just a CV repository, I would be quite comfortable with this approach. Some regions have a social mandate to include photos on CVs and it bothers me quite a bit. Where I live Marital status / number of children is also common which I really don't understand.

Because this is set up as a web of professional landing pages though, part of the system is discovering people that you may know or finding people that you're looking for (and not just getting a link from someone to their CV).

I'd love an option to turn it off site-wide though, that could be a nice feature if you prefer to more-dissociate your connections from their physical selves.

European tech recruiter here (again).

If I want to discriminate against you, I will anyway do so latest during the onsite.

I often have to skim through 200 CVs in a day and do >10 calls. I find it very convenient to have a face attached to the CV, because it helps me remember the person.

People hire people and people have faces.

I understand why people feel it is a burden to make and put a photo on the CV but I see so much updside also for candidates that I always recommend to add a photo. Here in Europe it's not forbidden but actually common. If you don't do it, you're the weirdo and your profile might get forgotten/ignored. Why risk this? I made a video to explain this once and not have to tell this to people again and again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELX85HAhHew

> If I want to discriminate against you, I will anyway do so latest during the onsite.

It is different. Many people want to maintain their image out of the public internet. I would never use a service that forces me to show my face to the public (not that there's anything wrong with my face, I just want it that way).

Usually, the firms require a PDF CV, so it is a private document shared between you and them, and it gets deleted after some weeks.

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 applicant is hired, we still never have to see or hear them at all! We can just keep referring to them as Employee #1672378623, use a randomly-generated avatar for our Zoom meetings, and filter everyone's voice through voice-changer software. Bias-be-gone!

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?

> "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.

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.

Nobody is sarcarstic on the internet, ever.

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.

I just put an avatar that's not my face.

I started read.cv when transitioning from full time to freelance design in July. I wanted an easy to update 'about me' page to link from my website and bio – something simpler than LinkedIn and more dynamic than a PDF.

Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles.

It took me around three months (Sept to November) to get it out the door, and I've been working on making improvements since. Open to any questions or feedback!

Hey Andy, I never received the verification email. je at h4x.club

Check your junk. That is where mine ended up.

Ha, thanks. Went past spam and straight to trash for some reason. First time I've seen that from a signup.

Welp, sorry about that. Wonder if the .cv tld makes has anything to do with this...

What are you using for your email backend?

The authentication emails are sent by Firebase.

If this does grow, it might be worth getting another domain just for email purposes such as "read-cv-email.com".

How was the experience with setting up a Cape Verde business entity for the domain? Any issues or regrets?

I guess you simply purchase the domain. Just like bit.ly which, as far as I know, doesn't have an entity in Libya.

Different domain locations have different rules. For example, if you want to get a .sg domain, you need a Singapore entity. If you want a .aero domain, you need to show you're an aerospace business to the registrar.

I tried doing it through 101domain.com and couldn't because I didn't have a registered business in Cape Verde. I tried again using Marcaria.com and they handled the registration process and I haven't had any issues so far.

Are you sure about that? Appears to me that you need a registered trademark in Cape Verde, which Marcaria also has a process for (costs a lot and takes up to a year). I'm fairly certain your domain will expire within three months after purchase without a valid trademark certificate.

Well done. I'm going to use it.

Hey Andy, good job! The app looks really clean and nice to navigate through.

I just wanted to share a couple of "views" that I created to express my career in a different way. I'm sharing just for your inspiration. (content in Portuguese, but I bet you can auto translate it)

Experience view; years of experience per theme/subject. https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/experiencia/

Projects & cultural context in chronological order (notice the flags) https://rodolphoarruda.pro.br/eu/lista-de-projetos/

I decided to make those views available because I stopped believing the standard CV/LinkedIn format for presenting myself and my career.

Cheers and keep up the great work!

Cool this is super helpful, thank you!

I just want to say this is a fantastic idea, and as another commenter said, it would be great to eat linkedin's lunch.

My only feedback I guess would be to make same wish I make about just about any project these days, which is compatibility with activitypub. Do you have thoughts on the promise of a project like this to work on that kind of protocol?

> Design wise I focused on legibility and tried to give projects/side projects equal weight to things like education and work experience. A few unique features: tagging collaborators in your experiences, status updates, and print optimized profiles.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I think your definition of legibility is maybe a bit off, the font is too small to be considered legible by any accessibility standard. I have 20/20 vision but I struggle to read some of it. The color contrast is also failing in some cases, and since the font is so small and thin, the contrast needs to be increased above what color contrast would suggest.

Also, when I wanted to check the size of the font (which is set at 14px but that seems equivalent to 11-12px for the common fonts like Arial) I realized I can't actually select any of the text, which I think might be important a website like this. You are creating some mask with a different div that might be blocking the clicks. You can create a mask like that with simpler html and css that won't have a problem with clicks.

Otherwise it's a nice project and it looks like you got a good traction already. I hope this helps.

Right, so I read a bit further and saw a comment about the view example button, which took me to the proper cv. So my comment isn't completely accurate, haha.

Love it. I see you're not running ads. What's your plan for monetization?

I would love to be able to embed the CV into a personal page so that it could link to the full profile on your site. I could picture it being the perfect link between a social network and private content.

1. As others have pointed out, the default font size is way, way too small. Not readable on a phone, barely on a computer monitor.

2. Please try your site on an oldish iPhone, like an iPhone 7, in landscape mode. You give about 2cm of space for the scrolling content. The problem seems to be keeping the "View example" button anchored on the bottom of the screen at all times, with a large fixed border around the button. This leaves no room for the actual content. When you actually click "View example," the resulting page renders fine on a landscape iPhone.

3. Please try your site on a large 27" monitor in full screen mode. Your content's width is a fixed number of pixels and you end up rendered on a tiny sliver (about 1/5) centered horizontally on the screen. Please don't be one of those sites that has huge horizontal whitespace margins (I'm looking at you, John Gruber). It's a terrible web trope. Consider using the whole width of the browser window, or most of it.

4. I also agree that headshot photos should not be part of this product. Dare to be actually different from LinkedIn.

Please post here again after some iteration, this thing has promise.

Hey looks great! What stack have you used? In particularly how did you develop such clean UI?

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.

Second, after looking at the example, I have almost no idea what you've done. All I see are job titles. I don't see any accomplishments or even job duties. It looks like I could add those things when I create my own profile, but having them missing on the example isn't a good look.

Third, the face circles. I see face circles under each job, but they aren't clickable nor are there tooltips. I have no idea what those are. I assume they're other people who worked at the same place? Maybe connections of yours who have worked at the same place? That's a cool idea, but it needs to be more discoverable. At the very least a tooltip would be good.

Overall, when I'm looking at a professional profile, I'm usually doing it because I want to hire or work with someone. The main information I want to know is 1) Do we have anyone in common I can ask about you? 2) What did you accomplish at your previous workplaces or otherwise? 3) Have you worked anywhere that I recognize and when, so I can ask my other friends who worked there if they know you?

The face circles accomplish #1, so that's great. #2 looks possible, but the design seems to minimize the accomplishments, as opposed to Linkedin which sort of puts it in your face. And #3 seems to be covered but again the design minimizes the information I want most.

I would say a good place to start would be asking yourself, "Why does Linkedin look the way it does?". A lot of their design comes from customer feedback, and their main customers are recruiters and hiring managers. Steal their good stuff and leave their dark patterns behind.

Click "View example" and 1, 2, and 3 will go away.

2 definitely doesn't.

> the text is 1mm tall.

That's relative.. But maybe it was as a joke. Because it's funny to imagine someone with a ruler measuring their screen ^^

> I would say a good place to start would be asking yourself, "Why does Linkedin look the way it does?".

I don't like this trope personally. It works for linkedIn because it was what Monster and other sites were not.

If its to be different, embrace it, listen to customers as you say. Don't just take what's already been done with a slight knock off feel.

As for the site itself and concept its nice and super clean, definitely fits into a lot of designers/developers ideals. Recruiters will want the analytic data but doesnt seem thats the market.

An exportable html/pdf page of your profile would be nice to give users too. Just because it gives ossum designers and whoever to extend on the clean template for themselves.

I use 1mm quite a lot, if I want to hide legalese from interested eyes, to be able to state afterwards, that everything was written on the page …

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 told me to face criticisms, the harsher it is, the more passionate the criticizer is. Find out why they're passionately criticizing it.

I feel like criticisms on HN, Product Hunt, r/photography, r/design, etc. - we are too soft to not offend people.

I personally would want to be criticized as harshly as possible. I'd like to face reality in all its glory without drinking the soft-mannerism bs. If the design is shit, say it. If its great, praise it. Tell people why its great. Be honest why it sucks.

It's hard but if I am really interested in improving my skills, I don't want to be given lipservice. It is worse than not seeking feedback because it leads to self-delusion. It goes the other way too, don't be afraid to praise something passionately if you resonate with it and explain the reasons.

This is the society's mechanism for improvement and filtering out noise. If we don't do this, society becomes noisy and people who are really good at stuff are drowned in the noise.

> Find out why they're passionately criticizing it.

Sometimes this is just "because they're an arsehole" and the criticism is garbage.

> people who are really good at stuff are drowned in the noise

Or people who could be really good at stuff get disheartened by the harsh criticism and we as a society lose out.

You could just as easily say that people who respond well to unilateral and energetic feedback are not motivated and society loses out without harsh criticism. It's hard to quantify these things and that means every position is at least a little reasonable.

I'd want society to side with truth over falsehood when either are not easily quantifiable.

> Sometimes this is just "because they're an arsehole" and the criticism is garbage

It’s pretty trivial to tell who is genuinely passionate and who is an asshole. Especially if you already know them personally.

> Or people who could be really good at stuff get disheartened by the harsh criticism and we as a society lose out.

Taking offense from an asshole, not being able to ignore them, all these traits are part of being successful. We can afford to lose a few people because they took offense to anything and everything. Maybe it’s different for minors and young adults. I’m addressing adults.

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."

In addition to being tiny, the font color used for the text is a light gray that just hurts my 40 year old eyes. As a hiring manager, I'd pass this and just read a PDF or LinkedIn.

I think the font thing might be a failure in displaying properly rather than an intentional choice. It's no smaller than the font here on HN or anywhere else for me.

> 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...

Curious, what do you think a LinkedIn competitor would it look like?

I'm not qualified to answer that. Plus, I'm not sure I've seen it (obvious LinkedIn competition) yet, but there are shades of things that might upend the recruitment industry resulting in LinkedIn's cash cow taking a hit: Lambda School, Scaler Academy, EightFold.ai, Upwork/Fiverr, Creator economy etc

For what it's worth, you're absolutely qualified to write an HN comment in response to that question, the stakes are low.

I don't think it's a given that LinkedIn's dark patterns actually earn it money, though they certainly would appear to if you're a middle manager and your KPIs react positively.

Most of the content disappears when viewed in Safari's Reader View.

I don’t understand the font feedback... can’t you just increase the font size? (The design is responsive to it).

Yes, that is an option, but should the default be so difficult to read especially for a CV?

I thought it was fine. But sure “make the font bigger”

Pinch to zoom doesn't work, and I can't find another option to increase the font size. This is on mobile. Are you by chance on pc?

No. Pinch to zoom works fine. PC zoom text works fine.

Hence my comment :/

Tech recruiter here.

Pros:

+ Very beautifully designed project

+ Super readability

Big, easy to fix negative:

Force people to add months to the years! You only asks the year when someone started in "Work Experience". If I read "2012-2013" I can't tell if someone has been at a place ~12 months or ~1 month. This information is very important.

Also, please calculate the durations to allow readers to grasp tenure faster. Sometimes people need to skim through 200 CVs per day, so every inch of improvement is a big deal. Check how Linkedin does it: "May 2012 - June 2012, 1 year 1 month"

Here a video where I improve some CVs, maybe that helps to make the product better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haQ4rtEjhJQ

> If I read "2012-2013" I can't tell if someone has been at a place ~12 months or ~1 month.

Or even 24 months...

hey there - you might be interested in our product - https://rezi.io

FYI the "Rezi Is A Resume Builder For Top Companies" sections doesn't work well on mobile.

"This information is very important."

Years != Experience

...but thanks for confirming the shallowness of the recruiting processes we've all experienced.

thats not how i read the OP

With "Work experience" I was referring to the field in the Show HN app

It's a pretty strong signal.

So you seriously don't believe that the difference between spending ~1 month or ~12 months or ~24 months at a company (all are possibilities, when a date range reads "2012-2013") isn't important information for a recruiter?

This isn't strictly about experience; it's also about whether someone a company is going to invest time in is going to stick around for a while, or is going to hop around a lot.

But regardless, years worked, when coupled with title/promotion history, is actually a decent proxy for experience. It's not perfect, but neither is the resume itself. No one is going to make a hiring decision solely on it, but it's a signal that can be useful.

It's not about believing, it's about knowing. You have to couple that time interval with the company they worked for.

At one company it took them 2 weeks to set-up my email, 3 months to decide on which project to work on and in about 6 months I was delivering something. So 6 months "experience" actually meant zero. I was ready to deliver from day 1 but...

At another company I had all the accounts created by the end of day 1, already working on bugs the second day. Some projects took 1 month in total. 6 months could mean 6 projects. The amount of skills accumulated in that time was way over the skills accumulated at the first company.

As you can see the time interval is useless. I think it's fairer if the recruiter simply rolls a dice.

it seems you've presented a single data point, yourself, and decided that this universally applies, which seems unreasonable.

I think most people's experiences of onboarding in new companies are somewhere in between, thus the tenure length provides another data point.

Furthermore, some hiring managers look for people that stick around for various reasons, e.g. hiring in that company is difficult due to bureaucracy, so knowing that somebody was at a company for two years vs 1 month is an important data point.

It seems you’ve presented zero data points, and decided that this does not universally applies, which seems unreasonable.

Unless there is pattern of short stints, no. And if there is pattern over time, you see pattern.

I have seen quite dysfunctional toxic workplaces or teams. If you leave within one month, you have good social understanding and likely have better ethics then those who stayed. Those who stayed for long were all eventually compromised (meaning their ethics changed and they started to accept or do things they should not).

Our company have also few "trap" positions. The people there change quickly, because our hiring manager talks about positives (all true) and does not mention significant negatives. The more capable you are, the quicker you recognize the situation and leave.

It is perfectly fine to have some short stints.

You’ve drawn the incorrect logic statement.

!Years == !Experience

It’s very hard for a SWE to have immediate impact, especially a junior one. Up to the first six months are a write-off. The next period includes their first launch and review with potentially a months long performance improvement plan.

With exceptional exceptions, longevity and impact go hand in hand and a lack of longevity at the very least poses questions. Sorry if you find that shallow.

A string of 11-13 month appointments is absolutely a non-green flag.

If I was treated the way you describe here as a junior developer in the first year of my career, I would have abandoned software a long time ago.

The lack of trust is not something I'd be willing to put up with at the timescale you're describing.

It's not lack of trust. It's actually a grant of trust - trust that in 6 to 12 months you'll actually start making company more money than you cost them. The larger and older a project, the more time you need to spend learning its specifics before you can contribute something with positive ROI. It's just a fact of life.

“We distrust folks with short stints on their resumes” is a great sentiment to articulate to your staff if you want to reduce turnover via misleading them.

What you said is very true, at large companies only. There are way more companies that are smaller and move much faster. When they hire someone, it's very clear to them what they will be doing, who will present the project to them and so on. You could be writing code on day 1.

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 guess there's junior and JUNIOR! Maybe a recent boot camp grad would have been less able to jump in.

It’s more abstract than spoon feeding. Perhaps you imagined some kind of 6 month training program?

You can be very productive in your first few days, weeks and months but in terms of experience, the topic at hand, internally and externally that time doesn’t have any value on a resume.

This is on the assumption that you are looking for ‘experience’ as in experienced team developers who can focus on this particular business's goals. If you’re looking for people “experienced at writing code in [some language]“ then, yes, any time spent writing code in the job is experience.

If you work somewhere with a large code base and a fluid enough engineering team it does indeed take many months before one can see the bigger picture, and expectations of developers are set accordingly.

This is especially so with infrastructure / dev tools / internal tools where new projects are often driven by individuals. You have to use the infra itself — a lot — before you will have the insight into what can be improved.

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 reach anything approaching full capacity. Learning the structure of the codebase, abstractions used, testing and deployment pipelines, the who's who, protocols for dealing with issues and customers, etc. takes a lot of time, and often can't easily be batched (i.e. you won't learn as much as you need even if you read the codebase end-to-end, you'll also be learning as you do your first tasks).

I had one experience with one-day-to-full-speed onboarding in the past. That was when I was briefly borrowed to a kind of bottom-feeder software house, whose job was to take garbage projects that were outsourced to way too cheap and unskilled labor, and beating them into something mostly working. At that job, once I got necessary accounts provisioned, it was just one unending stream of pushing items on a Kanban board at high velocity. You didn't have to own anything or care about anything, just do the fastest possible change that brings some aspect of a project up to customer's spec. Ain't particularly proud of that one (though I didn't have much of a choice here, their boss was a friend of my boss and needed a favor). Ain't something I'd even consider a proper software job.

> 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.

I don't think this advice applies to startups.

My first two jobs had me undeniably junior but I still had a measurable sizeable impact on the businesses where I worked within the first two months. Seems an overgeneralisation to say the first six months are a complete loss by definition.

The length of time is largely dependent on industry as well. In Automotive, 3 to 3.5 years for 1 Project cycle would be a minimum to step out of the Junior status.

that has nothing to do with shallowness, if someone has spent a few months at X previous jobs before you, this is definitely something to be addressed in the interview.

Had an acquaintance recently that hired a guy that didn't pass the probation period at 2 out of 3 jobs he had. My acquaintance didn't address this at all and hired him anyway. In a few short he managed to transform in the whole office to a hard to believe toxicity and had to be let go. He made a huge scandal, tried to involve lawyers etc. Now he didn't pass probation at 3 out of 4 jobs.

This smacks of the anecdotes anyone will have about someone they know (or a an acquaintance thereof) who's abusing social welfare. In reality, in most European countries, welfare abuse it at most 2% of all social welfare users and usually at 1%. The data just doesn't support large-scale welfare abuse. Is it shallow when people still assume there are huge amounts of moochers?

Now are there reasons why you might ask someone how long they stayed at their previous job? Yes, definitely. Does that make everyone suspect automatically? Hell no.

I don't have more data on the subject, so I won't draw any definite conclusions as to whether it is warranted to base someone's professional worth on the number of years/months served. My own experience shows only a very weak correlation there, and no correlation at all between seniority within a company and said company's attempts at retaining that employee.

I've seen people who had "ten years' experience" who in reality had done the same year, ten times. I've seen people who had three years' experience but were driven, looked into things on their own initiative and who outclasses those "seniors". It all seems to depend on what you're exposed to and, lacking exposure, what you'll subject yourself to of your own accord.

Have you read any studies on the subject?

If they have "X" cases of that, you see that with only years given too...

> + Super readability

I disagree; it uses a fraction of the available screen size (optimized for mobile?), the font is small, and worse, it's grey-on-white; the contrast is too low.

I also did a bamboozle; turns out the profile on the linked page here is not actually the demo, but just an image / screenshot on a landing page. Didn't really clock that it was a landing page; maybe link directly to the example and update the landing page to not start with a product screenshot, but with the marketing blurb instead (Disclaimer: I'm not a designer, but I've seen other product landing pages that use large screenshots to highlight segments of the product along with short descriptions of the feature)

> I disagree; it uses a fraction of the available screen size (optimized for mobile?), the font is small, and worse, it's grey-on-white; the contrast is too low.

Agree. it's very hard to read. contrast is too low,. font is too small.

Now that you say it, I'd also wish for bigger font and more contrast.

> 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.

I just checked: On Linkedin it is indeed optional but they made it look like they force you (https://imgur.com/a/0wdI3Wy)

I almost always see the dates with a month.

CVs are primarily consumed by people who hire people, why wouldn't you listen to what they say?

If you had to be out of work for a year and a half for personal reasons, just put it there. Trying to conceal stuff can work, but might not; hence, isn't the most conservative idea. All the best.

As a person who "hires people", would it be a good idea for a 50-year old guy to openly state in their CV that e.g. between Mar 2016 and Sep 2017 they were fighting testicular cancer? This wasn't my reason; I'm just asking for a friend.

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.

Recruiters don't seem to get to the conclusion that I'm "trying to hide a year and a half" because fwiw it can be a month, or just a change of jobs on Jan 01.

Some recruiters look for red flags in order to dismiss a CV. Year out of work could be such a flag. My job is to hide that red flag. Once being interviewed, I will provide the details if asked.

At an interview in 2020 I was asked:

"Can you explain the gap in your work history from May 1997 to March 1998?"

My answer:

"You're asking about a gap more than 20 years ago? I just didn't work for a bit, that's all."

Congrats on the launch. Overall it's really clean and I like the design.

Some quick feedback, which you can take with a grain of salt: * I was confused by the image CV on the homepage. It expected it to be clickable, and it took me a minute to find the View Demo button. * I love the collaborators feature. IMO this is one the biggest missing factors of LinkedIn (e.g. who did you actually work with on a small team) * It would be nice to be able to customize the invite message when inviting a collaborator. * The Create a Profile button on the homepage doesn't user cursor: pointer, which made me miss that it was the sign up button at first glance. * It looks like most of the links don't have cursor: pointer, which feels off to me * Once I saved my profile, it took me a minute to find the edit button in the bottom left

Overall, nice working and I'm looking forward to following the updates. Also, great first name you have there.

Thank you fellow Andy — Hear you about the homepage, hoping to completely redo it soon and create more abstracted visuals. In terms of the pointer, my current logic is to use cursor: pointer on anything that visually looks like a link (e.g. unstyled text), and to leave it as default for components that have a visual affordance that they are clickable (e.g. buttons or tabs). I realize this might not be the most web-like convention though - might be worth it to just move all clickable components to the pointer cursor.

Yes please; personally, I've had couple of decades of training and habits that a change in cursor indicates clickability; without my cursor changing, it feels like a static image, not interactive page.

Otherwise, awesome sauce :)

No cursor on mobile, so it's not enough.

> my current logic is to use cursor: pointer on anything that visually looks like a link (e.g. unstyled text), and to leave it as default for components that have a visual affordance that they are clickable (e.g. buttons or tabs). I realize this might not be the most web-like convention though - might be worth it to just move all clickable components to the pointer cursor.

The cursor isn't the only problem. The way you present the screenshot fundamentally looks like a functional profile. It isn't just that the links look like links but aren't clickable. Text also isn't selectable. In general, it's in the uncanny valley that feels really uncomfortable. Consider making it look very obviously like a sample screenshot: caption it at the top, move it to the side beside (rather than above) the explanation of the site, layer a couple of profiles atop each other so they look like "sheets", or similar. Those would help trip people's "ah, it's a sample screenshot" pattern recognition.

Totally, on my to do list to redo the homepage with more abstracted product visuals!

This is pretty awesome, I ended up just creating my full profile and swapping my personal details from here to there.

The only thing I'm missing is the Publications and Certifications section (had to create an award for the certs)

#nit - an affordance is something that can be done, a signifier is a visual clue that you can do something

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/94265/whats-the-diffe....

> I was confused by the image CV on the homepage. It expected it to be clickable, and it took me a minute to find the View Demo button.

Another option is to have the "view example" button visible even before the user scrolls.

+1 about cursor: pointer. I also noticed that the text inside at least the top button can be highlighted when clicking. You can disable that with user-select: none;

It's become a web trend to waste 60% of the screen by making ultra-thin, column sites with microscopic text. I don't know why. Apparently having a site 'look good' trumps being able to read it? I was curious what the font size for this site was and it seems to be 14px for key sections which is honestly way too small.

On websites that optimize for readability (like news websites) you see at least 18px and upwards. They also don't force the text into a micro-column forcing you to scroll for pages to read a few sentences. I also think the color / background isn't helping with readability. Black text contrasts terribly with a white background and makes it feel like you're staring at a light bulb. Imagine if PDF readers used the same style for rendering. People would probably go blind before finishing one book.

I think hiring managers will be sitting through a lot of CVs on this site and they would probably appreciate it far more if you optimized for readability over appearance.

There is an option of dark mode once you register. I do fully agree with all your points though. Seems like retina/high dpi displays were not really considered during the design

I think the design is great, just too small.

Try viewing the demo (https://read.cv/andy) on desktop at 125% zoom. Pretty much perfect.

Hello from Vancouver! Great work.

One piece of feedback - would be great if there was an "import from Linkedin" feature. It seems like a lot of the information has already been populated, and it's annoying to c/p it over.

Hit me up if you need some help.

I was just about to suggest this myself. It would be a great addition for sure!

came here to say this... and to also offer...

yup needs it, otherwise quite nice!

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 get applied to hiring people.

If a youngish recruiter spends all day filtering out certain people on his dating apps, when he hops on LinkedIn or this thing here he's going to instinctively keep filtering people out. if someone's not physically attractive to you that absolutely should not have any role in their qualifications, if I ran the world photos on LinkedIn and this would be illegal since it's just an easy way to discriminate against people.

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 the whole point is to find something to "discriminate" against and eliminate the candidate. Please PLEASE do NOT reply to this message saying "oh discriminating is the wrong term I'm simply EVALUATING blah blah blah" Yes whatever you like to call it the end result is exactly the same.

Then, of course, the whole team does the same sort of "don't call it discrimination but if we notice some trait we don't like, we don't hire them" thing again.

Maybe it's their age, or hair, or the clothes they wear, or the way they talked, or didn't talk. Maybe even sometimes, because the person is broke and hungry and they came off wrong, because of course, they don't have any income, or took a risk in their lives that didn't pan out, or perhaps even had to take care of a dying parent for a while, and now have to struggle to come up with an explanation on why they weren't working for that time.

Maybe they even had a felony 20 years ago when they were totally different people...heaven forbid they did THAT because, of course, NO ONE in our amazing Foobar company EVER did anything illegal and didn't get caught!

So that's really just only a matter of bad luck, but yet it's an absolute KoD with getting hired these days.

What rarely ever happens, oddly enough, is to ask candidates to prove their programming skills with either a sample project or a trial period. This would seem like a very logical thing to do and it confounds me why it's not used more...and even if it is and the person aces the tests, if anything is found, well, discriminating about the candidate, well, we just cannot even take a chance on hiring them.

And even though almost 25% of all "sure-fire" hires won't work out and will be gone in a year[0], and there are literally a million tech jobs[1] that need to be filled this year, we just cannot even take a chance on hiring them rings over and over in the offices of the hiring managers. THAT...of all things to rant about, is the thing that baffles and frustrates me more than anything...

How can anyone ever prove they they can become a valuable part of the team if no one will ever give them a chance?

[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/software-had-the-highes...

[1] https://blog.hackerrank.com/unlocking-trapped-engineers/

Living is discrimination.

> 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?

I understand that the way my experiences has shaped my opinions and views is vastly different than yours, but since its 100% impossible to discern peoples motives on why they make certain decisions, how you be at all certain what's really going on there?

This is awesome!

As many others are sharing feedback, I thought I’d might add some myself: I would like to have better support for changing roles internally within the same company (ie promotions etc) and in this regard having the month available at least as an option would be great. LinkedIn uses the company as a higher level grouping, then the years/months spent in a certain position.

For me to use this regularly I would have some reason to check in; and I guess either building up “company profiles” where I could see people who work in a certain company or indeed an interesting way to find companies and open positions would be great.

I love the “features” section and the focus on adding people you’ve worked closely with.

As you are - it seems - involved in Quip too, I’m cheeky enough to add some feedback in that product: fix notifications (!) - managing and keeping track of them is close to impossible, make it easier to actually discuss higher level on a particular document (not per line, and the comments in the sidebar disappears quickly) and lastly please add support for collapsing certain sections of a document :-)

Overall would recommend leveraging the schema from JSONResume (https://jsonresume.org/schema/) that supports all of the above

Thanks for the great feedback! I definitely want to explore a company profiles product - will be interesting trying to make that feel rich enough with only a few companies on board at the beginning.

As for Quip I left in July but I'll be sure to pass the feedback on!

Apologies for being off topic, but the side project you link - https://andychung.me/self-portrait - is absolutely awesome. Runs like butter in the browser and I absolutely love the art style.

Kudos to you!

Wow thank you! It was definitely a fun project.

Yes it's great. But why does he wear slippers outside?

Those aren't slippers. Those are birkenstocks!

Haha yup

with socks?!

Yes, there's some controversy but it's definitely a thing to wear them with socks.

In Germany young people lough about people doing this. It is a symbol for the "typical German".

Birkenstocks + white socks, classic.

Absolutely buttery smooth in my (non Chrome/Chromium) mobile browser.

Brilliant!

If anyone wonders: there has been so many somewhat interesting websites lately that only works in Chrome that it is well worth pointing out when something just works.

Oddly didn't work so well on my Chrome (I have 100+ tabs open), but did great on Firefox.

This is visually very attractive. Have you considered supporting uploading structured resume formats like FRESH?

Edit: also I want to emphasize the fact that this looks great on mobile, which isn’t something I always expect in this space. That said I’d consider bumping up the text size a bit (or allowing users to do so for their own profile).

Would you be able to provide a link to the FRESH format you mention? What other structured resume formats are there in widespread use?

In Europe, EUROPASS is not uncommon: https://europa.eu/europass/en/create-europass-cv

In Europe, you'll never impress anyone with Europass, but you're highly unlikely not screw anything up.

It is well structured, people know what to expect, it's machine readable... Personally, I like it a lot, as opposed to some flashy website PDF that an applicant thinks it's amazing, but it takes me extra 30s to find a piece of data on it.

It took me more than a couple of Google searches for me to find it in the end, so here's a link to FRESH, in case someone else is interested: https://github.com/fresh-standard/fresh-resume-schema

This is a good suggestion. If I've already gone to the trouble to make a machine-readable resume, it would be nice to at least seed my CV with the data from that file.

> ...structured resume formats like FRESH...

I've never heard of this (FRESH), and am intrigued and interested. Would you kindly share some more info on this?

There's also HR Open Standards Candidate as well.

I haven't heard of FRESH before, but I'll certainly look into it. Filling out a CV is a chore and anything I can do to make it easier for people would be great.

It might also help you refine your data model to use other structured standards as a reference. It’s helped me think about building my own personal site presentation.

I was wondering about the existence of structured resume formats, so thank you for this random piece of knowledge in a place I did not expect to find it.

For real. I've been wishing for such a format for years. Now if I find myself applying for jobs, I can sneer derisively at places that don't support any of these, and then grudgingly apply for them manually anyway.

(unsolicited) Feedback: Why are there other people on my CV? Who are they to begin with? And when a recruiter is looking at my CV, I don't want them clicking on other people.

The idea is that you're able to (optionally) tag coworkers and collaborators in your work experience and projects. Although this doesn't track 1:1 with the traditional CV use case, it felt like a great way to celebrate the people you work with and create lightweight endorsements.

If you choose to print or save your profile as a PDF these tags are hidden automatically, making it much more of a traditional CV, appropriate for job applications etc.

First off - cool project, nice work!

Just riffing off some ideas for the 'coworkers and collaborators' section as well since I agree that I wouldn't find it useful as a sometimes-recruiter in its current state.

I think the section could do with some more structure or information given. E.g. instead of just loose association with other folks who work at the same company, break associations into 'reports to', 'close teammates', 'manages' (or make that information visible on hover or something). There's probably a pretty cool hierarchical way to show this information but maybe people would find that too invasive. As someone who conducts interviews pretty often, understanding a person's team structure would definitely be useful, and would still serve the 'social proof' function you've described.

The collaborator's title while they were involved with that specific project might also make it easier to parse what the working relationship was between the CV owner and the collaborator as well.

It isn't any form of "endorsement" if you can add them without confirmation from the person you're tagging.

I think you are lightweight endorsing them, not the other way around.

Their image appearing on a CV feels (inaccurately) like an endorsement of that CV, given people's typical goals when looking at a CV.

I actually really like the concept of naming collaborators. Most great work is done in teams. Either through sparring or checking. The individualistic view on cvs does injustice to the complex dynamics of teams and performers.

> Most great work is done in teams.

But most teams don't produce great work - it's all dependent on the team makeup, bringing it back around to individuals.

I wish I was on a great team again - they seem harder and harder to find.

Some feedback from a random internet person, take it with a fistful of salt.

Why are there non-functioning arrows next to the names of projects, companies, etc.?

Why does it keep randomly re-rendering while I'm trying to read something?

The design is, no doubt to some people, gorgeous, but I'm finding the landing page example completely unusable. If it's intended to show off capability then it needs to be clear that that's the purpose. If it's intended to be usable then it needs to be re-thought.

(Later)

Ah, when I go to an actual example then the arrow isn't functional, but the text on which the arrow is placed, is a link.

My reaction ... I don't want it to be discoverable, requiring exploration to work out the functionality. I want it to be immediately obvious, using existing internet norms. If I visit for the purpose of looking at a CV I don't want to have to learn how to use the site, I want to get the information I'm looking for.

Thanks for the feedback! As you mentioned the arrows indicate that the project is an outbound link (links are optional so having a visual indication that something is linked was necessary, though there are certainly other ways this could be achieved).

Pages subscribe to updates in real time, so I think you just so happened to be viewing a profile as it was being edited. Seems like live updates should probably only be on for the editor.

As for the landing page I'm hoping to redo this in general. As a quick first version I just embedded an actual profile so I wouldn't have to update image assets as the design changed, but I can see how this approach is confusing.

I like the clean, simple design and anything to take on LinkedIn is great in my book. The font is really small though.

Is there a business model? I'm always rather hesitant to put time into projects like this without some sort of business model to keep them running. I've been burned too often by sites either shutting down, going by the wayside, or switching to ads/other less desirable business models eventually.

The design is really elegant! I could see myself using this if I could make my CV unlisted / un-indexed. I used to have a public resume, but then recruiters found it and relentlessly spammed me with irrelevant recruiting offers, and also spread my resume to more and more recruiting spam networks.

I also wonder if you have a plan for monetization; I didn't see a FAQ about content rights / usage / pricing.

Definitely heard the private account feedback - and recruiter spam is a big reason why I didn't want to include any kind of comments of DMs for a first version. Will be looking into how to better support this.

In terms of monetization I plan on keeping the profile aspect free to use. If the user base gets big enough to warrant it I could see charging businesses to create job listings on a jobs section or something.

Check out https://standardresume.co. It has web resumes/profiles that allow you to set noindex. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders and it isn't completely free, although it sounds like you might appreciate that :).

How do you intend, or not intend, to monetize this data? In other words, what are you going to do with my information?

I think it looks great and I'm really inclined to create a profile. However, I already get a ton of spam, and thanks to Linkedin, sales people now call me on my personal phone - something that isn't even exposed to anyone not in my network.

I worry about something like this needing to make money and getting bought by someone that needs the data. That said, I could just shut up and use it, since my data is already out there. :D

I think this looks beautiful, definitely kudos for taking the time to finesse it so aesthetically.

If i had 5 CVs of this format to review i think i’d appreciate a few usability tweaks. The information density is too low for me. I think my ideal situation when consuming CVs is an uber dense firehose consisting of only relevant info.

I’d happily sacrifice the whitespace to have deeper detail about what was done in each role. I’d love if there was some consistency or key or colouring to help me figure out what each section contains.

E.g. if i read the first job listing and achievements/differentiators were in one colour box, responsibilities in a different colour and data like tenure/industry etc were in another colour box - then i could rapidly scan the other historical entries to compare and contrast, e.g. to help me get a flavour for how this person has chosen to develop their career over time for example.

Another thing i’d love is plenty of links to supporting info where available - git repos or published work etc.

This is going to sound ridiculous but i find the read aloud feature of the edge browser’s reader view and the two finger swipe audio reader of ios to be super useful. I have the speed cranked way up and i’m freed to efficiently write notes. If the format lent itself to speed read-aloud, i’d be a massive fan.

I really dig this. Well done.

I like the collaborator feature.

One piece of feedback, I almost missed the contact information at the bottom of the profile. Any chance of having a preferred contact at the top so it's harder to miss?

You can rearrange the order of the sections using the grab handles in the editor. Let me know if that helps!

It does! I guess I was hoping for kind of a more prominent option instead of another section, but that's a nitpick. Nice work again!

This is awesome! I’d recommend adding a section for certifications. I have a bunch of FAA certs that are career-relevant but they don’t fit naturally into any of the existing profile sections.

I’d also suggest making some of the fields wider. 24 characters for location isn’t going to be long enough, for example.

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!

Very nice. Lots of beautiful and simple design of which we need more on the web.

FYI there’s a rendering bug when I move back and forward in iOS 14.

If I visit FAQ then Support, then swipe back to return to the FAQ page I briefly see the Support page fade in, followed by the FAQ page.

This looks beautiful, except I have no idea why there are rows of tiny faces under some of the items. It's not at all clear what they mean, and they make the page ugly (in my opinion) by messing up the composition.

As the only circular objects on the page, as numerous as they are, and as intensely saturated blobs on an otherwise calm, white document, they are incredibly loud. They're so loud that they almost make it harder to read the text. Just get rid of them.

You folks may want to reconsider having photos in CVs.

Not only are people going to be very strongly biased by race, ethnicity etc., but also by the trivialities of presentation: dress, apparent attitude, choice of background. All of those things signal 'personal brand'.

These things are becoming 'far too important' in terms of how we evaluate each other and this development is really lacking in self awareness for a generation of folks who are supposed to be against this kind of stuff.

Secondarily, I'm wary that overall, this is just contributes to the 'life resume BS' competition of filling up your professional profile with rubbish to make you seem engaged - much like 'GitHub commits' as some kind of signal of validity.

At least with LinkedIn it's considered to be 'professional' i.e. this is your 'work presentation' - the casual nature of these new CVs tries to blend some personal and aspiration aspects so as to make the individual seem more 'authentic'. This is a creeping cultural problem and might be the source of a lot of baseline social conflict in the office. It's a 'place of work' - your hobbies are nice, but not relevant.

I stumbled at "Mindful", and then stopped fully at "He/him".

Yeah, what does “mindful” mean in this context exactly? Is it some kind of signal indicating adherence to a certain orthodoxy?

I had to Google what "He/him" meant then stopped.

Maybe try some screenshots that imply the target use cases?

IE:

Why would I use this when I have a profile on LinkedIn?

Why would I use this when I could just put a resume up on my website?

Vs. LinkedIn: I started using it in 2009, but it's become virtually unusable for me. The only reason I haven't deleted my account is it has up to date contact information for my 1,300 LinkedIn connections.

It’s pretty awesome. Great job.

I have been working on a similar project aimed at content creators - they also need their LinkedIn. The idea is that you can build your Authentic Profile by connecting your social APIs. It’s called Authentic https://authenticstats.com and it’s growing fast. :)

Good luck with your project.

My feedback is that the collaborators aren't very useful to me. As in, I get 10+ tiny unrecognizable face icons and a name if I hover over them. There's no way to a see a list of collaborators and their one sentence blurbs for a specific project. Not even sure if shared collaborators are highlighted if you're logged in yourself or not.

I'm thinking of simply truncating collaborators after a certain number and offering the ability to open the full list in a modal or something.

Looks very nice to get the first impression over a person. There is usually a lot of hints and information in the Internet about how to build such first-impression CV. However, EU companies (maybe elsewhere too?) often ask about second-impression CV with more technical details.

I search for a tool helping you to build your coding experience matrix. Imagine a chart looking similar to Github activity tiles or a spreadsheet, where on the x-axis you present time, and on the y-axis you place the coding languages or technologies that you have used in that time.

Such thing would help telling the interviewer, that you have 3 years of C++ experience, but your last project on this was in 2013. Anyone seen something like this?

edit: grammar & typos

Great! I've been wondering for a while if I should do my own but I've been living fine with my StackOverflow CV. Nonetheless I have created a CV there on read.cv/jpic and tried all the features and have a couple of ideas:

- I tried "Print to file" to export a PDF because a lot of times sites ask you to upload a PDF, it turned out only the first page got out, this might be a bug, another thing is that we don't see the picture and there's not much colors

- It would be great to be able to create several CVs, when I apply to a corpo dev job I show a corpo dev CV and when I apply for a freelancer job I show a freelancer CV and when I apply to a corpo management job I show another and so on

Love the idea and the design as well. No clue if my points are mentioned in the comments already.

# Scale down face images

If you decide keeping the face images please scale them down to a thumbnail size. You make my browser load a 400x400 pixel image for than displaying it as 24x24 pixel. You can safe quite some bandwidth on your (and my) side.

Another option would to completely remove the images in favor of https://blurha.sh/ as the images are so small, that detail are not seen anyways.

# Server side rendering for SEO

Please render the site on the server, so it can be used without javascript, can be crawled by google and is a lot faster as well.

You could leverage a service like: https://www.seo4ajax.com/ so you don't have to actually build a server side rendering pipeline.

# Check for web accessibility

I would enjoy having my CV being accessible to a wide array of humans. Some of the contrast and the font size seems to not be optimal for that (and also some screenreaders have problems with the javascript stuff => see server side rendering)

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://read.cv/andy

# Email + password login

I am privacy aware and delete my cookies quite often. The process of waiting for the email and than opening the link (which is broke btw if it is not opened in the same context as the login window) is annoying. Please let me use a username+password to login. (Which can be auto filled by my browser)

# Export as PDF

Here in Germany quite some companies still want printed out CVs or at least PDFs. Would be greate to be able to send them a link to an autogenerated PDF e.g. https://read.cv/andy/pdf

Keep up the work.

Cool but... no language skills?

If this is tailored for the states, it kind of makes sense - but there are different realities (such as Switzerland), where being bilingual / trilingual is an huge asset to the skillset (:

Agree. Additionally, I think it should in general allow sections with custom titles.

For example currently there is a 'writing' section, but as a researcher you want 'publications' (which is pretty much the same, but names matters).

User feedback: I don’t know if read.cv will be around forever since it’s a new thing. I feel compelled to give it a shot since I’m attracted to the cleaner low-noise profiles compared to LinkedIn. I was scanning the marketing material to see if there was an option to export a CV as static HTML in case I wanted to self-host the CV. The closest thing was the bullet about printability, which I assume means I can at least save as a PDF. Even so, an static HTML export option would have made it even more compelling to setup a profile.

This makes total sense, will look into more ways to export your data.

Looks not bad on mobile phone but the font size can be made bigger.

For sure, have heard this a few times now.

Very nice!

So, in Safari on iOS 14, the view demo link brought me to a page that was mostly blank besides the name and picture. I turned on a screen recording to capture the bug, but then was unable to reproduce it (started the recording on this page and followed the link again.) I should have thought to screenshot the page before doing so, oh well! Maybe it was due to a failed XHR request for the profile data, if the pages are being rendered client-side.

Thanks! Ah yeah, sounds like it could have been a weird connection and failed to load the rest of the page.

Things I like.

- projects and feature section.

- Simple clean design, easy to edit

- printable

Things I don't like

- Super buggy

- no support for company lookup/reference (need to build company DB and connect the social graphs, this is why Linkedin is so valuable/has a moat i.e. your biggest challenge.)

- No ability to add a custom section to my profile.

- I would like to add things non-work related like music i'm listening to, books I'm reading etc...

- The above makes things more personal, but I would go even further the more intimate the better IMO. Work is personal.

Have definitely been thinking about how to make sections more customizable as I'll never be able to make the defaults cover every use case. What bugs are you encountering?

perhaps you could implement a simple feedback/bug report button so that people can send it in in context. i like encouraging using Loom too, since its free

Modals kept getting stuck, couldn't click out of them and then the app would freeze.

I think the landing page should be adjusted so that the embedded resume doesn't look like the final product. Perhaps screenshots of the sections and features instead. A decent amount of feedback here seems to be because people didn't click view example.

And I'd also add the ability to have generic sections or entries. Something for lists especially. For instance languages or certifications, or certifications.

Some constructive tips on making the design more accessible/inclusive:

- "gray-3" on white has a really low contrast ratio (confirmed by others in this thread)

- remove "maximum-scale=1" from your viewport meta tag

- use semantic HTML / landmarks (e.g. "aside" instead of "div id='sidebar'")

- add a label to your "sidebar-toggle" button

Love the clean look, certainly a break from LinkedIn.

Some minor feedback, it's strange that all the external links in your CV have an arrow next to them apart from the one at the very top of the page under your name [0] where you link to your website.

[0] - https://read.cv/andy

This seems very useful, but one question I have is how suitable is this for freelancers? Not everyone is looking for a full-time Job or wants to present a CV as such but still wants to showcase their work and what they've achieved but your site seems a little more Cv oriented?

I hope it makes sense what I'm getting at?

For sure get what you mean. I actually wanted to give equal weight to things like projects and side projects for this very reason (instead of purely work experience and education). I'm hoping this can be seen a little bit less like a formal CV, and sort of a easy to share link you can throw in your bio or even use as a personal website.

Yes. I'm interested in the personal website aspect.

I would like it if the collaborators were in a cluster on the right of the Company name, rather than inline. It would make it more clear that this is a related concept.

As you eyes go down the left side of the page you would read contiguous CV info, supporting information would be a little more segregated to the right.

I am stuck in this state https://imgur.com/8tbkQt4 didn't create any data in my profile so can no longer edit it!

Edit: I have a masssssive screen so didn't see the edit in the bottom left!

I never had a LinkedIn profile or similar. Might give this one a try, actually. I like the no bullshit approach. Lots of the sites and platforms we use try to be and do a hundred things at once. It's overwhelming sometimes, and exhausting most of the time.

It looks beautiful, but please increase the contrast. Some texts are #aaa on #fff, which is almost illegible. This is an accessibility issue not just for people with impaired vision, also for people checking a page on a mobile phone on a sunny day.

I have been using represent.io for this purpose; nice to see some competition in this space.

Looks great! Could you share details about your stack? Would live to learn more about it.

Very cool!

One thing I'd need to have if I continue to play with it is some toggle for public/draft. Right now it seems my profile is immediately public but I'm not sure I want to keep it yet, and it's still a WIP even if I do. Thanks!

This is really beautiful, but then again my reference point is the overly bloated, always slow, and hideously designed site that is LinkedId.

Added bonus for HN readers, because it's only just been released you can probably bag a nice @username.

Andy, congratulations on shipping a product! It's a good idea and using .cv for CVs is a nice touch.

That said, here's how your website looks on my 27" 2560x1440 display: https://i.imgur.com/5dsRIlN.png

I'm sorry, but I have to be harsher than usual with my (granted, unsolicited) feedback now because you've been a designer for 11 years and I find your design - to be blunt - inconsiderate and inconsistent.

I hope you can school me on design in general by answering these questions:

1. Why is 3/4 of my screen empty space, while 1/2 of the content is invisible, forcing me to scroll down like I ran out of screen space? Seems inconsiderate.

2. Did you make this website for your own use, or for other people to use as well? If for other people, then why are you not accounting for the fact that lightgray on white is difficult to read in general, but especially hard to read for older folks? Seems inconsiderate.

3. What are the tiny circles with pictures supposed to tell me on the home page? They're just super tiny images with no information or tooltips. Seems inconsiderate.

4. Why do the "Create profile" and "View examples" CTAs look like buttons, but the mouse pointer is different when hovering on them? Seems inconsistent.

5. Why are you messing with the scrollbar to force me to scroll through the main CV? Seems inconsiderate.

6. Why is the "View example" button taking me to a page that wastes my time by showing me the exact same CV that I am forced to scroll through on the main page? Seems inconsiderate.

7. Why is the text on the main CV not selectable, yet on the "View Example" page it is selectable? Seems inconsistent.

8. Why are the links in the footer so close together? Seems inconsistent with the rest of the spacing on the page.

That reminds of what - I think, not sure - Paul Graham once said, that what is applied to stupidity of the founders is just that they have little time and other priorities. Don't remember the exact quote. You are saying that Andy is inconsiderate in every other line. When most likely he had tons of other things to do. You can either make sure all your hover cursors and the spacing between links are consistent. Or you can ship.

I see all this stylish eye candy on the page (animated transitions, rounded corners, dialogs with dark overlay) that takes time and care to implement, but there was just not enough time to make the text legible before shipping, eh?

It's clear that some of these were design choices and have nothing to do with shipping faster. The others are just inconsistencies that go against the general polish that the design aspires to convey.

Why are you being an asshole? Seems Inconsiderate.

You can remove those "Seems Inconsiderate" and still give feedback.

Two people can be inconsiderate at the same time.

Andy should be experienced enough to be able to handle non-sugar-coated feedback, unlike you, it seems (based on your comment).

My sugarcoated feedback to you is to please try to refrain from resorting to name calling when disagreeing with another person. It shifts the discussion from facts to feelings and that's typically counter-productive. I hope you'll take the time to reflect on this and attempt to change your approach in the future. Thank you and good luck with your endeavors in 2021 and beyond.

I only see a white page (probably due to usage of an ad blocker, ublock origin).

Nice work. Quick feedback. Instead of (or in addition to) using Google to authenticate could you use LinkedIn? That way the site could pull my information from LinkedIn instead of making me enter it again.

Thanks! I think pulling information from LinkedIn would be awesome and really reduce friction to creating an account.

Any thoughts about making this an open platform where people own their own data but apps are built on top of it? And users can design their own UIs too? I'd be an early paying customer of that API.

How would that work exactly, could you elaborate a bit more?

This really looks neat!

Feedback

+ If there is a downloadable version of CV that will be helpful, maybe LaTeX pdf download?

+ Adapt the JSON Resume[1] schema

[1] - https://jsonresume.org/

Love the idea and second the "to pdf" feature requests but on a high-dpi screen the text is a bit small and hard to read, some css tweaks are probably needed to make it perfect. Kudos.

text way too small and hard to read, by like an order of magnitude

This looks cool, really nice design. It would be good to list a few more example profiles, it's hard to get an idea of what a profile would look like by only seeing yours.

For sure! I actually can't wait to remove my profile from the homepage completely, there are lots of great ones now.

I can't swipe or otherwise close the left menu once it's open (Android/pixel3/chrome)

Remember resume.json spec that was on here a few years ago? Any plans to support that?

I haven't implemented gestures to open the sidebar yet unfortunately - currently to close the sidebar on mobile either tap the right edge of the screen (the sliver of the detail), or tap a navigation item in the sidebar.

Could a word/character limit also be considered? I have seen people who write bloated almost-autobiographies wherever an online profile allows them to.

Beautiful. Good work. For software engineers involved in building UIs, I think there should be embedded iframes or some such thing showing their portfolio.

Looks promising, congrats!

To make it more useful, I recommend increasing the font size and using darker text. The most basic requirement of a CV is that it be legible.

Looks really nice. Wondering if it would make sense to have sections for a list of skills and/or projects (rather than just work experience)?

Very cool, and great use of the read.cv domain name.

What's your real name policy?

And there's probably a typo in your FAQ, "We do not allow sexual of adult content or any kind."

A way to publish information (mainly the "About" rant) written in languages other than English may boost adoption.

Hi @_andychung, have you ever considered jsonresume ? Personally I use it to generate my CV on various templates.

Would be wonderful if the status can be synced with my Twitter account!

Also would definitely pay for it I can use a custom domain.

Clean design, but the contrast could be a lot better (light gray on white). Company logos would be cool too!

It's clean, but clean as in it feels like there is nothing for me to look at or objectively accomplish

Like it, cool feature would be: Some kind of passphrase-protection or option to make the profile private.

For sure, have heard this feedback before especially from people who would like to hide their profile from their current employer.

Love the design -- pretty cool work!

I almost never interact with Show HN projects but I am going to make an account. Good luck!

This looks nice, I like it.

One thing that worries me about CV social networks is the possibility of that site going away or loosing it’s relevance. Once you have lots of comments/recommendations etc, loosing that could really cause issues to your employability.

I don’t know what the solution is, maybe some type of distributed crypto bitcoin setup?

Like it. A nice feature would be: Some kind of password-protection or private mode.

Printing button doesn't seem to be working. Firefox 84, Debian.

Its simple and beautiful :) Can we make profile images optional?

Really lovely work, I think it makes for a great digital CV.

There are 27 photos at the bottom on mobile? Who are these people? If these are example profiles I would try to get a more diverse and inclusive grouping. There is not a woman in the 27 and ideally it would be 50/50

These are simply the most recent users who have signed up, and unfortunately the the HN demographic is pretty male...

“Unfortunately”.

What a ridiculous culture we’ve built if this sentiment is widely accepted. Just bizarre.

Nothing bizarre about it; Diverse viewpoints tend to strengthen a community, so considering it unfortunate that HN doesn't benefit from a broader demographic distribution is pretty defensible.

By that logic, it would be sensible to lament that, say, a particular daycare is staffed entirely by women, or that a particular ice hockey team is made up entirely of white men. Sometimes groups of humans coalesce these ways, and there’s nothing wrong or unfortunate about it. No intervention requested or required.

If you want to champion diversity of viewpoints, that’s a different matter entirely, and such conditions may be desirable, depending on the wants & needs of the group in question.

Take these things on a case-by-case basis. Don’t reach for top-down governance as a panacea when such a thing is neither requested nor required.

> By that logic, it would be sensible to lament that, say, a particular daycare is staffed entirely by women, or that

This is a non-sequitur; neither of those are communities in the sense under discussion.

I'll agree that there are some cases where a lack of diversity doesn't indicate any weakness in the community, but that is not the general case.

I don't know why you are bringing "intervention" into the discussion as I did not, nor did the OP. And who said anything about top-down governance? I noted only that the case for more diversity in HN is quite defensible, and it obviously is. NB I didn't claim it was correct, just defensible which is a pretty low bar.

So beyond "bizarre" being an overreach (ironically, verging on bizarre even before the ex post facto introduction of intervention, etc.), this is exactly the case-by-case you are asking for.

> I'll agree that there are some cases where a lack of diversity doesn't indicate any weakness in the community, but that is not the general case.

Do you think that e.g. a forum about child-rearing populated almost entirely by women exhibits “a lack of diversity”?

Yes to case-by-case, and in this case, Hacker News being a somewhat representative demographic of the Tech sector, it is rather unfortunate that it lacks the noted diversity.

It's not ok to suggest that the Tech sector, being one of the most important industries for gaining financial independence and making an impact on the world, must remain the white male bastion that it is.

You can’t force demographics. People are going to navigate to and participate in the things that interest them. There’s nothing unfortunate about that.

Maybe you’re really thinking about unnecessary gatekeeping or something? THAT is unfortunate.

But it’s vital to recognize the difference between these concepts. One is immoral, the other is not.

Sorry, I have to: we need more female construction workers for diversity. Most occupational deaths are male. We need to balance that scale. Do not we?! Sigh...

Does it make sense to speak about the composition of a group without understanding what the group membership represents?

Eg: what if that's the list of people who gave him financial support building it? What if it's his buddies from the Navy SEALS? Perhaps it's a list of sexual predators in his area? Should it still be 50/50…

Though I agree it's not clear what those pics on the bottom represent.

signed up immediately. looks beautiful. i LOVE that you have dark mode right out of the gate.

what are your plans for this? is this a fun side project or a proto-startup?

Thank you! It started as a side project but I have a few ideas on how to turn this into something a bit more real.

the Side Projects links here don't work https://read.cv/about

This looks really nice and I especially love the neat URLs!

One thing it got me thinking: since the UI is really nice, could this be an opportunity to create a defacto standard computer-readable format for CVs? Something that I could upload or link into a job application site and it would automatically extract the required info or put through various converters to get different designs and formats.

I guess the second part specifically would be in a way competing with your core product, but I'm sure many people would appreciate the ability to get data out (and maybe in?) using some kind of text format (this might also possibly be required by the GDPR, but I don't know too much about that).

I like how clean and minimalistic the design is.

Alright, I get it, but I’m not the target audience. Could you build a product that’ll help me disappear without a trace? An opposite, if you will, of what you’ve built.

I guess low contrast text is good design?

my only gripe is that it takes too many clicks to change your profile photo, otherwise looks amazing!

88 HTTP requests, damn...

Clean and simple!

I saw the world "mindful", and groaned.

Also saw the addition of the pronouns section and cringed. I hope such expressions of religious affiliation are optional.

They are optional, but I'm not sure what pronouns have to do with religion.

The concept of personal pronoun assignments is part of a very specific orthodoxy.

what are your plans for it?

beautiful design.

Clean design, I like the UI

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.

I am glad it worked out for you. That's awesome. I am afraid though, its an exception.

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777640

I bought this book and they've done a lot of analysis around "prettifying" resumes.

I think this is an interesting idea, and would like to follow the progress.

My only complaint is that the site is entirely unusable without JavaScript. Perhaps consider including some content with in addition to the notice of enabling JavaScript. I get most sites aren't designed with NoScript users in mjnd, but being able to see a little information before whitelisting the domain would be nice.

Dude the world uses JavaScript, stop making these comments on every thread

I don't mind if a site doesn't work as intended, but is it too much to ask to get something more than "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app."

I didn't realize viewing text or images without client side JS was an unreasonable ask.

Great idea and execution! I personally find the white space excessive and it's made more obvious on print. Unless someone is name dropping companies, I would expect a resume to have a lot more information in a higher density view. A cool idea would be to replace the facepile with various icons with numbers next to it to show quantified metrics that were accomplishments of various positions/projects ($X rev/# commits/# users/etc.)

oh god please don't make an engineer (at least) prove their worth in a bunch of silly metrics

This made me chuckle. Having been an outsourced technical partner for a number of marketing agencies, I completely feel your pain.

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