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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

The replies to this are emblematic of HN culture -- a whole lot of quick dismissals without engaging with why this might exist, who it might benefit, and who it might turn away.

A decade ago everyone was telling me how millennials were lazy or disconnected or didn't understand the real world. And it felt pretty bad. I'm seeing all the same commentary shifted down a generation to GenZ without any introspection.

Yes, you might find this silly, and yes, you might not want to get hired this way. But also consider that for some companies, for some roles, or even for some pipelines there could be benefits to broadening the applicant pool.

Some folks are going to have a hard time articulating their experience via resume, some folks are going to have a hard time articulating their experience via tiktok. Why wouldn't we want to consider folks from both input sources and let folks present themselves using the form they feel best conveys their strengths?

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Its amusing that less than 24 hours ago on the 'how to write a resume that converts' thread many people commented that "Resumes are completely outdated", and now here we are with more negativity on this modern approach.

For entry level jobs requiring young people that are customer facing, a video application makes a lot of sense to me.

It also removes a lot of the awkwardness Gen Z's might feel going down to their local retailer and asking if they are hiring.

My instinct says props to TikTok for at least trying something that's different and thinking a bit outside of the box

Everyone’s a critic. It’s always easier to dismiss and be pessimistic than embrace and be constructive. In fact this very comment I write is dismissive itself.

> Its amusing that less than 24 hours ago on the 'how to write a resume that converts' thread many people commented that "Resumes are completely outdated", and now here we are with more negativity on this modern approach.

I find myself in state regularly. At least I know now how to recognize the paralizing absurdity. Still very often a new solution is best when it massages an old one to fix problems but the world seems to operate by big deviations that shock the status quo and then new and old blend again.

It isn't that amusing. It just shows that HN isn't a monoculture.

This is why comments complaining about HN monoculture get upvoted. Because a large enough piece of the userbase agrees with both sides. If they didn't, those comments would just get downvoted and you would never see them.

Kinda funny how that works. "See, lots of people agree that HN is a hivemind!" Proving it's not a hivemind.

Don't you know? Recruiter supposed to hire you by using their mind tricks, duh.

If we're going to go out of our way to acknowledge this new service could be a civic good we should also acknowledge that it could be immensely destructive. If you get to have optimism for a brand new corporate product launch from TikTok I get to have cynicism.

Social media, particularly to Gen Z, and particulary TikTok, has a major focus on projecting success, wealth, beauty, and other aspects of vanity - often in unhealthy ways. Rich people tend to have more followers, white people tends to have more followers, blondes tends to have more followers, sexually provocative content tends to have more followers.

I do not see TikTok shedding its whole zeitgeist to forward a a jobs product that helps the world.

> Gen Z [...] has a major focus on projecting success, wealth, beauty, and other aspects of vanity

Focus on projecting success, wealth, and beauty is a tale as old as time. It is not unique to Gen Z, nor is it heightened in Gen Z.

Funnily enough, those claims are also as old as time.

> Social media, particularly to Gen Z, and particulary TikTok, has a major focus on projecting success, wealth, beauty, and other aspects of vanity

This statement can apply to LinkedIn as well.

I must be seeing a different sides of Tiktok than you. The Tiktok I see has plenty of vanity (though nothing compared to Instagram), but also an immense amount honestness/earnestness/openness where Gen-Z shares its mistakes/embarrassments/awkwardness.

> Social media, particularly to Gen Z, and particulary TikTok, has a major focus on projecting success, wealth, beauty, and other aspects of vanity - often in unhealthy ways.

As if it wasn't true for basically entire human history.

It is just the way in which the success or image of it is being projected that is changing.

You, Mister, need to study history a little bit before you start to compare generations. Also get a little bit of distance and learn about your biases.

> white people tends to have more followers

Citation needed.

You should realize that HN audience is old and graying, I was really looking forward to new tech forums populated by younger people, but havent seen any popular ones.

I'm sure the HN audience is a diverse set of folks across age ranges, there's just a culture of punching down at things they don't understand that's permitted here.

Not just here, Reddit and even MacRumors as well [1].

[1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...

I'll always remember /.'s take on the iPod:

    No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

The history of what works vs what flops for similar products is always fascinating. The iPod is basically no more, but it sure did better than I ever thought it would.

I think it would be uncontroversial to say that HackerNews would have had the exact same take if it existed.

And I, at the time, had the exact same take.

Despite being full of entrepreneurs and hackers, folks here are remarkably out of touch with the average consumer.

It's not a damning criticism. Like I said, I include myself in this group that reacted with a resounding "What? WHY?" to almost every single Apple product launched under Steve Jobs's tenure, and was wrong every time.

But it's a blindspot we should be cognizant of. And anything related with TikTok is the perfect confluence to lead to the most stale takes.

Having said that, there is always a bit of a survivorship bias with these trends.

I also was completely negative and dubious on Snapchat and turned out to have been vindicated.

I do think TikTok is something different. It captures my imagination and attention better than any platform EVER, and I include YouTube and Instagram in this. Their recommendation algorithm is truly wonderous.

I am graying but I wouldn't say I'm that old =) Btw, what's that new "tictac" you youngsters keep talking about...

Forums are old and graying, the young people are on TikTok and other social media sites like this article suggests.

I disagree - reddit's audience is still young, but it's been taken over by politics spam

Imgur is in the same boat. It was a younger, energetic social network and the comments were mostly whimsical. I used to enjoy perusing its frontpage. Now it's heavy on political spam, talking points and general political propaganda, more or less cloning the descent you see on mainstream Reddit (plenty of niche subs are still great and mostly free of politics). I think it largely mirrors the manic obsession you see in certain parts of the US culture to hyper focus on politics 24/7.

> taken over by politics spam

Not in my experience. You just have to subscribe to subreddits that don't have a political tilt. On rare occasions some subreddits go dark or sticky something political, but I'd hardly call that a take over.

The spam is everywhere, even /r/science was spammed last time I was there (I leaved last year).

The defaults (Or what used to be defaults), are all generally garbage and filled with political spam. Finding more niche and specific subreddits yields better results.

You will note that /r/science is a mainstream sub. You've got to subscribe to niche subreddits only and build up your experience from there to avoid politics. Most of my small hobby subs are politics-free.

Reddit’s audience is old; it’s a bunch of millennials and older gen Z. And the kids don’t really use the comments on Reddit, they just yoink memes and throw them on whatever social media platform their friends use. The gen z’s I know through the LGBT community couldn’t give a shit less about politics.

Text as a medium is rapidly falling out of favor unless it’s for purely informational purposes. I read an article this morning about how the book publishing industry is all but dead because nobody is buying books anymore. Newspapers are largely dead, and the ones that still exist have pivoted hard to video or metatextual content.

Text doesn’t sell valuable ads and reading requires your full attention, and that is in direct competition with social media. It’s why banner ads were never really effective and the big ad revenue shift only happened after video ads became viable (and made YouTube unwatchable).

No they're not usually, except a few communities

I have a 14+ year old Reddit account, and that platform was always astroturfed.

There are tons of slack/discord servers full of all kinds of people, you just have to look around.

not necessarily young, and the chatroom format is not engaging

I would highly suggest Tildes, it's a little more varying than HN with much better discussions.

https://tildes.net/

I'll drop a few invite codes below for anyone interested (if they are all used, let me know)

https://tildes.net/register?code=I448A-IEYUI-UDNWH https://tildes.net/register?code=VDTMC-SBJTQ-PTW9X https://tildes.net/register?code=HEX3N-VA48Z-AIJIT https://tildes.net/register?code=7L0GO-L4BZ0-962ZN

Note: I am not affiliated with Tildes, just an active member who wants the community to grow.

All of them says invalid?

They're all gone.

There is literally one or two comments if any on most articles. Some articles "Trump blog not lighting it up" and "Elon Musk is not your friends" are worse than anything that even appears on slashdot.

Did you spend some time reading these posts? I actually did and found them both interesting.

The first confirms that once DJT was removed off of large platforms like Twitter, he lost a lot of followers and digital support, proof that large scale networks have a strong positive feedback loop.

The second provides 2 videos that go into excruciating detail on why Elon Musk is a fake futurist, ruthless capitalist and overall a terrible person (Including working his factory workers at the TSLA factory through COVID forcefully, threatening their jobs and saying we will be at 0 cases by the end of April 2020). At the very least, you should dislike Elon for his anti-union, ruthlessly capitalistic approach to human labor and selfishness.

Looks interesting, but I don't understand how it's supposed to grow with limited access. Imo, it's better to have free for all registration (maybe until it hits a certain number) and just block the unwanted users later.

This invite only approach doesn't seem to be working all that well, I've been following Lobste.rs, from what I can tell it's got the same problems as HN with poor comments.

I think there's quite a few young people here. Like you say, there's no many other tech forums. That's why this one is popular and why people come here.

Actually, I think HN skews younger. The previous polls demonstrated this [1], this is an old link but I think it holds up.

Also 'young people new to the job market' will probably always have a major mismatch with respect to expectations and values, it's probably been that way since the dawn of time.

It took me 2 years just to get my head straight in a 'basic way' to even start to understand the professional world.

Though I don't think it's fair to characterize any generation as 'lazy' though, that's not the right word - although Millenials are the first generation to not consider 'hard work' as a characteristic of their generation - this is an old data point (10 years old) which could either indicate a generational value shift - or - simply the fact that people of a certain age don't have that virtue (or don't think of themselves as that) but by the time they are 30 then their views and values shift etc..

TikTok surely can reach young people for certain kinds of jobs, not doubt. But it's also just a way to try to make money in any way they can.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588

There's a weird gap between Gen Z and Millenials in how each of our generations experienced what "tech" is, and I do wonder how it affects the Gen Z tech world in particular. My generation, Millenials largely learned technology at a time when unpolished, non-standardized platforms were still the norm. We got comfortable with installing and rolling back drivers, setting up routers and printers, and navigating text-dominated forums and mailing-list email chains to troubleshoot issues. Lots of us were into PC gaming, and that kind of stuff was just expected if you wanted to play. When we went into technical fields later on, those skills were still really applicable.

Meanwhile, my early-teen step-siblings have very similar interests to what I had back in the day (they enjoy playing games like roblox/minecraft on the computer, and FPS on consoles) - but are way less comfortable messing with the OS to troubleshoot vs what I was doing at their age. They were raised with tablets, where things just kind of work. When they do want to learn something, they pretty much always go to youtube first - and I'm not really sure if that's more effective or less effective than what we used to do, or if means they will have a harder time parsing technical docs later on in life.

They've expressed interested in computer science fields, and I do think they'll be able to learn it just fine. In some ways, maybe the exposure to more polished UX will make their bar for those experiences higher than what my generation would accept.

Are you sure this is a millennial/gen z problem and not just a techie/non techie one?

Because this a really broad extrapolation.

One has a hard time becoming a techie when all technology is indistinguishable from magic, sleek and impenetrable.

I get the feeling you are right. I remember when I was kid during the late 90s and early 2000s, when these "unpolished" systems were the norm.

A lot of my peers were starting to use them, but just like kids today, they didn't really look into how things worked, they weren't really curious about them, they didn't really tinker with them.

They wouldn't go and update / rollback a driver. They would just complain if things didn't work, and maybe asked a "geek" friend for help.

Today, if a random game doesn't work, people will just try the next one.

yes, not too many people tinkered with their computers then. But the real question is: how many of those who tinkered then, would tinker now if they were born in the 00s? Probably less then if they were born in the 80s, just because e.g. ipads or smartphones are not to be tinkered with. I mean many pupils have problems just working at a laptop (e.g. understanding the file system) because they never did it at home where all they might know are smartphones. So there definitely is a very different technological structure today than back then.

That's true, the way "technology" is set up now, with locked-down tablets and phones may be less conducive to tinkering. But then again, computers, in general, are much more affordable.

So if people are curious, it's much easier to get their hands on a computer, and there's less risk.

When I was growing up, a PC was a fairly consequential purchase for my family, and they couldn't afford to buy a new one very often. There was a lot of pressure to "not break it". Of course, looking things up a bit and getting help from my father and friends, I was able to figure out that "messing with drivers" would likely not break it physically. But I understand this could have been limiting for people not having someone to guide them.

There's also the fact that today much more people have access to "computing", so if the part of the population interested in tinkering is roughly the same in absolute terms, the ratio between those who tinker and those who don't is skewed in favor of those who don't.

These people might not be tinkering with iPads or iPhone, but web development has infinite possibilities and a very low barrier to entry (you only need a computer with a web browser). Anyone interested in code will find a way to scratch that itch.

i m sure ease of tech has to do with it. In the 80s, lawyers would use SQL -- because that was the state of tech at the time. Problems that are out of sight are out of mind.

btw there is no such thing as techie anymore - everyone is into tech, there are very very few luddites left. There's a tendency of UI designers to infantilize their designs , but i m not sure that's based on actual measurable improvement or a certain "contempt" for the end user.

Agree

In this case, I really don't think they're very different. I ended up in tech, but I didn't consider myself a techie at their age. I could do the stuff I mentioned, but pretty much everyone in my peer group could - and most of us did not end up going into tech. In some ways, they're more advanced (one of them used to play some tablet game that basically used programming concepts - though he's never touched real code or applied anything outside of roblox to my knowledge).

I'm a Gen Z and I've noticed the same thing. I think the ease of use for a lot of these technologies is to blame. A lot of people I know are into the Gaming PC subculture, but couldn't do much on the software side to fix a PC. The main reason why I tend to be good with low-level stuff on the computer is because I had a computer which constantly broke, and I had to optimize.

I think for anyone who has a kid, the best way to get them interested in this stuff is to have a bad computer, or at least one that primarily uses the shell (not that those computers are bad, I use one myself).

Also a zoomer...I don't know if I agree with the sentiment but my experience was similar. Made my first computer in 6th grade, evidently I did something wrong because I was debugging crashes on that machine for 6 years. Also significant time spent min-maxing our internet for League of Legends around that time.

>I think for anyone who has a kid, the best way to get them interested in this stuff is to have a bad computer, or at least one that primarily uses the shell (not that those computers are bad, I use one myself).

I got deeply interested in technology the opposite way. I got an iPod touch as a kid, and I was amazed by how well designed it was. The thing felt completely delightful to use compared to the Windows XP/Vista systems that were around in the day. I immediately had dreams of writing apps for the iPod that were every bit as amazing as the rest of the system. It didn't take me long after unboxing that iPod touch for me to boot up an old Mac to start on my programming journey.

And to this day, creating great user experiences is what drives my interest in software above all else.

> They were raised with tablets

and macbooks. Totally opaque systems that you d rather replace than upgrade. That's OK -- it would happen inevitably, as it did with cars. The problem is that this culture has extended to software, where it is normalized that any technology must be offered through frameworks, APIs and prepackaged cloud solutions

Same generation as you, and same experience. It's just that creativity went elsewhere now.

Because there's three trillion ways you can write a program and all of them seem to come with dozens of READMEs and what-to-do and what-not-to-do and very opinionated maintainers, the creative minds of today might just create their games within Roblox or get to know Javascript by making mods for a browser game, or learn to use DAWs to make cool-sounding EDM, etc. This was already a thing in "our" time with Flash and Adobe's software, but now that's the norm.

Effectively those minds have migrated over generations from the pure hardware to progressively thicker layers of software, which makes sense to me since that's how all human progress basically does with any other field too.

I think the same could be said about Gen X vs Millenials and before that as well.

My dad would tell me stories of copying code from magazines by hand and how little memory they had.

Today, memory and CPU speed is basically a non-factor; it's assumed to be infinite or at least extremely high for many applications.

I believe it! My mom would always tell me about how she would do the same, as a teenager learning to program on her Commodore 64.

Funnily enough though, memory constraints were still relevant for me and some of my friends - since Ti-83 calculators were the first exposure to programming for many of us. It helped that we were all required to buy them, so we could collaborate and copy over programs to each other. I would write programs so I wouldn't have to memorize chemistry stuff in HS. The teachers back then never checked, and they expected us to use calculators for normal calculations anyhow.

By the time I was using real code in college though - I agree. Performance optimization like that was taught as more of a "nice to have", and the only classes where it really mattered were assembly, and one elective I took on game engine development.

I think most kids back then, just like most kids today, weren't/aren't super into computers or hacking. But the young teens I've met who do enjoy this stuff are seriously impressive -- some know rust, or machine learning, or build websites or reverse engineer apps. During the pandemic, high schoolers are figuring out ways to bypass their schools' surveillance software. That is to say, the kids are alright.

Modern docs, youtube tutorials, and high quality free courses are much more conducive to learning than the forums, mailing lists, and library books of yore.

Maybe because younger people simply don't use the same platforms we do.

All younger folks I see use TikTok and Snap to communicate, interact and get their data feed.

Text communication is being replaced by video, see TikTok

HN has decided it hates TikTok, and so it is. No one here will care to read deeper. Despite the (for whatever reason) superior/smug attitude of the readers on here, they’re still party to extreme groupthink.

An alternative hypotheses; TikTok really is horrible (along with many other social media companies) and it’s not old farts, ego, or groupthink.

The thing is, you can have negative feelings about tiktok (I am) without thinking that their jobs service is useless or doomed to failure.

I'm not much of a social media user, despite being of an age full of extremely active users. I find Tiktok in particular annoying, like someone took the inauthenticity of mediocre YouTube creators and decided that every user in the network should ape it.

But that has nothing to do with the jobs service, the fact that it may expand a company's recruiting reach or provide opportunity to those who don't fit well into the stodgy workflow of traditional job apps. Just because the tiktok application format wouldn't fit my co's hiring doesn't mean that there aren't tons of jobs for whom a short demonstration of personality and creativity is signal as useful as a resumé.

HN definitely has a negative attitude towards TikTok in particular, that goes beyond its normal hate of social media.

Not really. Facebook gets far, far more attention and negative attention around here than tiktoK.

The difference is that most people on here have used Facebook (wrote and read something) while I'm pretty certain most people here have not created a video on Tiktok.

You don't have to be a creator to count as a user.

I'd wager that's mostly because Facebook already had a decade before Tiktok to work its network effect magic, and nobody wants to subscribe to yet another social network that is Tiktok.

I was pretty sad when they banned it here in India. TikTok had become really popular among poorer people somehow. The income and class gaps in India mean that you don’t often get to know how the rural poor really live - TikTok was rare a window into that life. Helped me understand and empathize deeply.

The new replacements for it just don’t have the same vibe.

"<x> is horrible" if the judgemental attitude people are complaining about. As long as something doesnt eat babies, it's not horrible

>everyone was telling me how millennials were lazy or disconnected or didn't understand the real world.

a decade ago was the single largest financial collapse in american history since the depression. millennials were told they would all get office jobs and a lexus. they all largely got working-poor fast food jobs and endless student debt.

now GenZ is looking at the same prospect. Covid and stagnant wages, and unapproachable college debt.

whatever Tiktok hopes to do, it needs to pivot from this malarkey where everyone needs to be a programmer and start offering trade jobs, which have been starving for new hires for 40 years. plumbing, HVAC, electrical, mechanical maintenance, and engine techs would stop traffic for a chance to so much as talk to someone from GenZ about the trade.

> techs would stop traffic for a chance to so much as talk to someone from GenZ about the trade.

Pay more. Stop asking people to give up their physical health to compete on the job. Give them a career.

Construction wages have decreased, adjusted for inflation, so it's not a surprise there's no interest in taking those jobs.

> Pay more. Stop asking people to give up their physical health to compete on the job. Give them a career.

Wow! What an insightful suggestion! If you aren't paying enough, just pay enough, duh.

You are being sarcastic, but that is literally the fix. If you offer backbreaking work without matching compensation, it's clear that you won't get any applicants.

> start offering trade jobs, which have been starving for new hires for 40 years. plumbing, HVAC, electrical, mechanical maintenance, and engine techs would stop traffic for a chance to so much as talk to someone from GenZ about the trade.

Salaries in those fields have been flat. That shows that there is NOT some magic pent-up demand in the trades.

Yes, a lot of people would like a flood of tradespeople to drive those flat salaries down but that does not mean that there is a shortage.

I have observed young people today, on tiktok, wallstreetbets, and other communities, to generally be very savvy and cognizant of trends and good investments more so than older people, who get stuck in ruts, such as subscribing to hype/fud of zerohedge or peterschiff. TikTOk and Reddit investors are good at filtering out this bad advice and alarmism.

Is this satire? TikTok, IG, and WSB are comically bad and dangerous investment advice. Sure there are a few DD's on WSB that get upvoted to the top, but most are just jumping on a few tickers because someone said it's the next hot thing. Even worse on TikTok and IG, it's 99%:

"look at BTC went 500% last year, buy the dip for another 5x"

"these stocks are the future $RANDOM_SOLAR_PANEL_CO, $TSLA, $WEED_CO"

The most generally knowledgeable sizeable investment advice community is on bogleheads.org and users are usually like age 35+. They're generally well informed on tax implications, century old historical performance, different asset classes, factor analysis, ETF securities lending, etc.

Meme-driven investing is riding on a short-term wave now, but soon everyone who didn't get off the bandwagon in time to save their gains will go home crying.

The fact is that short-term (<10 years) investing is indistinguishable from gambling, unless you're Warren Buffett. Investment should be done accordingly, with the plan to get rich slowly if you want to be certain of the outcome.

Politics is eating the world. Everything is forced to be looked through the eyes of clans and governance.

It’s upsetting, uncreative and harmful.

Politics is about deciding what should be society's rules of liberty and economics in the game we call modern life.

Imagine if games were made of discussions on how the game should be.

it’s important stuff but should not be replacing the stuff that it’s supposed to regulate.

Intense rule making periods are tragedies. Everything of substance is easily lost on the promise that we will have more of it in the future.

At the end, often the rules remain about the same but the rulers change. Politics is not about philosophical argument but power distribution. It's not the case that the more you argue the better rules you produce. In the Middle East the everyday life is deep into politics and they failed to produce the outstanding rules.

> Politics is eating the world. Everything is forced to be looked through the eyes of clans and governance

When was this not the case - ever? Perhaps it didn't seem like "politics" for you in the past.

There’s always politics but politics is overhead. It necessary but if the overhead is too large it can easily eat up the bandwidth and leave no room for the actual stuff.

You can’t do if all you do is arguing over what to do and how to do it.

People have limited time and cognitive capacity.

> It necessary but if the overhead is too large it can easily eat up the bandwidth and leave no room for the actual stuff.

This has always been the case - some sub-groups of the population didn't notice it because it wasn't their/our bandwidth being consumed. Pick any past century or decade, and I will name a group whose world was consumed by politics then.

Yes, there were always some rules for some subgroup that caused political discussions and that's fine.

The problem starts when the bandwidth gets saturated. I don't say that people just should shut the f up and follow the rules, I'm simply saying that this saturated state is very bad.

You missed the point: it's always been politics, you just didn't realize when it was your little group getting the free pass.

>you just didn't realize when it was your little group getting the free pass.

As a lifelong minority with periods of being undocumented or illegal if you wish, I rarely got a free pass. I'm very familiar of the concept of being not allowed to do things o be denied stuff due to status I have no power change.

There was a time I had to beg bank employees to open me an account because I was working for months now and I need to get paid, and not because the law forbid me from having an account. There was a time when I was on a fishing boat crossing borders illegally and it was not because I was too lazy to get a proper visa.

Can you please inform me about the freebies I got? Why don't you tell me about the wonders of having your family being threatened to be send to the place where people often get lost without a trace? Tell me about the privilege of having your father feeding you by working for less than the minimum wage despite being an Electrical Engineer with Masters degree?

If anything, part of the big political events of the last few year revolves around me getting similar rights to those who are not happy with the new situation. I guess they want their underpaid Engineers back.

DB.

Would you consider your past as a time when politics "wasn't eating the world" then? Did you not look at things "through the eyes of clans and governance"?

It was “eating the word” when things were happening. Think the collapse of the SSSR, the transition period was politically intense waste of time. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t for the better, eventually.

You must be thinking that inheritance taxes discussion or carbon emission limits are intense but no I’m not talking about that. I'm talking about situations where you decide if you like something or not depending to the political affiliation of its makers. Like the idea of a CV in a special format that comes from a Chinese company being instantly dismissed is an example of unnecessary politics.

Gradual changed are necessary, maybe full throttle are necessary too however the periods of “everything is about our battle in the politics” are huge waste of life’s.

10 years ago. Outside of pol threads, Internet was largely focused on producing content and was about escaping from real life politics madness.

To be fair, the Internet was much more of a niche back then. Internet and technology have since become the nervous system of every economy and society in the developed world, so it's no wonder that they now reflects the predominant concerns (such as politics and governance) of the people it's connecting.

10 years ago the following issues were topical: the Tea Party wave had just crested, Obamacare, rabid birtherism and Obama's "Terrorist fist jab". It was the same polarization we're seeing today, only less intense as social media hadn't quite amassed the critical mass it has today.

edit - I looked it up and the "Terrorist fist jab" comment was made in 2008 - so 13 years ago

I dunno. This strikes me as the digital version of driving over to The Home Despot and looking for some day hands to help you out with the yard or something like that —except it’s for service jobs rather than manual labor.

I really loathe the “sell yourself via video snippet” aspect. It’s inhumanely degrading.

> It’s inhumanely degrading.

Hyperbole much? There are a lot of inhumane, degrading things in this world. TikTok videos are not one of them.

Anyways, clearly some people thought it would be cool and interesting. I think this will be an interesting alternative for those that don’t do well with resumes.

Fortunately, no one is going to make you use this, so I don’t know why everyone here is acting like it will be forced on them. This is obviously a secondary application method, one that will work particularly well for creative or extroverted types.

> Hyperbole much? There are a lot of inhumane, degrading things in this world.

There are degrees of inhumane and degrading. Sure, there are plenty of worse things than having to apply via a video CV on Tiktok, but that's a difference in magnitude and not a difference in kind.

> I really loathe the “sell yourself via video snippet” aspect. It’s inhumanely degrading.

Interesting, why do you find it more degrading than selling yourself via text snippet (your CV)?

Of course. Text doesn’t care about looks, presentation, voice, speaking skills, etc. It does require forethought, ability to organize things logically, and present the best aspect of your work history, accomplishments and future potential with much less ability to judge and dismiss within mere seconds.

> Text doesn’t care about looks, presentation, voice, speaking skills, etc.

Lots of jobs care precisely about those. Most notably sales, but also most other customer-facing jobs. Even for jobs where these aren’t the primary skills, they contribute to overall success. People who are good at these can equally complain that text doesn’t do them justice. In any case, calling these inhumanely degrading is just a subtle way to be inhumanely degrading to people who possess these qualities. It tells us more about you than the process honestly.

I don’t dispute that. However, a video snippet has the potential of disqualifying many prospects before they’ve interacted with a hiring manager because of their short video —which I hold gives them the short shrift.

Great. So now the job market is rigged even more against:

- introverts

- people without well-developed social skills

- people who do OK with smaller, familiar audiences (think an office with 40 co-workers) but not OK with larger, unfamiliar audiences (public speaking and presentation)

- non-neurotypicals

than it already was in the text CV era. How is that an improvement?

Extroverts and people who know how to operate in the society already have an unfair advantage, we don't need to give them yet more of it.

> The replies to this are emblematic of HN culture -- a whole lot of quick dismissals without engaging with why this might exist, who it might benefit, and who it might turn away.

Curiosity comes from exploring both positive and negative consequences. You now have the top comment, so how emblematic of HN's culture is that?

This is the third time today I've read this sentiment and it's always someone frustrated that their view isn't as widely supported as they've hoped it would be. It's a big crowd here, from all across the world and the US. Trying to box HN much less HN users up is fruitless. Feel free to look at some of my post-history where I assumed I knew things about a user or their intent.

You have just described literally every generation of humans that ever existed. The ancient Romans complained about their lazy, disconnected successor generations.

It's extra funny since YC asks applicants to also submit a short video pitch, which is basically a TikTok.

Ignoring the fact that in the many countries HR would quite rightly avoid asking for a picture in an aplication (apart from modeling / acting gigs oh and SC/DV jobs) to avoid potential legal blowback.

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