Show HN: Cilantro - Chat 1:1 with employees at companies you'd like to work at | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cilantro - Chat 1:1 with employees at companies you'd like to work at

trycilantro.com

53 pointsrtao46 comments

It's unclear from the post whether or not it's anonymous. I'd be more comfortable asking (and answering!) if I knew it was anon. Otherwise, it might be awkward, especially at a smaller company.

one of devs here...it's totally anonymous there's no login anywhere. Thanks for the feedback! please try it out and let us know :)

Any plan to prevent trolling? Honest question... curious about how you plan to catch me giving crazy answers about a company I don't like.

This is an excellent idea. Kudos! Would love to see this grow and evolve as a primary way for prospective employees to do their due diligence. Quick Question - How do you guys ensure that the employees are actually employees at Zynga etc. once it expands beyond friends and family?

I also think this is a fantastic idea but further to your comment, its also impossible to determine if you are talking to an employee in a position you may apply for, or someone on the HR department who is trying to attract talent and so may give you a biased view.

Thanks! We definitely want to be able to have more relevant matches in the future as we scale and grow.

I wouldn't hotlink the logos.

Yeah, that's a pretty rude move...

hi josh! ah yes my bad :( will update soon. trying to scramble and upgrade a lot stuff since we hit firebase and server limits.

no longer hotlink'd!

this is crazy, i'm getting pinged every 5 seconds as a Zynga employee :)

So how does this work? How do I know the people you're chatting with are actual employees of the respective company?

Details are very sparse on the site.

We have past/current employees who have agreed to help out on the site for now. We imagine that we will expose some cred/job status later to indicate what type of background they have. But the anonymous aspect is something we'd like to keep since people tend to be more honest. Any feedback about that would be great!

How do employees sign up? Is that part still not open?

You can sign up by clicking the blue button at the top of landing page that says 'I want to share my experiences'. Sorry we don't call that out more!

Ah ok I was confused, it says "name of your startup" and then you have a lot of big name companies down below. Are employees of large companies also welcome?

a very unfortunate name. There's a long un-known, part of the population that very likely has a genetic aversion to the stuff. It's a really strong aversion. And it may be up to 5% of the population, if you believe 23andMe.

http://ihatecilantro.com/

Seriously?

While I don't think the name is great, who cares.

I am one of those people. The worst part of eating out at restaurants is finding out at the last moment that they put cilantro on everything, making it inedible. It might as well be called tryratpoison.com.

The site is not as unpleasant as cilantro so I will overlook it for now.

How can you possibly hate cilantro? It's smells so incredibly fresh and amazing, plus you can get more than you can eat before it goes bad for like 49 cents at any grocery store.

There is a genetic predisposition toward finding it terrible. That's like asking a colorblind person "how can you mix up red and green; they're totally different?"

Interesting.

It's genetic. It has a very unpleasent soap-like taste. Even if there's a little bit it tastes like someone put a bar of soap in your meal.

Because, to him, it tastes like soap.

> In the largest genome-wide association study of cilantro preference to date, 23andMe scientists compared genetic data from more than 25,000 individuals with European ancestry who declared whether they liked the taste of fresh cilantro or whether they thought cilantro had a soapy taste. We found that people with the AA genotype at rs7107418 had higher odds of perceiving a soapy taste in cilantro and higher odds of disliking the herb compared to those with the AG genotype, and people with the GG genotype had lower odds of perceiving a soapy taste or disliking cilantro. This SNP is close to a number of genes coding for olfactory receptors, one of which (OR6A2) is involved in detecting certain chemical compounds called aldehydes that are key components of cilantro aroma.

https://www.23andme.com/about/factoid/cilantro/

that's ridiculous.

> "There's a long un-known, part of the population..."

Shouldn't matter much if they are unknown, right? :)

No offense but I don't see how that matters at all in this context.

because if someone said, hey go to this site "trycilantro" to help find jobs - I would immediately have an aversion to it and the likelihood of me going there would be lower. I would also have an aversion to try helping out on that site.

You've lost ~10% of your client base right there.

Wow, that increased from 5% to 10% in half an hour! Or are you suggesting either that cilantro aversion is higher among tech workers, or that people who don't dislike cilantro will also be put off by the name?

I think if Wii and iPad can get past those names then this'll be fine.

5% on one side, 5% on the other side (presumably independent varibables, but minus a little bit to account for overlap hence ~10% not 10%). "client base" was the wrong turn of phrase, should have said "traffic potential". I don't really know what I'm talking about, so I could have done the math wrong.

And I don't use Python because I hate snakes.

And I don't because I hate British humor (so much that I refuse to add the second 'u').

I thought that was exactly the point of the name? Some people would really enjoy working at company x, some wouldn't. Just like cilantro..

I LOVE the idea! How does the request function work? Can I put multiple company names separated by comma, or should I put one request per company I'm interested in chatting with?

hey @jypepin you can put companies separated by commas! we'll handle parsing that :) sorry for being unclear.

Sorry guys server just crashed! we're adding more dynos now.

awesome!

What do you need to implement a website background like that? I want to work something like it for my website, minus the hairy arms :).

http://dfcb.github.io/BigVideo.js/ is great! That is what we are using with a few modifications :)

thanks, I'll give it a spin.

It's blocked by my work firewall. Oh well!

this is awesome guys!

thanks! please let me know if there's any general feedback as well.

that arm hair

And now, I can't look past it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com