romanhn

At one point I realized that Slashdot was reporting on stories that showed up on HN days earlier. It was a quick transition for me, despite daily usage of Slashdot since '99 or so.

I hadn't realized that Roland passed away almost 15 years ago...

You're describing basically every ATS (applicant tracking system). The problem is that those are all internal-facing, so there's no incentive to make your life easier as a candidate. I'm trying to tackle this with https://rolepad.com, a job application tracking system that can be connected to an employer portal and provide greater transparency and just make the whole candidate experience much better (the employer part is still under development though).

I can't imagine this could work. Anything remotely serious will have some context switching cost associated with it, and the more random 1-hour commitments you have, the more time you'll spend switching between each. And on top of that you're leaving no time to get into the productive flow state. I also have serious doubts about developing any kind of competency in the codebase or the business on one hour a day. Twenty+ yoe here.

That may be true for a small company, but any org with a standardized interview process will still likely put you through the whole interview loop. Best you'll get out of your call/coffee is a referral, and many places don't even place much weight on referrals either.

I'm reading the just-released Musk biography by Walter Isaacson and I think this is a pretty good summary. He has basically taken "move fast and break things" to the extreme and with hardware.

Musk himself is quoted as believing that SpaceX's success is in large part owed to him getting involved with the technical minutiae, whereas Bezos has other people making decisions.

FYI - I added an "opt out" option for email processing. Any incoming emails for the opted-out address will be silently ignored (same as incoming emails for non-existent addresses).

First off, you're not alone - https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum.

I haven't made quite the same transition, but I did start coding again last year after 10 years in non-coding leadership roles. Assuming you had decent technical chops in the first place (probably the case given your current role), I would not worry at all about getting back into it. I have a similar .NET background, and I was able to build a product from scratch that did pretty well on Show HN a couple of days back. Used .NET 6 (nice to come back to), React with Tailwind (no prior experience), AWS infra (no prior hands-on experience), etc. Not a big deal, and SUPER enjoyable to be coding again!

Good luck! This decision is not irreversible by any means.

Just want to say I super appreciate your balanced perspective here. I'm not a security engineer by trade, so getting this sort of feedback is quite valuable.

The no@ scenario is an interesting one. The opt-out would certainly be one clean approach here. Going to give it some thought!

Not yet in an automated fashion. Interesting to see this request pop up a few times now today. I would attempt to provide this manually to comply with the spirit of GDPR data portability clause for now. Note that I don't claim GDPR compliance for Rolepad at this stage, but would do my best to ensure data privacy and security.

To be perfectly honest, I don't have a great answer here yet. While the US has the Consumer Review Fairness Act, Glassdoor lost an important court case that saw a US court force them to furnish reviewer info to a non-US entity (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...). Terrible precedent, IMO.

Some of the early thinking I've done is around the system being able to verify that a user did in fact apply to a company (assuming company is a customer of Rolepad). That provides some initial guarantees about the author of the data. With some ATS integration, there could be fairly concrete numbers on "how quickly did X happen" that don't even need to be sourced from the candidate. That said, there is always a bit of a "he said, she said" with reviews, and I haven't fully figured out an obvious way forward here. I think the general sentiment I've seen is that Glassdoor and Yelp reviews should be treated with a grain of salt, but they're still better than nothing.

I think I answered a very similar question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37797516. Believe me, I have been thinking hard about alignment, conflicts of interest, privacy implications, etc. Alienating the candidate side will basically nullify the core premise of the platform, so avoiding short-term thinking and bonehead decisions is top of mind.

TBH, I just went through the official docs and that was sufficient - they are fantastic. I wrote a bit about my experience in the top comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35186812

Other tools? Have been using Visual Studio mostly (due to C#) until recently when I switched from a Windows laptop to a Macbook. Now all coding is in VS Code, which is ... good enough so far. Really the only other item worth mentioning is I bought the Tailwind UI component library early on. It's been a total lifesaver. Design does not come easy to me at all, and I was able to get started with semi-decent-looking UI from the get-go. It still requires a lot of effort to get things to where I like what I'm seeing, and there's still lots of iteration, but it was definitely the right move, and the cost was well worth it.

Some fantastic food for thought here, thank you!

Definitely will acknowledge that searching the provided data has room for improvement. Re: emails, it actually does have some rudimentary capability to detect which opportunity the email should be assigned to, based on a few factors - this too will be improved in the future. One workflow I've thought about was adding save@rolepad.com to cc/bcc on your outgoing emails to avoid the extra step. I have also kicked around the idea of creating custom Rolepad email addresses to use on outgoing resumes so that all communication is automatically captured in the system. Felt a bit fanciful at the time, curious if there's interest.

The multiple addresses is a doozy, will need to noodle on this. I guess easiest would be manually associating multiple emails with your account. Or the whole custom address thing...

That's where I got my inspiration :)

Yeah, this one I went back-and-forth a lot during initial implementation. It's not easy to find a balance between making it dead simple and preventing abuse. I kept it simple as far as forwarding goes - an account must exist for the sender address or else the email is not processed. For save@, I was mostly worried about covertly updating/creating opportunities based on emails alone, so there is a step where the user has to take a manual action to confirm the email note assignment. For no@, all the same outcomes, but also the sender is bcc'ed on the decline email.

In other words, theoretically spoofing could occur, but there are compensating controls in place to minimize any damage. Given a very low likelihood of an attack in this direction, that felt like a reasonable compromise. Would love to get feedback on that though!

It was a mix of what I already knew (.NET) and what I wanted to learn (React). I love C# as a language and it works just fine with whatever frontend you throw at it (it's just an API after all). I wouldn't touch a Microsoft frontend framework with a ten-foot pole.

Thanks! Not at the moment, but you're the second user asking about it today so that definitely bumps it up on the priority list.

dang followed up on it and it turned out someone flagged it by mistake

Fun fact - dang (the HN moderator) suggested this earlier while we were figuring out why this post was stuck in flagged status (props to him for unblocking it eventually).

Thank you for the suggestion! I've considered the bootcamp/school route and I think there is opportunity there. For now trying not to spread my focus too thin though.

Thank you! Would you mind expanding on the concern around hiring manager emails getting leaked? Curious what you consider sensitive in these emails and how that data might be used inappropriately. Just want to ensure I don't have gaps in my risk assessment.

I have not, will check them out, thank you. One at-a-glance difference is that they charge individual writers, which probably makes sense. I'm fairly allergic to charging job seekers though.

Thanks! I suppose the answer depends on what you mean by "plainly in the cloud" :) It is indeed stored in Amazon's RDS, which is a managed service. I approached this as a real product rather than a weekend project when it comes to security (application and infrastructure) and there is a lot in place protecting the data - Firebase's jwt auth, XSS and SQL injection protection, default passwordless logins, data encrypted at rest, database in private subnet, DB credentials in a secrets vault with automatic rotation, multi-factor auth for all of my access to infra, probably a bunch more. Are there specific concerns not addressed here?

That's a fair question - and no, almost all data is optional. But... people do enter this, and companies have roles with open compensation as well. I'm talking about an aggregated view into anonymized data here.

EDIT: Just realized I wrote "applicant tracking system" above. Total slip of the tongue, this is an _application_ tracking platform for job seekers, not an ATS used by companies. Though I do sometimes think of Rolepad as an ATS for the candidate.

Compensation is top of mind for me. An applicant [EDIT: application, not applicant] tracking system is well-positioned to have a solid, up-to-date view into the compensation landscape, unlike sites like Glassdoor and Blind which are more lagging and self-selecting. Balanced with privacy, there is some real opportunity here. Outside of compensation - all sorts of analytics pertaining to interview process, how quickly competitors fill their roles, that sort of data.

Through employers, not job seekers. Not sure how to put this without marketing-speak, but I do truly believe that there is a win-win proposition here where an amazing candidate experience can be highly beneficial to the hiring org. I wrote down some thoughts on https://rolepad.com/employers as well. As I mentioned in the original post, there is a lot of consider here privacy-wise but I definitely have some concrete ideas that I want to start bouncing off hiring managers and the like (which will likely involve sharing Rolepad job description links that add the position with a bunch of prefilled data to the candidate's account in one click).

Thanks for your comments! I asked dang about it, apparently someone flagged by mistake. I may get a second chance, and there's always another time like you said. Cheers!

Reminds me of WinFS, the Windows filesystem built on top of a relational database [0] that was supposed to ship with Longhorn (aka Windows Vista). Neat idea that never materialized.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Product Owner should not typically be a full-time position on its own, but rather a role played by someone on an agile team. Usually, but not always, by the product manager. In other words, it is a subset of a product manager's responsibilities which would also include cross-functional stakeholder and go-to-market activities that normally don't fall under the "product ownership" umbrella in the Scrum sense.