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Show HN: Career Fair – Learn about Jobs by People Who Have Done Them (careerfair.io)
161 points by shsachdev on May 17, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments



Love the site. Read a few interviews. I agree with the comment about wishing the interviews were longer and more fleshed out.

Take for instance astronaut. Although it offered some nice antidotes, I still don't know what its like to be an astronaut.

From the interview:

> What was your biggest roadblock to becoming an astronaut, and how did you overcome it? ...Being able to be brave enough to actually apply. Too many people are too shy or afraid of failure. If there's something you want to do you just have to go for it.

That's a bit of a non-answer. It's like asking someone how they ran a 100 mile ultra-marathon, and they said "one step at a time!". I'd be more interested in the qualifications and skills they're looking for? What age are astronauts and where do they recruit from? How much time do you spend in space or otherwise away from your family. Are all the jobs clustered in one geographical location?

Also, I think you should make the About section feel a bit more personal. You linked to your personal twitter elsewhere but not in this page.


Well, how can you expect an astronaut to have a good answer to the biggest roadblock? You need to poll some people who tried but failed to become astronauts. They would know more.


Sure, but when the astronaut application job posting recently came up, I was super excited. I would leave my technical job in a heartbeat to be an astronaut. But, the qualifications specifically needed specific things. Like, iirc, degrees in hard engineering disciplines. Otherwise it was a clear "No." I would expect them to mention things like really, really needing a hard engineering masters (at least, if not PhD) to even not get weeded out at resume review stage.

Also, I know two astronauts relatively well and they say the same thing when the topic has come up. One took a non traditional approach to being an astronaut, applying many times over years, but still had a hard science advanced degree. It's literally a requirement in the application.

To my chagrin, I will never be an astronaut.


Crista McAuliffe was a social-studies teacher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_McAuliffe

Where there is a will, sometimes there is a way.


>> NASA wanted to find an "ordinary person," a gifted teacher who could communicate with students while in orbit.

So i guess maybe some programs like this will appear in the future...


Failure is the best teacher, in that things working out the way you want them to almost always has a lower probability than the other way around (i.e. you're very good at basketball, so you should have a good chance of being in the NBA right?) This is why easy success stories are so demoralizing to people; they are hearing about the few who got lucky vs the countless ones who did everything they could to succeed but it just didn't work out.


How does that relate to failure is the best teacher?


Because amazing success stories are most likely due to chance, not action. This means that the people who succeeded, especially without first failing a large number of times (like applying to be an astronaut or NBA player; you get one, maybe two chances), haven't learned much about how to accomplish those tasks.


I don't think the problem is who they polled. The problem is that they're fishing out two-sentence platitudes that are not useful.


Huh interesting. You could have a website where for each job people want you find someone who failed at each point along the way to getting it, so you can know what to avoid doing yourself.


Anecdotes I think is the word you were looking for


Antidotes to chaos


Hey - Nice Site.

I noticed the below vuln because you currently aren't filtering inputs sufficiently. The validation looked weak as it was rendering html, so I did a bit of testing and found you can run javascript hidden in an image tag like the below:

<IMG """><SCRIPT>alert("XSS")</SCRIPT>"\>

You can see this running on the below:

https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/test

I suspect if I put this in the job name it might actually run the javascript when anyone visits the homepage?


thanks for letting me know - yeah, I created this a while back and didn't sanitize inputs as well as I should have. will push an update to take care of this today!


The "interviews" seem to be scraped from Reddit AMAs, take the veterinarian one: https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/veterinarian. The first question seems to be exactly this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k4jkh/iama_veterinari...

This is a rebranding of content farmed from Reddit, which we've seen all over the clickbait journalism world...


hey there - thanks for bringing this up. right now the main goal is to get as much content up as possible, and I leveraged reddit for 2-3 of these interviews. Another one is:

https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/firefigher

Going forward, I'm going to aim to have all interviews be sourced by myself. Thanks for checking out the site :)


Then the proper way to do this is list the sources at the bottom of each.


You could at least put some attribution


Tech recruiter from Zurich here.

Great idea.

Do you consider to add geographic information? The same job can be quite different in different locations; work conditions and laws differ a lot.

I understand that in the beginning that might segment the website too much.


Love this idea. Found myself reading several of the interviews. Only feedback is I wish they were longer, more detailed.


thanks for the feedback and glad you like the site.

that's the next step - Quarantine has given me more time to invest in this idea so I'm going to be amping up the quality of these interviews.


Love the idea! I read through VC Associate and had a couple ideas:

- A list of industry-specific terminology used in the interview at the top. I was unfamiliar with the concept of financial modeling, would have been nice to have a quick definition from the interviewee's own words.

- The ability for readers to ask followup questions (without the guarantee that they be answered) and/or a way to contact the interviewee directly in an anonymous way (definitely way beyond MVP, but it's fun to think about)


Great idea. I'd thought of something similar but never got around to it. You can maybe explore Role/Team/Company (ex:Brand Manager/Consumer Product/FMCG company)as title description so somebody searching for either of those finds you. Additionally summary posts can be a sigma of all Brand Manager posts across Teams and Companies.


Nice idea! A couple of months ago I read a book from Stanford professor about design thinking method approaching to live. Almost the same - to understand would you love this work or not best to speak with people who already working on this position.


Do you take requests? I'd be interested to hear from folk in particular occupations. If you list the requests, people could vote on them, or you could call for volunteers to answer them.


This is awesome. I was thinking about something similar. There is currently nothing right now which tells you about the day-to-day workings of several professions. Watching this space.


The Product Manager role doesn't mention anything about talking to users. I guess you can't make people say things in interviews, but that is really weird.


Damn! I am in midst of designing screens for almost similar web app(the Submit screen looks almost same)! You beat me to it! Very well done!


Cool idea: how are you planning to handle multiple view points or postings for the same job type?


Check out careerfairy.io - the interactive version of careerfair.io :-)


I love the overall idea but the design on mobile is messy !


hey thanks for the feedback! yeah, I agree - I coded this from scratch (no templates etc) and this is one of my first projects. Definitely going to clean up design on mobile.


Good effort. How do I know these are valid entries ?


Rolling out non-anonymous interviews this week. Stay tuned :)


can you please add this to your css, i cant see all the other career fair posts

.job_list {

overflow-y: scroll; }


I added my own.




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