6 ms·

Old Geek Jobs

58 points by johnwheeler 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
johnwheeler 10y ago
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. The tougher the questions, the better.
- anondon 10y ago
  I'm jealous! Yours is literally a fairy tale launch. Just kidding, actually no, but congrats man! Very inspiring story. A few questions: -What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates? -Do they feel it was $50 well spent? -Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats? -What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add? -Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic?
  - johnwheeler 10y ago
    -What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates? None of them have contacted me. -Do they feel it was $50 well spent? I don't know. -Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats? A few people wrote in to thank me and tell me they applied jobs. I haven't asked around, and there's no tracking in place. -What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add? I want to keep focusing on the UX. Speed and ease of use are the features I care about most. I want the UI to be so good that people feel comfortable looking for a tech job no matter how old they are with the site catering to older geeks as a bonus. -Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic? No issues at all. I use Flask-Cache backed by redis, which I'm sure helps a lot.
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  The site seems unable to handle the search term "c++". Is there some trick to it?
  - johnwheeler 10y ago
    No trick - just not currently supported. I use Postgresql full text search, and haven't researched how to handle c++ or c#. The only sophistication baked into the search are wildcard queries and title vs. description ranking. I'm aware of the limitations and want to fix them. If any HNers know what I should search for on Google to get this done, please let me know.
    - mempko 10y ago
      don't know about postgres but, just write a function that converts c++ into cpp (many use cpp too). Store that. Then on search do the same thing, c++ becomes cpp. probably simplest fix...
      - johnwheeler 10y ago
        That's smart. And c# -> csharp. I love HackerNews.
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  More of an idea than a question... I think it would be awesome if a job site has some formalisms around various skills. A candidate could report his/her skills like this: (skill name) --> (level of proficiency and/or interest in learning). A job posting could report skill requirements in a similar manner: (skill name) --> (importance to job). It would be an awesome way to get highly-targeted search filters / notifications. Similar formalisms could be used to filter on commute / relocation details. Edit: Negative-terms would be very helpful as well. E.g., I'm actively averse to doing devops work, even if it's a match in other ways.
mikeleeorg 10y ago
Thanks for sharing your story! Great interview. I noticed you dropped the price from $50 to $20. Out of curiosity, why? Also, any chance you could bump up the font size and/or contrast of the text? My old geek eyes are having a bit of difficultly reading the site. Thanks again!
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  I'm still experimenting to find the right price point that maximizes quality job postings. I've had it at $0 and had to delete a few. One person posted an ad for what appeared to be a technology cult even (deleted). I've been asked to bump the font size by a few people and have to defer to ctrl+ (win) cmd+ (mac) for now. I'm dog fooding this site and 14pt "courier new" is what I like best.
  - mikeleeorg 10y ago
    Any chance this might change your mind? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628
    - johnwheeler 10y ago
      Yes - that was very helpful. I did not increase the font-size (yet, still not thrilled about that), but I did make the body text and muted text blacker. Here's a before and after http://imgur.com/a/7Hf4i http://imgur.com/a/7Hf4i The difference is subtle, but it's an improvement in my opinion.
      - oliv__ 10y ago
        Before feels better. But that's just my opinion
      - mikeleeorg 10y ago
        I like it. That, plus some ⌘+'s, have helped. I didn't mention it before, but I also appreciate the bright yellow hover/active state over job links.
yosyp 10y ago
Looks like as of 2:20PM EST 10/25 there are 2,194 job postings. At $50/post, that's a pretty successful launch! Congrats!
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  The jobs that aren't highlighted in green were aggregated from StackOverflow. I mention that on the front page. So far, I've made $1775 total selling job listings. In the beginning, I was giving them away free.
  - adentranter 10y ago
    Congrats on the $1775 milestone. Good work.
hnuser2016 10y ago
You have done an incredible job with your site.Keep it up.I wish I could do the same with my site www.mobijobs.net which I created for app developers.Why do you keep changing the price?
badshar 10y ago
Thanks for this! 2 questions: 1. You are now making money off of it. So how is that working? Have you created a separate bank account and pushed all your revenue to that account, for the purpose of making filing taxes on it easier? Or did you go some other way? 2. How quickly were you able to solve the chicken and egg problem of getting employers to post and people to visit? Do employers know how many people view their listing? I'm having a hard time understanding why they would want to spend $50 on your site vs simply posting free of charge on HN and getting a pretty large audience.
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  1. Yes, separate bank account. Stripe is really nice in that they push funds automatically on a regular basis. I have another business which uses PayPal, and I like Stripe better. 2. I'll be working on the chicken & egg problem for sometime. I don't expect a quick turnaround, but the good news for me is it's fun driving steady traffic with blog posts. I just made IndieHackers today, and I'm working on a piece for SitePoint which will be out on Thursday. Just stuff like that along with my Medium blog https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com From the IndieHackers post in the OP, you can see my Google Analytics since I started the project (minus a few early days because I didn't have tracking). I get several thousand visits when I'm able to get blog posts promoted, and several hundred in the ensuing days. Mind you, these are people who surf HackerNews, so they're going to be stronger candidates than average although the numbers are nowhere near one of the big tech boards (i.e. Dice) and probably never will be. I'm OK with that. I'm catering to an HN-like audience, and want to go solo as long as possible. You can't post jobs free on HN afaik, unless you're a YC company. Thank you!
  - badshar 10y ago
    Thank you for the detailed answer. Final question on the second part: I was referring to the "Who is hiring?" threads for jobs. So the employers who are paying and posting on OGJ are essentially betting that their job postings will be seen by others, right? It doesn't look like they have any way of figuring out if anyone will see their job. I don't mean to hint at anything, just trying to get a clear picture.
combatentropy 10y ago
I like your site. It loads fast, and the user interface is easy to use --- deceptively simple. I know how hard it is to make things simple.
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  Thank you! Yes - simple is hard! I've gotten a handful of e-mails from people offering to redo the site for a fee, but I don't want it to be just another bootstrap site with 700K of assets on the initial page load. The sparse design is intentional, and I'm deliberate in my use of screen real estate. Your compliment means a lot!
alexgotoi 10y ago
This may be a newbie question. If a company is asking for a invoice (i know that most ask to justify the payment in accounting), Stripe has the possibility to generate one or are you using a 3rd party tool? Thanks
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Old Geek Jobs

58 points by johnwheeler 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

johnwheeler 10y ago

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. The tougher the questions, the better.

anondon 10y ago
I'm jealous! Yours is literally a fairy tale launch. Just kidding, actually no, but congrats man! Very inspiring story. A few questions: -What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates? -Do they feel it was $50 well spent? -Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats? -What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add? -Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic?
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  -What did the companies that posted on your site have to say about the quality and quantity of candidates? None of them have contacted me. -Do they feel it was $50 well spent? I don't know. -Did people apply through your site and find jobs so far? Do you have a way of tracking the stats? A few people wrote in to thank me and tell me they applied jobs. I haven't asked around, and there's no tracking in place. -What is your future direction of this site? What features do you plan to add? I want to keep focusing on the UX. Speed and ease of use are the features I care about most. I want the UI to be so good that people feel comfortable looking for a tech job no matter how old they are with the site catering to older geeks as a bonus. -Oh, and how did the $10 Digital Ocean VPS hold up with the sudden spikes of traffic? No issues at all. I use Flask-Cache backed by redis, which I'm sure helps a lot.
DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
The site seems unable to handle the search term "c++". Is there some trick to it?
- johnwheeler 10y ago
  No trick - just not currently supported. I use Postgresql full text search, and haven't researched how to handle c++ or c#. The only sophistication baked into the search are wildcard queries and title vs. description ranking. I'm aware of the limitations and want to fix them. If any HNers know what I should search for on Google to get this done, please let me know.
  - mempko 10y ago
    don't know about postgres but, just write a function that converts c++ into cpp (many use cpp too). Store that. Then on search do the same thing, c++ becomes cpp. probably simplest fix...
    - johnwheeler 10y ago
      That's smart. And c# -> csharp. I love HackerNews.
DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
More of an idea than a question... I think it would be awesome if a job site has some formalisms around various skills. A candidate could report his/her skills like this: (skill name) --> (level of proficiency and/or interest in learning). A job posting could report skill requirements in a similar manner: (skill name) --> (importance to job). It would be an awesome way to get highly-targeted search filters / notifications. Similar formalisms could be used to filter on commute / relocation details. Edit: Negative-terms would be very helpful as well. E.g., I'm actively averse to doing devops work, even if it's a match in other ways.

mikeleeorg 10y ago

Thanks for sharing your story! Great interview. I noticed you dropped the price from $50 to $20. Out of curiosity, why? Also, any chance you could bump up the font size and/or contrast of the text? My old geek eyes are having a bit of difficultly reading the site. Thanks again!

johnwheeler 10y ago
I'm still experimenting to find the right price point that maximizes quality job postings. I've had it at $0 and had to delete a few. One person posted an ad for what appeared to be a technology cult even (deleted). I've been asked to bump the font size by a few people and have to defer to ctrl+ (win) cmd+ (mac) for now. I'm dog fooding this site and 14pt "courier new" is what I like best.
- mikeleeorg 10y ago
  Any chance this might change your mind? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743628
  - johnwheeler 10y ago
    Yes - that was very helpful. I did not increase the font-size (yet, still not thrilled about that), but I did make the body text and muted text blacker. Here's a before and after http://imgur.com/a/7Hf4i http://imgur.com/a/7Hf4i The difference is subtle, but it's an improvement in my opinion.
    - oliv__ 10y ago
      Before feels better. But that's just my opinion
    - mikeleeorg 10y ago
      I like it. That, plus some ⌘+'s, have helped. I didn't mention it before, but I also appreciate the bright yellow hover/active state over job links.

yosyp 10y ago

Looks like as of 2:20PM EST 10/25 there are 2,194 job postings. At $50/post, that's a pretty successful launch! Congrats!

johnwheeler 10y ago
The jobs that aren't highlighted in green were aggregated from StackOverflow. I mention that on the front page. So far, I've made $1775 total selling job listings. In the beginning, I was giving them away free.
- adentranter 10y ago
  Congrats on the $1775 milestone. Good work.

hnuser2016 10y ago

You have done an incredible job with your site.Keep it up.I wish I could do the same with my site www.mobijobs.net which I created for app developers.Why do you keep changing the price?

badshar 10y ago

Thanks for this! 2 questions: 1. You are now making money off of it. So how is that working? Have you created a separate bank account and pushed all your revenue to that account, for the purpose of making filing taxes on it easier? Or did you go some other way? 2. How quickly were you able to solve the chicken and egg problem of getting employers to post and people to visit? Do employers know how many people view their listing? I'm having a hard time understanding why they would want to spend $50 on your site vs simply posting free of charge on HN and getting a pretty large audience.

johnwheeler 10y ago
1. Yes, separate bank account. Stripe is really nice in that they push funds automatically on a regular basis. I have another business which uses PayPal, and I like Stripe better. 2. I'll be working on the chicken & egg problem for sometime. I don't expect a quick turnaround, but the good news for me is it's fun driving steady traffic with blog posts. I just made IndieHackers today, and I'm working on a piece for SitePoint which will be out on Thursday. Just stuff like that along with my Medium blog https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com From the IndieHackers post in the OP, you can see my Google Analytics since I started the project (minus a few early days because I didn't have tracking). I get several thousand visits when I'm able to get blog posts promoted, and several hundred in the ensuing days. Mind you, these are people who surf HackerNews, so they're going to be stronger candidates than average although the numbers are nowhere near one of the big tech boards (i.e. Dice) and probably never will be. I'm OK with that. I'm catering to an HN-like audience, and want to go solo as long as possible. You can't post jobs free on HN afaik, unless you're a YC company. Thank you!
- badshar 10y ago
  Thank you for the detailed answer. Final question on the second part: I was referring to the "Who is hiring?" threads for jobs. So the employers who are paying and posting on OGJ are essentially betting that their job postings will be seen by others, right? It doesn't look like they have any way of figuring out if anyone will see their job. I don't mean to hint at anything, just trying to get a clear picture.

combatentropy 10y ago

I like your site. It loads fast, and the user interface is easy to use --- deceptively simple. I know how hard it is to make things simple.

johnwheeler 10y ago
Thank you! Yes - simple is hard! I've gotten a handful of e-mails from people offering to redo the site for a fee, but I don't want it to be just another bootstrap site with 700K of assets on the initial page load. The sparse design is intentional, and I'm deliberate in my use of screen real estate. Your compliment means a lot!

alexgotoi 10y ago

This may be a newbie question. If a company is asking for a invoice (i know that most ask to justify the payment in accounting), Stripe has the possibility to generate one or are you using a 3rd party tool? Thanks

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]