8 ms·

Loren wants to work at Airbnb

423 points by guynamedloren 15y ago

guynamedloren 15y ago
Inspired and motivated by some fantastic advice from the HN community, I’ve decided to pursue a frontend engineering position at Airbnb. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, but I love what they’re doing and could see myself working as a part of the team. In fact, Airbnb is one of the only companies I’ve really felt the urge to work with. In addition to submitting a resume and cover letter, I thought it would be fun to put together this little project. I’m not personally sending a link to Airbnb, so any chance they have at seeing this is entirely up to the community. I guess this is an experiment of sorts - we’ll see how it goes. Thanks HN!
- iamdave 15y ago
  Hire this man.
  - frankdenbow 15y ago
    Yep. This is a no brainer.
    - rudiger 15y ago
      Sorry, but the act of hiring an employee at a startup is never a no-brainer. Good luck to Loren and to the people at AirBnB, though.
pg 15y ago
I just emailed the founders. I expect they'll contact you soon.
- guynamedloren 15y ago
  Thanks pg - I appreciate it!
- corin_ 15y ago
  I assume you won't be willing to but... any chance you'd shed light on how you worded your email, ranging from just a link to "you have to hire.."?
  - csomar 15y ago
    I expect they'll contact you soon. I don't think so. He mentioned that he "expects" that they contact him soon, but he is not even sure they'll do. It's good in case the founders missed the post.
    - brianchesky 15y ago
      We have in fact contacted him.
      - jimisir 15y ago
        nice give this guy a job! I love his creativity. Btw airbnb is awesome. Using it for my internship in NY!.
  - rms 15y ago
    The page speaks for itself; there's really not much of a pragmatic difference between pg emailing the link and pg emailing the link as well as pointing out the obvious.
- mbesto 15y ago
  To all of the naysayers in this thread, I think you can pretty much read this comment and be ultimately disproved.
- mwbiz 15y ago
  Just taking a wild guess that PG is Paul Graham, so any negative comments to the post are irrelevant at this point.
sucuri2 15y ago
Awesome way to get their attention. Hope you get hired :)
tptacek 15y ago
See, now, this is great stuff. How do you not hire this guy? A near-perfect example of the form: * It's gorgeous * It's simple * It's precisely targeted and relevant My only critique is that he didn't find a way to work Pocket into it; the story about his six-year-old sister using it is a winner. Anyone want to put odds on how long Loren stays on the market? I give it a week. :)
- guynamedloren 15y ago
  Thomas - thanks for the kind words and support! Highlighting Pocket totally slipped my mind, but I did include it as a project on my resume.
- rimantas 15y ago
  Your points are all true and he may make a great web designer. As for front-end engineer position there is a room for improvement. Luckily it's not me hiring so all the best to Loren.
  - guynamedloren 15y ago
    Agreed, there's always room for improvement :) Any specifics come to mind?
    - izaidi 15y ago
      I enjoy the design but I find it very decorative. By which I mean there are a lot of visual elements (clouds, arrows) that serve no real function and distract from the message. It's fine for a resume page but doesn't say much about your ability to design the front-end user experience of a consumer web app, except that it's possible you might spend a lot of time on glitter. Just my opinion as a fervent minimalist.
      - mechanical_fish 15y ago
        I'm imagining your Christmas cards now. THERE IS A HOLIDAY SOON. I AM ALIVE AND HAPPY. I HOPE YOU ARE ALSO. ME. Actually, that would be kind of funny. It would capture one's attention in a way that the typical cute and whimsical holiday card would not. Just as this cover letter gets one's attention in a way that a direct, factual, minimal, utterly banal and archetypal cover letter would not.
kmfrk 15y ago
Nota Bene: Loren also made the Snowpocalypse T-shirt site, which garnered a lot of HN attention and praise: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173155 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173155.
rkalla 15y ago
This is an excellent example of what I'll call "Resume 2.0" or "How to get a job in our new economy". It's always boiled down to an employer knowing if you can handle yourself and get the job done. The only facilities we had available to try and assess that in the past were those stump-the-chump questions and interviews at a desk sitting across from a committee. I love what technology has enabled us to do. It has enabled everyone to be a self-starter and enabled us to brandish our accomplishments in really damn creative ways (e.g. this Loren fellow rocking the AirBNB application). HN is a bit of an echo-chamber for these types of cutting edge job acquisition moves, I don't expect most people to try and get a job this way, but it is the beginning of a trend that I think will make everyone happier as a result. Loren, best of luck to you. You certainly got an upvote for me and it sure looks like ABNB would be lucky to have you.
kenjackson 15y ago
Nice. And renders on a few browsers I tried. I'm always surprised with how many people consider themselves professional web devs, but can't bother to get IE to work properly.
- joelhooks 15y ago
  with his narrowly targeted audience I would venture a guess that excluding IE was a safe move.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    To be clear it worked on IE. I was praising him for getting it to work with IE, since a lot of links on HN don't render properly on IE.
- dools 15y ago
  Worked a treat on the iPad :)
- basugasubaku 15y ago
  Looks perfect in Lynx too, which was a pleasant surprise.
arctangent 15y ago
Fantastic stuff. Best of luck to you!
jmtame 15y ago
I tried getting a meeting with him several times back when I was still a student at UIUC, I read how he launched a t-shirt web site and made some money from it, and it seems every response I got was: "sorry man, I didn't get any sleep last night, I was busy working on something. Can we try again next week?" Seems like a hustler.
- briggsbio 15y ago
  How does standing you up for multiple meetings equate "hustler" instead of "flake"?
  - jmtame 15y ago
    I had seen he was working on projects, but that was just my impression. I know how it goes when you're focused on something that you can't take meetings and you only work on stuff for long uninterrupted periods of time. I didn't harass him about it though, I only asked twice and I think it was just bad timing. I'm sure it would have happened if I kept persisting, but even I was pretty busy myself and had forgot about it.
    - briggsbio 15y ago
      Ah. Ok. I got a different impression from your first comment.
  - geekfactor 15y ago
    How does not agreeing to take a meeting equate to standing someone up for a meeting?
nsfmc 15y ago
So, while this is novel and all, it seems to me that these "resume 2.0" applications indicate a real failure of systems like "jobvite" or whatever backend air bnb is using to simplify their hiring decisions. On HN we've been seeing a bunch of these hyper-targeted reverse resumes in the past year because I suspect people have gotten tired of submitting waves of resumes and hearing nothing back within a reasonable timeframe from companies that advertise open positions on their websites but never, for whatever reason, respond. What i'm seeing here, is that traditional recruiting practices are failing in some way because priority is achieved by a) making it to the hn frontpage which b) gets pg to vouch for you. Which is basically no better (or efficient) than the traditional method of hiring folks that you've networked with via friends/school/etc or what have you. I understand that historically those online resume systems are a real losing proposition for applicants, but this suggests that they're more like a black hole rather than a mail slot. Again, this is a critique of these automated systems which seem to be visibly failing because people are going out of their way to subvert them in order to achieve any success.
- timr 15y ago
  "What i'm seeing here, is that traditional recruiting practices are failing in some way because priority is achieved by a) making it to the hn frontpage which b) gets pg to vouch for you. Which is basically no better (or efficient) than the traditional method of hiring folks that you've networked with via friends/school/etc or what have you." Well, yeah. The purpose of jobvite isn't to get the candidate attention, and these "resume 2.0" (ew...I already hate myself for writing that) shiny, whizzy, attention-getting things aren't scalable. If everyone did this, it wouldn't work. It would just raise the noise level. Also, keep in mind that you're focusing your attention on the wrong side of the problem: it's always possible that this guy could show up for an on-site and stink the place up, because there are plenty of people out there who have lots of enthusiasm and a smattering of ability, but aren't qualified to write code for a big website. So this kind of thing is great for personal marketing, but it's not a solution to the core problem of recruiting from a company's perspective (namely: lots of mouth-breathers are applying, and we need to filter them from the tiny stream of good applicants).
  - 15y ago
csomar 15y ago
Loren, that's a very nice resume page. But I think it's missing something, which is quite important: Your portfolio. Collect some of your best work, and create a slider in one of your clouds. If you have also worked in some companies in the past mention it. Stackoverflow, Github, Dribble... links are also useful. hint: Change the white up arrow color, so that it contrast well with the background. You can detect this with scrolling and assign colors. This will show that you put lot of attention to small details ;)
- guynamedloren 15y ago
  Fumbled around with integrating a portfolio, but ultimately decided to leave it out and keep things simple (for aesthetics, primarily). I was sure to include relevant projects and descriptions in my resume, however.
shahedkhan30 15y ago
Hey Loren, love your website! Great work you go there, and such an ambition! I would definitely hire you for my start-up company (Viatask).
arc_of_descent 15y ago
Really nice looking page. Was going through the source and found this - "I'm a self-starter and <strong>entrepreneur</strong>"
startupcto 15y ago
Good luck and hope to hear from you if you did get your dream job at AirBnB.
Mz 15y ago
Count me as jealous, for a variety of reasons. I mean that in the nicest way possible. Best of luck!
pclark 15y ago
I'll bite. Is this actually that good? Spending a lot of time on it, sure, but other than it being quirky (which is hugely valuable) is it doing it's job? No specific accomplishments, core skills, and no software in the wild for us to see. You could have linked to your Airbnb profile ("hey i use it!") linked to your google map ("hey i travel!") and then listed all your software projects and links and things about each that you are especially proud of, and that'd have been awesome.
- guynamedloren 15y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Without proper context, I see where you're coming from - but the reality is that this was created in an addition to a submitted resume + cover letter, both of which listed specific accomplishments, core skills, personal projects, and experience. This was certainly not meant to be a standalone "Hey look, hire me!" page, and would be rather incomplete as such. Edit: Also, one of the primary goals of this project was to display the things that are commonly difficult to convey in a resume - passion and personality.
- nametoremember 15y ago
  How would linking to a Google Map prove that he travels or add to this resume in any way?
blehn 15y ago
This is one of the better "hire me" micro-sites I've seen... and it still made me cringe.
- paulnelligan 15y ago
  Wow, why? ... To me it's a statement that Airbnb would get someone who cares deeply about their product.
_harry 15y ago
That's awesome Loren! There are only four of us on the frontend team right now. We need more! We like engineers with passion. People who get excited talking about the new frontend development frontier. Conversations like this happen all the time: - Think Node.js would be cool for a realtime dashboard? Yes, do it. - Maybe we could try using backbone.js and a fat client for this feature? Fork it and let's go. - What's SASS? Install the gem. We're using it. Our fourth frontend engineer just started last week. We sat him down, showed him how we were doing things and we asked him, "What do you think?" and he says, "Have you guys heard of Jammit? It's used for asset packaging. It's pretty cool" -- A couple hours later he was showing us the page load speed increase and how to use it. If you're a frontend engineer wondering what it's like to work at Airbnb, feel free to email me: harry@airbnb.com or if you prefer character limits I'm on Twitter: @hshoff.
sixtypoundhound 15y ago
Awesome!!! Not going to critique the technical quality of the work (particularly since I'm not a front-end web guy), but as a hiring manager, I'd be frigging floored if someone spent an evening (maybe more? Although I suspect you're pretty quick by now, based on your comments) putting together a tight on-point microsite for my consumption. The big job boards are a joke since they have reduced the entire process to buzzword bingo - and a fairly poor form of one at that. There's basically zero insight into how good someone actually is. Looking at someone's blog or contributions to open source projects is potentially an indicator, but there are a number of solid folks for whom that isn't a serious options (significant risk of their old economy management freaking out - a problem when you have a couple of dependents you need to keep fed, housed, and healthy). So you get interviews like the one I conducted two weeks ago - "you have written free form SQL before?"...."yes, many times"... " Excellent, I have a little problem for us to solve..." [walks to board, draws three data tables - one transaction file and two dimensions - and outlines a requirement for a basic report that involves joining, summing, and filtering data - I validated it with a recent hire, took him 3 min] "uh"... twenty minutes later we bring the painful exercise to a close.... "I didn't think you would have me write code" Huh? Huh? The job description explictly mentions that you need to know free form SQL COLD and asks that you have higher level programming experience (real languages). Do you seriously expect to get a role like that w/o coding? Shoot - beats the cracker jack wanna-be pricing analyst we had apply off monster who explicitly mentioned his pricing experience...at Walmart... as a positive... The one decent player in the online recruiting space that I've seen is linkedin - most of the contacts I've had off of that which show serious intent (eg. tailored message) are pretty promising. Especially if they are a connection of someone you trust. Linkedin's biggest problem is that all participants get the same view of a candidate, including your corporate HR people (don't laugh - I was hauled in and yelled at about this a couple of years ago) - if there was a way to make more of this platform private, the value of the network would increase.
JacobIrwin 15y ago
Good luck Loren, hell of a visual (i.e., resume)! :-)
venturebros 15y ago
Gah I hate it when people are good at design and can code! Just not fair. /sighs Good luck!
- sbisker 15y ago
  That's cool; I hate it when people get cool names like "venturebros' before me. We can't all win at everything.
- Omnipresent 15y ago
  Same here. viewing source and using firebug to leaves us always a step behind:)
patio11 15y ago
The ROI on these in terms of career growth absolutely ROFLstomps effort at improving a traditional resume and playing spray-and-pray. (The ROI of networking is probably better than both but, hey, what can you do.)
- jimbokun 15y ago
  This is maybe closer to networking than it is to a traditional resume.
dsghjklui 15y ago
ONLINE STORE : ====( http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com )===== Christan Audigier bikini $23 Ed Hardy Bikini $23 Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15 ed hardy short_tank_woman $16 Sandal $32 christian louboutin $80 Sunglass $15 COACH_Necklace $27 handbag $33 AF tank woman $17 puma slipper woman $30 ====( http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com )=====
mvs 15y ago
Very Cool! hope you now believe 4 yrs weren't a total waste after all:-)
cemregr 15y ago
I was interested in working for Airbnb too. Last January I tweeted out about how much I love them, and through the tweet I ended up visiting their offices and chatting with Joe, one of their founders. They were very generous with their time. Took me 10 seconds writing out the tweet, but the face time I got out of it was very valuable. This is another thing one might look into to get the attention of companies. http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23146168087224320 http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23146168087224320 http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23154242558623744 http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23154242558623744
M1573RMU74710N 15y ago
Hey, I hate to be "that guy"...but since you're applying for a front-end job, here goes: - You're loading scripts in your head tag, and a crap-ton of them. At least some of these could be concat'd together. HTTP request carry a lot of overhead, so fewer is better. I bet at least some could be moved to the bottom as well, with some CSS/JS to avoid the dreaded Flash Of UnBehavioured Content. - In a similar vein, you're loading a lot of images, more overhead again. At least some of these (like the clouds) could probably be combined into one file and then separated out with CSS. - You're not setting long expire headers on your resources, bad for caching. - You don't seem to be serving up gzipped resources. - Some of the scripts aren't even minified. Take clouds.js for example, you use a whole HTTP request on this one file, and it's small. It's also not very DRY, you have a bunch of repeats of basically the same code, it probably could have been re-written to something like: $('.clouds').each(function(){ $(this).animate({ /* ... */ }); }) I realize some of this stuff is not entirely necessarily on a site like this, but considering how easy it is and the fact that you're applying for a front-end engineering job, I'd think you'd want to follow best practices. Overall it's a cool idea, very fun and nice looking. Good job. (BTW, I'm available for work. If anyone from Airbnb is reading this, I can haz Job plz? )
- josephcohen 15y ago
  Hey dude. About the job - email me at joseph at coursekit dot com.
- minikomi 15y ago
  Perhaps it was a conscious decision not to minify and concat. - to show how he works when developing.. in which case, a comment acknowledging so might have been extra-cool. Also, although not the be all and end all in Front end decision making.. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lorenburton.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lorenburt... just food for thought. Most are to do with unescaped ampersands in links.
  - M1573RMU74710N 15y ago
teddytruong7 15y ago
love this loren good luck!
mbrzuzy 15y ago
Beautiful. I didn't realize the clouds at the top of the page were moving until after. Nice touch.
bvandusen 15y ago
Lauren, what is it about airbnb that you love so much? There are a lot of amazing san francisco startups doing incredible things that would probably all love to have you on their team.
brianbreslin 15y ago
what i love about these types of sites is that the individuals applying realize they have to step out in front of the pack to distinguish themselves, and are showing true initiative. Far cry from the monster.com droves which send HR departments generic cover letters + resumes.
SeoxyS 15y ago
I think the strongest resume / cover letter is when you're able to say "Google me" and have it be enough.
ignifero 15y ago
Talk about modesty...
Omnipresent 15y ago
this is what makes me visit HN every day. This will give me inspiration for the entire week. Hell of a resume loren, wish I had creativity like you and knew css better :) How long did it take you to put this effort together and did you send your "formal" resume to airbnb before coming up with this idea?
Omnipresent 15y ago
you should do a detailed blogpost about the design and creative vision behind this!

423 points by guynamedloren 15y ago

Inspired and motivated by some fantastic advice from the HN community, I’ve decided to pursue a frontend engineering position at Airbnb. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, but I love what they’re doing and could see myself working as a part of the team. In fact, Airbnb is one of the only companies I’ve really felt the urge to work with. In addition to submitting a resume and cover letter, I thought it would be fun to put together this little project. I’m not personally sending a link to Airbnb, so any chance they have at seeing this is entirely up to the community. I guess this is an experiment of sorts - we’ll see how it goes. Thanks HN!

iamdave 15y ago
Hire this man.
- frankdenbow 15y ago
  Yep. This is a no brainer.
  - rudiger 15y ago
    Sorry, but the act of hiring an employee at a startup is never a no-brainer. Good luck to Loren and to the people at AirBnB, though.

pg 15y ago

I just emailed the founders. I expect they'll contact you soon.

guynamedloren 15y ago
Thanks pg - I appreciate it!
corin_ 15y ago
I assume you won't be willing to but... any chance you'd shed light on how you worded your email, ranging from just a link to "you have to hire.."?
- csomar 15y ago
  I expect they'll contact you soon. I don't think so. He mentioned that he "expects" that they contact him soon, but he is not even sure they'll do. It's good in case the founders missed the post.
  - brianchesky 15y ago
    We have in fact contacted him.
    - jimisir 15y ago
      nice give this guy a job! I love his creativity. Btw airbnb is awesome. Using it for my internship in NY!.
- rms 15y ago
  The page speaks for itself; there's really not much of a pragmatic difference between pg emailing the link and pg emailing the link as well as pointing out the obvious.
mbesto 15y ago
To all of the naysayers in this thread, I think you can pretty much read this comment and be ultimately disproved.
mwbiz 15y ago
Just taking a wild guess that PG is Paul Graham, so any negative comments to the post are irrelevant at this point.

sucuri2 15y ago

Awesome way to get their attention. Hope you get hired :)

tptacek 15y ago

See, now, this is great stuff. How do you not hire this guy? A near-perfect example of the form: * It's gorgeous * It's simple * It's precisely targeted and relevant My only critique is that he didn't find a way to work Pocket into it; the story about his six-year-old sister using it is a winner. Anyone want to put odds on how long Loren stays on the market? I give it a week. :)

guynamedloren 15y ago
Thomas - thanks for the kind words and support! Highlighting Pocket totally slipped my mind, but I did include it as a project on my resume.
rimantas 15y ago
Your points are all true and he may make a great web designer. As for front-end engineer position there is a room for improvement. Luckily it's not me hiring so all the best to Loren.
- guynamedloren 15y ago
  Agreed, there's always room for improvement :) Any specifics come to mind?
  - izaidi 15y ago
    I enjoy the design but I find it very decorative. By which I mean there are a lot of visual elements (clouds, arrows) that serve no real function and distract from the message. It's fine for a resume page but doesn't say much about your ability to design the front-end user experience of a consumer web app, except that it's possible you might spend a lot of time on glitter. Just my opinion as a fervent minimalist.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      I'm imagining your Christmas cards now. THERE IS A HOLIDAY SOON. I AM ALIVE AND HAPPY. I HOPE YOU ARE ALSO. ME. Actually, that would be kind of funny. It would capture one's attention in a way that the typical cute and whimsical holiday card would not. Just as this cover letter gets one's attention in a way that a direct, factual, minimal, utterly banal and archetypal cover letter would not.

kmfrk 15y ago

Nota Bene: Loren also made the Snowpocalypse T-shirt site, which garnered a lot of HN attention and praise: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173155 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173155.

rkalla 15y ago

This is an excellent example of what I'll call "Resume 2.0" or "How to get a job in our new economy". It's always boiled down to an employer knowing if you can handle yourself and get the job done. The only facilities we had available to try and assess that in the past were those stump-the-chump questions and interviews at a desk sitting across from a committee. I love what technology has enabled us to do. It has enabled everyone to be a self-starter and enabled us to brandish our accomplishments in really damn creative ways (e.g. this Loren fellow rocking the AirBNB application). HN is a bit of an echo-chamber for these types of cutting edge job acquisition moves, I don't expect most people to try and get a job this way, but it is the beginning of a trend that I think will make everyone happier as a result. Loren, best of luck to you. You certainly got an upvote for me and it sure looks like ABNB would be lucky to have you.

kenjackson 15y ago

Nice. And renders on a few browsers I tried. I'm always surprised with how many people consider themselves professional web devs, but can't bother to get IE to work properly.

joelhooks 15y ago
with his narrowly targeted audience I would venture a guess that excluding IE was a safe move.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  To be clear it worked on IE. I was praising him for getting it to work with IE, since a lot of links on HN don't render properly on IE.
dools 15y ago
Worked a treat on the iPad :)
basugasubaku 15y ago
Looks perfect in Lynx too, which was a pleasant surprise.

arctangent 15y ago

Fantastic stuff. Best of luck to you!

jmtame 15y ago

I tried getting a meeting with him several times back when I was still a student at UIUC, I read how he launched a t-shirt web site and made some money from it, and it seems every response I got was: "sorry man, I didn't get any sleep last night, I was busy working on something. Can we try again next week?" Seems like a hustler.

briggsbio 15y ago
How does standing you up for multiple meetings equate "hustler" instead of "flake"?
- jmtame 15y ago
  I had seen he was working on projects, but that was just my impression. I know how it goes when you're focused on something that you can't take meetings and you only work on stuff for long uninterrupted periods of time. I didn't harass him about it though, I only asked twice and I think it was just bad timing. I'm sure it would have happened if I kept persisting, but even I was pretty busy myself and had forgot about it.
  - briggsbio 15y ago
    Ah. Ok. I got a different impression from your first comment.
- geekfactor 15y ago
  How does not agreeing to take a meeting equate to standing someone up for a meeting?

nsfmc 15y ago

So, while this is novel and all, it seems to me that these "resume 2.0" applications indicate a real failure of systems like "jobvite" or whatever backend air bnb is using to simplify their hiring decisions. On HN we've been seeing a bunch of these hyper-targeted reverse resumes in the past year because I suspect people have gotten tired of submitting waves of resumes and hearing nothing back within a reasonable timeframe from companies that advertise open positions on their websites but never, for whatever reason, respond. What i'm seeing here, is that traditional recruiting practices are failing in some way because priority is achieved by a) making it to the hn frontpage which b) gets pg to vouch for you. Which is basically no better (or efficient) than the traditional method of hiring folks that you've networked with via friends/school/etc or what have you. I understand that historically those online resume systems are a real losing proposition for applicants, but this suggests that they're more like a black hole rather than a mail slot. Again, this is a critique of these automated systems which seem to be visibly failing because people are going out of their way to subvert them in order to achieve any success.

timr 15y ago
"What i'm seeing here, is that traditional recruiting practices are failing in some way because priority is achieved by a) making it to the hn frontpage which b) gets pg to vouch for you. Which is basically no better (or efficient) than the traditional method of hiring folks that you've networked with via friends/school/etc or what have you." Well, yeah. The purpose of jobvite isn't to get the candidate attention, and these "resume 2.0" (ew...I already hate myself for writing that) shiny, whizzy, attention-getting things aren't scalable. If everyone did this, it wouldn't work. It would just raise the noise level. Also, keep in mind that you're focusing your attention on the wrong side of the problem: it's always possible that this guy could show up for an on-site and stink the place up, because there are plenty of people out there who have lots of enthusiasm and a smattering of ability, but aren't qualified to write code for a big website. So this kind of thing is great for personal marketing, but it's not a solution to the core problem of recruiting from a company's perspective (namely: lots of mouth-breathers are applying, and we need to filter them from the tiny stream of good applicants).
- 15y ago

csomar 15y ago

Loren, that's a very nice resume page. But I think it's missing something, which is quite important: Your portfolio. Collect some of your best work, and create a slider in one of your clouds. If you have also worked in some companies in the past mention it. Stackoverflow, Github, Dribble... links are also useful. hint: Change the white up arrow color, so that it contrast well with the background. You can detect this with scrolling and assign colors. This will show that you put lot of attention to small details ;)

guynamedloren 15y ago
Fumbled around with integrating a portfolio, but ultimately decided to leave it out and keep things simple (for aesthetics, primarily). I was sure to include relevant projects and descriptions in my resume, however.

shahedkhan30 15y ago

Hey Loren, love your website! Great work you go there, and such an ambition! I would definitely hire you for my start-up company (Viatask).

arc_of_descent 15y ago

Really nice looking page. Was going through the source and found this - "I'm a self-starter and <strong>entrepreneur</strong>"

startupcto 15y ago

Good luck and hope to hear from you if you did get your dream job at AirBnB.

Mz 15y ago

Count me as jealous, for a variety of reasons. I mean that in the nicest way possible. Best of luck!

pclark 15y ago

I'll bite. Is this actually that good? Spending a lot of time on it, sure, but other than it being quirky (which is hugely valuable) is it doing it's job? No specific accomplishments, core skills, and no software in the wild for us to see. You could have linked to your Airbnb profile ("hey i use it!") linked to your google map ("hey i travel!") and then listed all your software projects and links and things about each that you are especially proud of, and that'd have been awesome.

guynamedloren 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Without proper context, I see where you're coming from - but the reality is that this was created in an addition to a submitted resume + cover letter, both of which listed specific accomplishments, core skills, personal projects, and experience. This was certainly not meant to be a standalone "Hey look, hire me!" page, and would be rather incomplete as such. Edit: Also, one of the primary goals of this project was to display the things that are commonly difficult to convey in a resume - passion and personality.
nametoremember 15y ago
How would linking to a Google Map prove that he travels or add to this resume in any way?

blehn 15y ago

This is one of the better "hire me" micro-sites I've seen... and it still made me cringe.

paulnelligan 15y ago
Wow, why? ... To me it's a statement that Airbnb would get someone who cares deeply about their product.

_harry 15y ago

That's awesome Loren! There are only four of us on the frontend team right now. We need more! We like engineers with passion. People who get excited talking about the new frontend development frontier. Conversations like this happen all the time: - Think Node.js would be cool for a realtime dashboard? Yes, do it. - Maybe we could try using backbone.js and a fat client for this feature? Fork it and let's go. - What's SASS? Install the gem. We're using it. Our fourth frontend engineer just started last week. We sat him down, showed him how we were doing things and we asked him, "What do you think?" and he says, "Have you guys heard of Jammit? It's used for asset packaging. It's pretty cool" -- A couple hours later he was showing us the page load speed increase and how to use it. If you're a frontend engineer wondering what it's like to work at Airbnb, feel free to email me: harry@airbnb.com or if you prefer character limits I'm on Twitter: @hshoff.

sixtypoundhound 15y ago

Awesome!!! Not going to critique the technical quality of the work (particularly since I'm not a front-end web guy), but as a hiring manager, I'd be frigging floored if someone spent an evening (maybe more? Although I suspect you're pretty quick by now, based on your comments) putting together a tight on-point microsite for my consumption. The big job boards are a joke since they have reduced the entire process to buzzword bingo - and a fairly poor form of one at that. There's basically zero insight into how good someone actually is. Looking at someone's blog or contributions to open source projects is potentially an indicator, but there are a number of solid folks for whom that isn't a serious options (significant risk of their old economy management freaking out - a problem when you have a couple of dependents you need to keep fed, housed, and healthy). So you get interviews like the one I conducted two weeks ago - "you have written free form SQL before?"...."yes, many times"... " Excellent, I have a little problem for us to solve..." [walks to board, draws three data tables - one transaction file and two dimensions - and outlines a requirement for a basic report that involves joining, summing, and filtering data - I validated it with a recent hire, took him 3 min] "uh"... twenty minutes later we bring the painful exercise to a close.... "I didn't think you would have me write code" Huh? Huh? The job description explictly mentions that you need to know free form SQL COLD and asks that you have higher level programming experience (real languages). Do you seriously expect to get a role like that w/o coding? Shoot - beats the cracker jack wanna-be pricing analyst we had apply off monster who explicitly mentioned his pricing experience...at Walmart... as a positive... The one decent player in the online recruiting space that I've seen is linkedin - most of the contacts I've had off of that which show serious intent (eg. tailored message) are pretty promising. Especially if they are a connection of someone you trust. Linkedin's biggest problem is that all participants get the same view of a candidate, including your corporate HR people (don't laugh - I was hauled in and yelled at about this a couple of years ago) - if there was a way to make more of this platform private, the value of the network would increase.

JacobIrwin 15y ago

Good luck Loren, hell of a visual (i.e., resume)! :-)

venturebros 15y ago

Gah I hate it when people are good at design and can code! Just not fair. /sighs Good luck!

sbisker 15y ago
That's cool; I hate it when people get cool names like "venturebros' before me. We can't all win at everything.
Omnipresent 15y ago
Same here. viewing source and using firebug to leaves us always a step behind:)

patio11 15y ago

The ROI on these in terms of career growth absolutely ROFLstomps effort at improving a traditional resume and playing spray-and-pray. (The ROI of networking is probably better than both but, hey, what can you do.)

jimbokun 15y ago
This is maybe closer to networking than it is to a traditional resume.

dsghjklui 15y ago

ONLINE STORE : ====( http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com )===== Christan Audigier bikini $23 Ed Hardy Bikini $23 Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15 ed hardy short_tank_woman $16 Sandal $32 christian louboutin $80 Sunglass $15 COACH_Necklace $27 handbag $33 AF tank woman $17 puma slipper woman $30 ====( http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com )=====

mvs 15y ago

Very Cool! hope you now believe 4 yrs weren't a total waste after all:-)

cemregr 15y ago

I was interested in working for Airbnb too. Last January I tweeted out about how much I love them, and through the tweet I ended up visiting their offices and chatting with Joe, one of their founders. They were very generous with their time. Took me 10 seconds writing out the tweet, but the face time I got out of it was very valuable. This is another thing one might look into to get the attention of companies. http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23146168087224320 http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23146168087224320 http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23154242558623744 http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23154242558623744

M1573RMU74710N 15y ago

Hey, I hate to be "that guy"...but since you're applying for a front-end job, here goes: - You're loading scripts in your head tag, and a crap-ton of them. At least some of these could be concat'd together. HTTP request carry a lot of overhead, so fewer is better. I bet at least some could be moved to the bottom as well, with some CSS/JS to avoid the dreaded Flash Of UnBehavioured Content. - In a similar vein, you're loading a lot of images, more overhead again. At least some of these (like the clouds) could probably be combined into one file and then separated out with CSS. - You're not setting long expire headers on your resources, bad for caching. - You don't seem to be serving up gzipped resources. - Some of the scripts aren't even minified. Take clouds.js for example, you use a whole HTTP request on this one file, and it's small. It's also not very DRY, you have a bunch of repeats of basically the same code, it probably could have been re-written to something like: $('.clouds').each(function(){ $(this).animate({ /* ... */ }); }) I realize some of this stuff is not entirely necessarily on a site like this, but considering how easy it is and the fact that you're applying for a front-end engineering job, I'd think you'd want to follow best practices. Overall it's a cool idea, very fun and nice looking. Good job. (BTW, I'm available for work. If anyone from Airbnb is reading this, I can haz Job plz? )

josephcohen 15y ago
Hey dude. About the job - email me at joseph at coursekit dot com.
minikomi 15y ago
Perhaps it was a conscious decision not to minify and concat. - to show how he works when developing.. in which case, a comment acknowledging so might have been extra-cool. Also, although not the be all and end all in Front end decision making.. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lorenburton.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lorenburt... just food for thought. Most are to do with unescaped ampersands in links.
- M1573RMU74710N 15y ago

teddytruong7 15y ago

love this loren good luck!

mbrzuzy 15y ago

Beautiful. I didn't realize the clouds at the top of the page were moving until after. Nice touch.

bvandusen 15y ago

Lauren, what is it about airbnb that you love so much? There are a lot of amazing san francisco startups doing incredible things that would probably all love to have you on their team.

brianbreslin 15y ago

what i love about these types of sites is that the individuals applying realize they have to step out in front of the pack to distinguish themselves, and are showing true initiative. Far cry from the monster.com droves which send HR departments generic cover letters + resumes.

SeoxyS 15y ago

I think the strongest resume / cover letter is when you're able to say "Google me" and have it be enough.

ignifero 15y ago

Talk about modesty...

Omnipresent 15y ago

this is what makes me visit HN every day. This will give me inspiration for the entire week. Hell of a resume loren, wish I had creativity like you and knew css better :) How long did it take you to put this effort together and did you send your "formal" resume to airbnb before coming up with this idea?

Omnipresent 15y ago

you should do a detailed blogpost about the design and creative vision behind this!