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Ask HN: When did you first get confirmation that you were doing the right thing?
I am nowhere as far down the line as most people that frequent this site, in terms of skill or of success at a startup, in fact I am still at the very start of earning my CS degree. But today I received confirmation that I am following the right career path by working towards one day building a startup.
Let me fill you guys in.
About a week and a half ago I had an idea to take the freely available information from my university's Student Employment Center (http://www.finaid.wwu.edu/studentjobs/index.php) and create my own site that would let student job hunters actually filter the jobs based on pay rate, on- or off-campus, category, employer, etc... Which the Student Employment center is pretty lacking in. In fact the Student Employment site is pretty lacking in any sort of usability; it is essentially just a list. I decided to focus on catering to what student job hunters need out of a list of jobs. Mainly easy but strong filtering/browsing and usability, usability, usability!
I made a quick and dirty site in my free time (http://western-jobs.com) but I didn't finish almost all of the features that I wanted to. Why? Because I realized that the Student Employment site does have some of the main features I wanted to implement (durr) such as automated emails and browsing jobs by category (not pay though) but they are hidden away in the corners of the site. Again, highlighting how it is not very end-user friendly, and lacks usability, but they already had all the eyeballs and I felt defeated.
I figured I might as well just throw what I had together and put it out so I could be done with it, and move on to the next thing. So I posted it to the WWU forums (http://forum.wwu.edu/node/4203) and that was that.
That was yesterday, today I received a phone call from the head of the Financial Aid department (which runs the Student Employment Center) offering me a job, and we had a good conversation. Unfortunately, due to privacy concerns, they are blocking incoming traffic from my site. No hard feelings, I am not joining their team because I already have an awesome job, but I agreed to sit down with their developers and share my opinions on what their site is lacking, and let them do all the work. Now I can have a positive influence on many more students than I ever could have by running my own site.
Sorry, I know this is a bit long but it feels really good to get noticed and receive attention, something that I haven't done with web development yet.
This elated feeling I have can't be unique though, so I pose a question: When did you have your moment of confirmation?
I'm sure there are some great stories of motivation out there.
- lacker 18y agoDon't settle! The privacy excuse sounds bogus. Probably they just don't want to look bad when a student makes a better website than theirs in their spare time. If you just give them your opinions, they will nod politely, take notes, and then never make anything better, because it's the laziest, easiest thing to do. Find a way around the block and keep your site running!
- mnemonik 18y agoThe privacy concerns that he had were that because they assure employers that post jobs that they don't share contact information with anyone but students that visit the site, and I was making browsing by employer possible, that their policies were being broken. I think that the right thing to do right now is try to work with them to get their site up to par, because I could help many more students by proxy than I could with my site. However, if they fail to act in a timely fashion after I speak with them, I will definitely try to work around their block. Right now they are just blocking incoming traffic with a referral from my site. What is the best way to get around this? Could I just forward traffic through a redirect from a different domain I have registered to the same server or is the block most likely the whole ip? (I'm at school right now and can't test anything out but it would be great to get some ideas bounced back to me)
- lacker 18y agoThat isn't really a "privacy" concern. The block is most likely based on the referer header. Probably if you redirect from some other domain it will work.