

Loren wants to work at Airbnb - guynamedloren
http://www.lorenburton.com

======
M1573RMU74710N
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? )

~~~
SeoxyS
Ever heard of premature optimization? Doing things like concatenating images
into sprites and using css to display them is overkill for pretty much
anything except Google's doodles. I also find it to be very inelegant.

Best practices is one thing. Overkill is another.

~~~
M1573RMU74710N
When I lock the door when I leave the house, I am not "prematurely optimizing"
against burglaries. The lock is there, I just have to turn it. I'm expending a
minimal amount of effort for a comparatively large payoff. When I spend
10,000$ on an alarm system to protect my 50$ stereo... _that's_ prematurely
optimizing.

Most of the stuff I'm talking about is the default. There are a million and
one tools to handle this stuff for you...there's a couple switches to flip in
your server config, etc. It's not like you have to go out of the way to do
these things, you almost have to go out of the way not to.

I mean, this is a pretty simple page...and it has a loading screen that takes
a couple seconds? Maybe implementing some of these best practices could take
care of that.

Little effort, good payoff.

>I also find it to be very inelegant.

HTTP requests cost. Putting the images together and then selecting them with
CSS is a very elegant solution to that problem IMHO. It's also very simple to
do.

You're entitled to your opinion of course.

Anyway, if you want to impress a prospective employer, I think it's a good
idea to try and impress instead of just doing the absolute minimum. (not
saying that Loren didn't impress or slacked off..this thing is beautiful
looking and well written, but I mean hypothetically if I was doing something
like this I'd want to know I did the best possible job for the effort spent)

~~~
atourgates
Or - to extend your metaphor - if Loren was applying to work at a physical
security firm, he'd be better off saying, "I'm a security nut, so much so that
I installed an amazing security system at my house, with lasers and a shark-
pit and whatnot," than if he just said, "I regularly lock the door at my
house."

Sure, the lasers and shark-pit might be overkill for any normal home's
security needs, but if they're being used as evidence of talent in the field
where you're looking for work, their purpose isn't to be practical for your
everyday needs, but to demonstrate applicable skills.

------
guynamedloren
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
Hire this man.

~~~
frankdenbow
Yep. This is a no brainer.

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

~~~
corin_
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
_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
We have in fact contacted him.

~~~
jimisir
nice give this guy a job! I love his creativity. Btw airbnb is awesome. Using
it for my internship in NY!.

------
tptacek
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. :)

~~~
wheels
I suppose the Matasano version would be the same thing, but it'd be on your
intranet? ;-)

~~~
tptacek
Well played, sir. Hats off.

------
_harry
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.

------
nsfmc
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
_"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).

~~~
ezyang
> shiny, whizzy, attention-getting things aren't scalable. If everyone did
> this, it wouldn't work. It would just raise the noise level.

Unclear. In many ways, this is simply a logical extension of the well written
cover letter, and if those work, why can't these?

~~~
hugh3
Escalation. Once everybody is doing a shiny, whizzy attention-getting thing,
then folks will start competing by being _more_ shiny, _more_ whizzy and
_more_ attention-getting than everyone else. Instead of a nicely-designed
colourful scrolling webpage people are submitting half-hour semi-interactive
animated feature films in which the ghost of Ghandi rises from the grave to
tell you all about the advantages of hiring so-and-so while you fight off
lizard men and can-can girls.

~~~
Mz
At which point, understated elegance will become the new rage.

~~~
hugh3
Exactly. I'm ahead of the curve. Here's my cover letter. It's in twelve-point
Times, motherfuckers!

~~~
jrockway
My cover letter doesn't even specify a font. It's ASCII text.

------
kmfrk
_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>.

------
rkalla
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.

------
patio11
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
This is maybe closer to networking than it is to a traditional resume.

------
csomar
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
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.

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

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

------
pclark
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
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.

------
kenjackson
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
with his narrowly targeted audience I would venture a guess that excluding IE
was a safe move.

~~~
kenjackson
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.

------
sixtypoundhound
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.

------
jmtame
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
How does standing you up for multiple meetings equate "hustler" instead of
"flake"?

~~~
jmtame
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
Ah. Ok. I got a different impression from your first comment.

------
cemregr
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/23154242558623744>

------
sucuri2
Awesome way to get their attention. Hope you get hired :)

------
mbrzuzy
Beautiful.

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

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

------
bvandusen
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.

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

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

------
Omnipresent
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?

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

------
brianbreslin
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.

------
arctangent
Fantastic stuff. Best of luck to you!

------
venturebros
Gah I hate it when people are good at design and can code!

Just not fair. /sighs

Good luck!

~~~
sbisker
That's cool; I hate it when people get cool names like "venturebros' before
me. We can't all win at everything.

------
Mz
Count me as jealous, for a variety of reasons. I mean that in the nicest way
possible.

Best of luck!

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

------
teddytruong7
love this loren good luck!

------
shahedkhan30
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).

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

------
ignifero
Talk about modesty...

