
Show HN: Kareer Day – Learn About Jobs by People Who've Done Them - yaas
https://www.kareerday.com
======
yaas
A job search today is like having to arrange a lot of blind dates, with your
focus at each being on trying to convince them you’re the best thing for them
on the spot — that they should pick you. And if they agree, you then commit to
a "long-term relationship" with them right away. But if you leave before a
year is up, people will often think less of you, and it may harm your ability
to date after.

You’re never really taught how to pick the right “date,” nor provided adequate
resources to help you figure out who might be a good fit for you.

And yet, if your best friend told you they were going to jump into a serious
relationship with someone (this time in the real sense) — or heaven forbid
marrying them — right after meeting them, you'd probably caution them
otherwise.

We want to help people pick a job (and career) that fits them, one they may
actually get to know better (and like) before having to go all-in on date
three. Interviews are often a bad environment to fully learn about a job
because the interviewee is primarily there to sell themselves, they may not
want to ask too probing of questions about the job as that may turn off the
interviewer, the interviewer may not have all the answers to your questions
(perhaps they've never done the job you're interviewing for), and interviews
are usually too short to really understand a role.

We want to improve that process. We're going to do that by providing people
with an opportunity to learn directly from those who've done the jobs, who've
worked in the careers, in a more neutral way, outside of interviews. These are
detailed, first-hand accounts (reviews) that will better educate them on what
a job truly entails. Our hope is that it allows people to ride shotgun as if
they're on a job shadow, without actually having to get in the car.

~~~
sansnomme
How do you plan to monetize?

~~~
yaas
I'm honestly not sure yet. Right now my top priority is getting good content
on the site.

~~~
Enginerrrd
Seems like it's not that far off the conventional monetization route of a
recruiter. If you could increase the recruitment/candidate success rate after
12 months for new hires, even by a little bit, that'd probably be a pretty
nice selling point.

~~~
yaas
When you say:

>If you could increase the recruitment/candidate success rate after 12 months
for new hires

Do you mean the probability of a new hire staying after 12 months?

~~~
Enginerrrd
I mean both the probability that they are happy in their position and stay,
and the probability that they are an acceptable candidate. These are two very
different things though probably quite correlated.

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divkakwani
That's a great resource for high schoolers who are trying to find a career
path. I have also seen something similar to this at Khanacademy - their "meet
the professional" series and also some video interviews on different careers
[1].

[1] [https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/career-
cont...](https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/career-content)

~~~
yaas
Nice, I haven't seen that. Thanks for sharing.

I personally would rather read than watch because I can take-in more
information faster, and I'm less willing to sit through a video from a source
I'm not already connected to or familiar with (as oppose to say my favorite
comedian). But given how popular many YouTube channels and videos are for
people teaching various skills, maybe I should include video.

Edit: after looking at this part of Khan Academy (which I'm a fan of), the
frustration I have with many of these career sites or content is that they
don't focus on what doing a job is actually like nor provide enough detail.
You do a job for 8 hours a day, I want to know what I will be doing during
that time. Bonus if you also tell me details about what a career path for that
job looks like.

------
xwowsersx
> Interesting fact: Diet Coke is many flight attendants least favorite drink
> to pour because the fizz takes forever to go down. They can pour three
> drinks for everyone one Diet Coke.

TIL ;)

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throwawayurnfj
This is great! Thanks!

I've had a related idea a while back - I wish there were walkthroughs for
university fields of study. Like a class that discusses the tables of contents
(not so much the actual contents!) of courses of other fields at a level that
would be understandable to prospective students of the field.

This would reduce unknown unknowns.

As someone who has studied CS, at times it would've actually been useful to
know what areas electrical engineers and mechanical engineers are studying,
and what the major topics in each course are. Be it to work closely with
people who did study those fields, find the right people in the first place or
possibly even as a seed to be able to learn just enough of their field to help
myself.

Of course for such technical fields I can read the course descriptions myself
and make educated (hah!) guesses, but if I turn to some unrelated fields (e.g.
veterinary studies) out of sheer curiosity I'm lost.

------
tezzer
Interesting idea! The name is a little hard to take seriously with the
misspelling.

Some of the reviews are very detailed with expected salary ranges and career
progressions, and others are really sparse- the Sales Engineer for example, or
the Flight Nurse which is basically an anecdote that tells you nothing about
the field, how to get into it or what it's like. I'd have a template or
guidelines for your reviewers, and reject anything that doesn't match the
quality of, for example, the Investment Banking VP or the Crane Operator.

~~~
yaas
Finding salary ranges is pretty easy these days. Knowing what a job is
actually like before doing it is not, so that's going to be my focus.

You're right some posts are really sparse. And I hope to fix that going
forward, perhaps via some guidelines as you suggest.

Though, I'd prefer not forcing too many restrictions on what people share. If
you envision looking at say 10+ posts for a given job, some with just
interesting anecdotes about specific experiences or situations would be useful
I think.

I appreciate the feedback.

~~~
tezzer
That makes sense, good luck with it!

------
xwowsersx
I think the formats should be consistent. The Flight Attendant one was written
like a post..then the Interior Designer one was a Q&A with a designer.

~~~
yaas
You might be right.

I thought having a varied structure is better because it allows people to talk
about whatever they want to talk about, however they want to talk about it.
But when I watch or read good interviews (not job interviews), the interviewer
asks good questions, listens a lot, and asks subtle (yet effective) follow-up
questions that creates an engaging conversation because of the stories or
details that you learn. Bad interviewers get in the way by not listening well,
talking too much, or asking bad questions.

I'm just not yet sure if there are universal questions that can be applied
across all job categories and functions, that will also get people to provide
good anecdotes and details. For example, are there questions you ask a
football coach that are equally applicable to asking a software engineer?

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kylegalbraith
This is a cool idea and I dig that you're focusing on content. One thing I
noticed after clicking through a few was some are far better than others. The
flight attendant provides awesome details and pros/cons. Whereas the F1
performance engineer is a single paragraph with nothing more than what the
title means.

~~~
yaas
Ya, that's an example of one that has little content, but which leaves you
wanting more. I hope to get more and better content with time.

------
ethanpil
Nice idea. Good luck on seeing it grow out. Do you have a revenue model long
term?

Right off the bat, I think you need a search box. Probably with autocomplete
to the job titles. I was a bit frustrated trying to click through to the
various titles, and I could not find the search box.

~~~
yaas
I'm not exactly sure on a revenue model yet, but I think job ads is one idea
that could work. However, when I was researching companies that are trying to
match people with the right career, several ended up partnering with Fortune
500 companies to essentially be their marketing channel. I won't be doing
that, as I think it creates a conflict of interest. Having good content is my
top priority.

Adding search is the first feature on my list to build out, sorry for the
frustration. And thanks for the feedback.

~~~
ianai
I think the workers should be your revenue model. But I also don’t see that
generating quite enough revenue without some creative means. Definitely have a
tip jar. Maybe non targeted ads?

Crazy idea time. Build out a suite of features for someone to fully document
employer abuse. Request a portion of legal windfalls as cost for downloading
the data.

Or maybe partner with labor unions? You will have to refrain from the crazy
idea though.

~~~
yaas
This is actually a market where there are many real business models that work.
Advertising is the most dominant one via job ads, and that could be a way to
go.

Alternatively, I think people would pay for accurately telling them what they
should do with their life that would provide them with the most fulfillment;
and more if you're directly able to place them in that job/industry (similar
to how a dating service could find you the person to marry).

------
bcherny
This is a cool idea!

One thing that sticks out to me is once you get past the overview of what a
job entails, you'll probably have a lot of specific questions where Q&A or
mentorship with someone that's done the job might be a better fit than a pull-
only model.

~~~
yaas
So I thought about implementing some type of comment system or Q&A feature,
but decided not to right now because I often find that posts on many websites
don't have much activity on them, the original poster not responding
(especially in a timely manner), as well as having to deal with spam.

Instead, I was thinking about encouraging people to include their emails in
posts for people who are open to being contacted with questions. What do you
think about that?

~~~
ianai
I agree. Comments all too often add nothing and take away a lot. Especially in
the day of state backed trolling.

Maybe offer an intermediary communication method like an anonymous email
address for emails for just that post to go through.

~~~
OmarShehata
The email idea would be great. I've had trouble responding to comments on
articles I've written until I learned I could just subscribe to Disqus
comments. Ideally the author would publish the email response to the article
if appropriate.

And for articles where the author doesn't provide an email address they can be
reached at maybe those don't have comment sections as it does now.

------
folli
A unionized crane operator gets 200k annually? Wow!!

[https://www.kareerday.com/reviews/crane-
operator](https://www.kareerday.com/reviews/crane-operator)

~~~
eppp
Years ago I got the chance to try and operate a friction crane during some
down time. I was just a laborer on college break but we were waiting on
another large machine to do its work so the crane operator told me to come up
and he showed me the basics.

I learned a completely new respect for what he was doing when I gave him
signals. Good operators are amazing, the not so good ones are terrifying.

~~~
o-__-o
I’ll just leave this here -
[https://youtu.be/UuPajTVHItI](https://youtu.be/UuPajTVHItI)

You made me spend an hour on YouTube, thank you sir.

------
melvinram
Similar site: [https://jobshadow.com/complete-list-of-
interviews/](https://jobshadow.com/complete-list-of-interviews/)

~~~
yaas
I've never seen this site. Thanks!

------
whatsmyusername
These responses are just copied off reddit verbatim without validation. I've
seen the flight nurse and a couple of others before.

~~~
ianai
They’ve got to get their starter content somewhere?

~~~
whatsmyusername
I mean, I guess I can copy a bunch of unverified AskReddit thread responses,
make a website, mix in some javascript, and get a bunch of news.ycombinator
karma?

Like if OP had gone back and interviewed some of these people and got some
validation they are who they say they are, sure.

~~~
yaas
Validation is something that will likely happen in the future. But I also
think anonymity is important as well. So figuring out that balance is key.

You're right I should have tried to corroborate the Reddit users' stories.
Sorry about that. However, many stories on the site are corroborated and will
be going forward.

~~~
JshWright
Is citing your sources in the plans "going forward"?

------
youeseh
Great idea! If there was a way to tell apart categories with no content in
them it would save many clicks.

~~~
yaas
Thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping that's only going to be a short-term
problem. Perhaps you'd (or anyone else) be willing to write a review for one
of the categories that doesn't have content? :)

Categories that currently don’t have content:

Administrative, Arts & Design, Consulting, Customer Service & Support, Legal,
Information Technology, Marketing, Media & Communications, Other, Product &
Project Management, Research & Science

If you'd like to help out, you can do so here:
[https://www.kareerday.com/write-review](https://www.kareerday.com/write-
review)

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helloiloveyou
Really nice idea! Congrats!

~~~
yaas
Thanks, I appreciate the kind words.

