
Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month - johnwheeler
https://blog.oldgeekjobs.com/from-google-form-to-1000-in-revenue-in-one-month-3f5cd75b6089
======
b212
Can you do another good deed and require your posters to include salary range
in their job ads?

It's the norm in the UK and we successfully forced this in Poland (though
posters almost NEVER post salaries here). How? The companies need IT staff so
much that almost all IT job boards (at least the most popular ones - like FB
groups or [https://nofluffjobs.com](https://nofluffjobs.com)) started
requiring the salary range.

I think your idea is praiseworthy, but I'd never ever create a website like
this with hidden salaries. Especially in your case - it's so cool people post
jobs on your board, but what if they do so, because they're offering 10, 20,
40% less because it's a place for "old geeks that noone wants"?

I'm really super proud that if a IT ad in Poland has no salary range most of
us just ignore it. And it took us maybe 2 years to get to this place. I think
every other country should follow the lead and end the "competitive salary"
trend. I don't want to spend 3 days on interviews just to discover that the
salary offered is way too low for me. Salary missing from an ad is a big lack
of respect, the sooner people realize that the better.

~~~
ptero
Just my 2c -- I'm in the US and I disagree. For example, many of the jobs
allow for a very broad experience.

For example, in my current job, we are often looking for a smart, energetic
people to work on X. Someone with a BS just out of college? An engineer with
10 years of matching experience? Tech lead wo just built X elsewhere? We will
take either (if we like them) and adjust responsibilities instead.

This approach requires either creating multiple postings (a pain; we do not
need so many people; it confuses the heck out of HR on why a single hire needs
3 postings), posting ridiculously wide salary range or saying "salary
commensurate with experience" (which nowadays says nothing at all). My 2c.

~~~
Quarrelsome
What the hell is wrong with posting a wide salary range and stating you are
looking at all sorts of people then? We're trying to prevent people wasting
their time chatting to people when the remuneration will never be sufficient.

~~~
awesomerobot
Honest question: Is a salary range of $50 - $100k really valuable to you as a
job seeker?

~~~
krisdol
Yeah, because then I know to ignore the listing.

If I came from a place that paid $50k, I'd expect them to be able to give me a
small bump but likely land me in the low-to-mid part of the range and I'd
apply. If I came from 75k I'd expect higher end of the range, and I'd apply.
That could be unreasonable depending on how they place different tiers of
engineer on that range, but if it is then it's better to split out the jobs by
title (Software Eng Jr./Sr/Staff/Principal). If I came from over 100k I'll
pass because I don't think they can afford me regardless of title.

------
gregsadetsky
Congrats! Small note, none of the listings appear when using uBlock Origin [
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-
origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-
origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en) ], a popular ad blocker.

It seems related to your /js/ads-controller.js file (it gets blocked because
of the "/js/ads-" portion in the path).

I would suggest fixing that (and preferably minimizing your JS into one
bundle).

~~~
jbyers
This is a good reason to never prefix generated Javascript with hex hashes, at
least without swapping out vowels. We rolled the dice one and had this happen
on Wikispaces once; it was utterly infuriating to debug.

~~~
blaze33
Nice catch, never thought about it. Is it more problematic with preffixes (vs.
suffixes etc.) or should we generally avoid any random string? Appending a
hash to the script is very convenient to force the download of the new version
of an asset (but maybe we have better solutions now, haven't considered this
issue in a while).

~~~
imron
In your site's code, reference the asset in a path that includes the timestamp
the asset file last changed.

e.g.

/js/1476929634/myscript.js instead of /js/myscript.js

Then use your webserver to rewrite /js/<any number>/myscript.js to
/js/myscript.js

~~~
Scaevolus
You can also do /js/myscript.js?v=1476929634 -- this generally works without
any server-side changes. A CRC32 might work better, since controlling mtimes
can be annoying.

~~~
imron
You can, but that can cause issues with browser caching
([http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/08/23/revving-
filename...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/08/23/revving-filenames-
dont-use-querystring/)) and in any case I prefer the cleaner urls :-)

Plus, once it's configured you never have to worry about it again.

------
hash-set
Here's the deal: Employers will exploit your age no matter how old you are.
There is no "perfect age" for a developer. When you're young, they exploit you
because you are inexperienced (especially at negotiation). When you are "old"
they exploit by trying to play the age card. "Not a cultural fit"\--LOL--fix
your stupid culture and stop exploiting people, you smug fools!

So what is there? A ten year "ripe" age range where you're good enough to code
but don't have a wife and kids? Blatant exploitation of human capital.

As far as "moving up to management" that's a load of crap. There aren't enough
management positions to soak up all the age 35+ developers out there. It's an
extremely narrow funnel. For the winners of that race, the prize is a lifetime
of quiet suffering: You'll be lucky if you retire without major depression,
anxiety, heart problems, or all three. I wonder what the mortality statistics
are for people who work as IT managers?

There is also this role called "architect." Do not be enticed. It is, at best,
a torturous role, and at worst, it's a redundant role that people who were
only so-so at coding get promoted to so they can no longer annoy the rest of
the team. The effectiveness of any given architect has an exponential decay
from the instant they stop coding and start attending meetings all day.

Basically, you either keep coding and stay relevant or you go do something
else completely. The rest is bs. But don't for a second imagine that companies
aren't exploiting you by making you uneasy about your age or whatever else can
be thrown in front of you to try and confuse, diminish, and lowball you.

~~~
reustle
> "Not a cultural fit"\--LOL--fix your stupid culture and stop exploiting
> people, you smug fools!

If you're hiring someone 15+ years older than the rest of your team, there are
going to be some cultural differences.

~~~
LnxPrgr3
So? You're getting together to build things for money, not pounding back beers
on the front porch and ranting about politics.

~~~
Annatar
I think what the poster meant is that the twenty-somethings will just want to
hack things up on the quick in Python or Rust while the old guy says _whoa,
let 's sit down and write a specification first, and think about how we could
architect this thing, and let's make OS packages out of all the components._

~~~
gridspy
That isn't the problem. The problem is that the young guys THINK that the old
guy will do this.

~~~
Annatar
Sorry, I'm not clear on what you mean: they think that the old guy will write
the specification and architect everything, or they think he will hack stuff
together with them?

~~~
emodendroket
I think the implication is they think he'll be a slow-moving dinosaur before
they even talk to him.

~~~
Annatar
I guess that's probably correct. The old guy will appear to be slow because
he'll want to think things through before digging his fingers into the
keyboard, where the young guys are just fury of a tornado, but absolutely no
plan.

And planning is 50% of the work.

However, I'm not being completely fair: my experience working in Silicon
Valley with 20-somethings was extremely positive. At first, they were
suspicious that it was taking me an entire day what they normally do in two
hours, but they did it by manually hacking. What I was doing is writing a
program which, based on data, generated another program to actually perform
the work. I could just tell that they thought I was full of crap, because
programs which program sounds completely esoteric.

What they didn't know was that the subject of programs which program, and data
driven programming, is ancient history for old guys like me: open any European
computer enthusiast magazine (64'er, Dator, anyone?) from the '80's and you're
almost guaranteed to find at least one treatise on the subject in almost every
issue, in one form or another.

But I digress; after that one day, their jaw dropped when I would perform the
same amount of work that would take them two hours to an entire day... in
three minutes. Every time.

Next they wanted to know how I did it. AWK and shell. Say what?!? What is AWK?

And this is where our story really begins: I always purposely kept enough free
space at my desk, and an extra chair, so that anyone from all over the company
could just pick up their laptop, walk over to me and plop themselves down next
to me with whatever problem they were trying to solve. I also gave them
homework. Pretty soon everyone was walking around with Aho, Weinberger, and
Kernighan's little Grey AWK book and used it as a reference. Then it was ANSI
C 2nd edition's turn. Throughout it all, I kept teaching. There were
whiteboard 1:1 classes on data structures. Then on algorithms. I loved it. And
because this is regular work, I thought the exact theory that they needed to
implement in order to solve the problem they were working on.

When it came time for some of the guys to switch jobs, go back to school, or
go home, there were tears on both sides. I had had really devoted, bright
young students, eager to learn, and I loved to teach; enthusiasm can be
contagious given one is surrounded by right people. It was such a wonderful
experience, and I think it was so for both sides.

~~~
emodendroket
I've had some pretty positive experiences working with older colleagues, so
I'm totally in favor. I think the relationship can be better than either side
alone because one tends to fill in the other's gaps.

------
mgkimsal
I wish folks like Bray had championed this cause 20 years ago. It may not have
done much, but... it feels a bit weird to hear old people complain about
discriminatory impact. I can't say he was a contributing factor to the ongoing
'youth culture', but... it wasn't hard to see this coming.

My situation may be somewhat unique, in that I've had grey hair since I was
18. Not a HUGE amount at 18, but... people noticed. By the time I was in my
mid 20s, it was definitely noticeable - more pepper than salt still, but
noticeable. By 30... there's a fair amount of grey showing. Early 30s I've got
people thinking I look good for being in my late 40s (had that more than a
couple times).

But when it came to interviewing and opportunities, I was already feeling the
age stigma in my late 20s. "Not a cultural fit" \- not even in silicon valley
mind you.

Had someone interviewing me - early 30s - said "well your resume only goes
back about 12 years or so, what were you doing before that?" "High school".
"Whoah..." \- later found out he's assumed I was mid 40s.

Could I dye my hair? Yeah, but.. it's a pain, and... other parts of me will
get old too. Not worth it - want to get hired based on ability, etc.

What's sad is to hear about the mid 30s folks wanting to get plastic surgery
to look younger, which just validates and perpetuates the continuous youth
culture. May not be possible to fight it at the Facebooks and Googles of the
world, but it shouldn't be this bad...

~~~
SystemOut
I can't comment on Facebook but at Google I see plenty of people in their mid
30s and beyond. I joined in my early 40s. Yeah, we hire a lot of new grads /
younger folks (I interview a lot of new grads) but I haven't noticed any overt
ageism in the groups I've been in. Plus, the people making the hire decision
don't see the candidate anyways. You should/would most likely get called out
by the hiring groups if you added in color/vague "cultural fit" references.

This is just my experience, though.

~~~
duderific
Well, that's a huge company with many different types of engineers, and in
business a long time (relatively). I would say the ageism is more likely at
small startups that happen to have mostly young (in their 20s) engineers.

~~~
toadi
Maybe they're more easy to exploit providing a low wage dead marches.

------
soared
I thought I was on medium.com.. You need to add a call to action to the end of
your post! Add a short line - "if you've experienced ageism checkout these job
listsing at /link" or "to see what I built visit /link" or something similar.
Lots of lazy people want to click a link at the end of your post to see your
site rather than trying to find a link in your profile or scrolling all the
way to the top. Plus when someone inevitably copies your content, you get a
free link.

I should make a site with marketing tips for devs...

~~~
j_s
[http://devmarketing.xyz/](http://devmarketing.xyz/) by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mijustin](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mijustin)

~~~
soared
thanks for linking this. That makes me want to do it more actually.. Sites
like that guys make me feel uncomfortable.

------
CodeWriter23
@johnwheeler: Their loss for not hiring you.

I thought I was hot shit when I had 5 years under my belt, too, just like
those whipper snappers. Took another 10 to recognize how full of shit that
idea was.

I think there's a certain niche that wants to hire experienced, disciplined
and reliable "old" geeks like you (or actual old guys like me...still grinding
code at 50). Looks like you're going to own it. Well played.

~~~
Chris2048
Can I ask what the difference is? What didn't you know?

~~~
marktangotango
Less is more, focus on results, not code. Two things off the top of my head.

I just hired onto a subsidiary of a big corp, a cadre of 5 of started on the
same day: 39, 41, 42, 45, and 55. Companies are paying top dollar for
experience now, from what I'm seeing.

~~~
johnwheeler
>> Less is more, focus on results, not code. Two things off the top of my
head.

bingo. same here.

------
dbdoug
FWIW, I just turned 70 and I'm still being offered more coding work than I
want. It is VBA, though :)

~~~
cdubzzz
This I like to hear. Hopefully LAMP will be the VBA of my seventies (:

------
jondubois
It sounds like everything worked out perfectly for the author on that fateful
day. What are the odds that a stranger saw the author's initial (unsuccessful)
post in the HN 'new' section and decided to write a whole article about it,
post it to HN (with a link to the original form) and that this new post made
it to the front page... Then it crashed... But thankfully there was an HN
moderator on that day who cared enough to edit the link to send users directly
to this form.

It sounds like the author made the most of it though, so I guess it's well
deserved.

------
mrlambchop
Woah - did I miss the announcement that old is now 35 and above? Given the
working range of professional engineers in the SF field, it sad that its not
easier to invert the problem and build a Young-Fun-and-Full-of-Recent-
Academic-Course-Material-Jobs.com.

~~~
cialowicz
"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects certain
applicants and employees 40 years of age and older from discrimination on the
basis of age in hiring, promotion, discharge, compensation, or terms,
conditions or privileges of employment." [0]

OldGeekJobs.com works since it's the reverse of this... essentially
discriminating against younger candidates. It's not legal to discriminate
against 40+ in the US.

[0]:
[https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc](https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/discrimination/agedisc)

~~~
incompatible
It reverses it by discriminating against the young, fighting ageism with
ageism. I didn't realise age discrimination against those younger that 40 was
legal in the US. There are other countries where a "jobs for the old" site
would most likely be illegal.

~~~
driverdan
Except it's not jobs _just_ for people who are older, it's companies
explicitly saying they _do not_ discriminate based on age. No one is saying
they'll only hire someone 40+, unless they're looking for 20+ years experience
which implies your age.

~~~
bbcbasic
CV's with Lisp projects at age 4, notwithstanding.

------
mathattack
_One of the reasons I want to work on OldGeekJobs is because I’ve experienced
ageism first-hand. I’m only 37 years old, but I was rejected by a startup of
twenty somethings a few months back._

Ahh - that first painful moment of, "Wait a second, I'm too young to be the
victim of age discrimination!"

------
sparky_
I hadn't seen this site before, and I think it's a great idea. Though I'm
young, I am certainly terrified about the trend of age discrimination in the
valley - after all, we all age! I'm glad to folks trying to make a meaningful
difference in the trend. Perhaps through good samaritans such as OP, those
same twenty-somethings that reject so many qualified applicants on account of
age will receive better treatment when they themselves reach 35 or 40.

~~~
samfisher83
In 5 years there will be some new hot nodejs and then those current 20 year
old will find the same thing and they will complain about the same thing.
Oracle and Sap job pay pretty well and they are filled with old people (30+).

------
rsp1984
_spent an hour putting up a Google form and static site on a cheap Digital
Ocean instance._

Now I feel like the Old Geek (I'm 32):

What's the deal with Digital Ocean? If the website is static and receives
content by manual copy-pasting from a Google sheet (as outlined in the
article), why bother with Droplets and Storage and all the other
configuration? Why is good old web hosting (the kind where you just upload
your html/php/js via FTP and it all just works) not good enough for this?
Really curious.

~~~
BillinghamJ
Digital Ocean is just a simple VPS provider - I wouldn't even call it cloud.

The usual cPanel PHP 5.4 shared hosting is consistently unreliable, insecure
and a generally overall bad idea. Who would you actually even trust to run it?

~~~
billmalarky
Eh, DO is cloud. The instances are virtual and can be resized dynamically.

~~~
_joel
Not sure I follow that ontology as that doesn't necessarily make something a
cloud. API's to interact with the ecosystem make it more like a cloud. Whilst
I understand DO have API's, just saying the machine can be dynamically resized
doesn't justify the cloud tag. Cloud doesn't need to be virtual, either.

~~~
billmalarky
To me, I think of cloud as a business term that describes infrastructure that
can be easily manipulated with software (or dashboards). That's what DO
provides albeit with WAY less functionality than AWS (but at a much lower
price point).

------
jnevelson
I'm not even the target market (too young), and this is my favorite job board
already. Very fast to navigate around - speed IS a feature! Also love how
granular the locations are.

------
b_emery
Simultaneously a great story and proof of the value of an 'experienced' coder.
Looking forward to seeing how far this goes!

------
econnors
I really like how the author posted the fake pricetag before spending time
implementing payment processing - easy way to verify people will pay for it,
low cost of experimentation. I've heard of other companies using similar
strategies like a/b testing features that don't exist yet to figure out what
they should build next.

Congrats!

------
RikNieu
I started a new career as a front-end developer at the age of 33(last year),
so I have my age and lack of experience counting against me. I must say, I do
worry about my future prospects a lot.

Hopefully sites like this can throw a bone to us old dogs out there.

~~~
khnd
yikes old dog at 33.

------
Jetroid
Shrewd, this story is just going to bring more visitors. :-)

------
drieddust
Thanks for sharing this. If not finest then quickest example of idea -> MVP ->
Product I have seen so far. I applaud you for the brave decision of putting it
out there.

On the contrary, I always end up planning endlessly. Evaluating the best
framework, best UI, best architecture and actually end of doing nothing.

------
pjlegato
Great, I love that this worked out!

What's the purpose of backfilling jobs from StackOverflow -- is it just to
make the site look less like a ghost town? Aren't those not necessarily old-
geek friendly jobs?

~~~
vanderreeah
I would like to know this too - how do you ensure you only pull old-geek-
appropriate jobs from SO?

------
K-Wall
Awesome story! Just as a heads up with uBlock Origin in Chrome on macOS one is
greeted with a header followed by a white page. Everything loaded with once I
shut it off.

[http://i.imgur.com/Ovbi0ic.png](http://i.imgur.com/Ovbi0ic.png)

~~~
alexdumitru
I noticed the same thing and the problem is the js file contains the word
'ads', which seems to be blacklisted in uBlock.

------
avip
I don't get something - 37 is now considered "old"? Is this some kind of
millenia neolang?

~~~
krapp
Old _begins_ at 20, now, maybe 25. Anything after 35 is old without even the
benefit of plausible deniability.

40 and above, you might as well be dead.

------
hyperknot
Congrats for doing this and writing so honestly about it! But why only $1000?
There are 134 "green" jobs * $50 which would be $6700. Or the Stripe
integration was added that much later on?

~~~
johnwheeler
Correct - When the direct link made the front page of HN and the jobs were
free to post

------
morganvachon
Fantastic job and a great service!

One thing: The linked article states that you started on October 15th, but the
screenshots indicate you started September 15th.

~~~
johnwheeler
Yikes! Honest mistake. Fixed

------
gggggggg
Just a idea which I am sure would be easy given what you currently have,
femalegeekjobs.com

~~~
wavee
I don't think this should exist

~~~
gggggggg
I have to ask why?

I have a team of male devs, and for my last hire really wanted a female for a
different perspective and help balance the team, however only received 1 not
ideal female application.

At the end of the day, oldgeeks mean you are discriminating (filtering out the
young), why should it not work on gender also? Its all just different levels
of discrimination.

~~~
nibnib
> Its all just different levels of discrimination.

Aren't some of those levels enforced legally?

------
nextos
It's a lovely story. I bet there are tons of similar ideas that can succeed
with a quick MVP and a bit of ingenuity.

~~~
ikeboy
I tried to launch my e-commerce MVP with a Show HN but didn't get far.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12708181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12708181)

Going to try resubmitting.

~~~
ambicapter
Yeah, but have you noticed a ton of articles on HN complaining about the
problem that you fix? That's the difference here.

~~~
ikeboy
Now that I think about it, I've seen a bunch of complaints on HN about Amazon
having fake goods for sale (most recently
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12743316),
but it comes up pretty much every time there's an article remotely related to
Amazon). Maybe I should mention something about how we're only sourcing from
legitimate suppliers like retailers or direct from manufacturers, which might
alleviate that issue. It's definitely not the main problem I'm trying to
solve, which is the amount of time good deal-hunting takes. (Price comparison,
coupons, taxes, plus around a dozen other considerations).

~~~
jmickey
I think it would be useful to give examples on how or where you your site
finds an item at a price that I, presumably, was not able to find?

It sounds sketchy. :)

Also not sure if the whole workflow of your clients providing prices for items
and then hoping your site delivers will work. How do I know the price I
provided is realistic at all?

If you already have the capability to find items cheaply, just list those
items on your website and let people purchase them :)

~~~
ikeboy
Thanks for the feedback.

>I think it would be useful to give examples on how or where you your site
finds an item at a price that I, presumably, was not able to find?

Right now I'd be checking other retailers, other price comparison sites, some
tools, plus using a handful of tricks to save off the posted price. It's deal-
finding-as-a-service.

I want the flexibility to be able to source differently later; e.g. if there's
a lot of demand for one brand I might get direct from the manufacturer, or
wholesale, etc. You as the customer should be agnostic as to where I get the
product from, as long as it's the right price.

>Also not sure if the whole workflow of your clients providing prices for
items and then hoping your site delivers will work. How do I know the price I
provided is realistic at all?

I don't know either. I believe I'll be able to fulfill a significant portion
of orders, but I won't know that until a bunch of orders come in.

If you a put in a price within a few percent of retail, there's a good chance
we'll be able to meet it.

Also, I'm not charging tax out of NY, and most states have a dropship sales
tax loophole. That means you could save 3-4% off the Amazon+tax price on most
items even if I don't find a deal.

>If you already have the capability to find items cheaply, just list those
items on your website and let people purchase them :)

Well, I've sold through Amazon and other channels and have had over 100k in
sales, all from being able to find items cheap enough to resell. But to launch
a website to sell you either need a narrow niche (which prevents mass appeal),
or a huge investment to list many products (or big partnerships with sellers
with lots of products). Allowing the customer to name the product lets me not
worry about product pages, and I do think the Name Your Own Price mechanism is
beneficial to all parties (priceline is valued at $73 billion because they
brought a ton of value to users).

Eventually I'm going to want to open up to sellers/retailers, but even without
that I think I can add value.

------
sparrish
If you really want us old geeks to use it, you need a command line interface.

------
exlurker
I like the simplicity of the site! But how about some more contrast on the
body text. For us old geeks, you know.

------
quaffapint
I just joined a new company and I feel a little reverse-ageism from my part.
My team and most of the company employees are at a younger point in their
life. After leaving a company where I could talk to people about kids the same
age as mine and such, I find it all a little unnerving and uncomfortable.
They've been fine and I imagine once I've been there awhile it will be ok, as
I still have people outside of work to talk to, but it will take a little
getting used to.

Also - When I search for 'c#' it seems to filter out the '#'.

~~~
hash-set
You're clearly not a cultural fit, then.

------
Jugurtha
Awesome.. I remember reading your first post and finding the idea neat but
also saying in my head, with amusement: "right, everything is easy when your
name is John Wheeler _".

_ Archibald.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Everything is easy if you expect it to be, and act as if it's going to be.

Lyndsy. :)

------
Lxr
I love how simple and clean your site is, I would use it just because of that.
Nice work!

------
up_and_up
Awesome work! As a 34 year-old I can't believe I am faced with impending
discrimination, but I guess its true. Thanks from my future self!

~~~
bognition
cheers mate, me too. Now get off my lawn

------
mikemikemike
I wonder if the problem is specific to ageism in individual contributor roles.
I've worked at a few startups where maybe 1/3 of the product team was over 40,
but I can only think of two coworkers over 40 who didn't have any direct
reports. Do we find ourselves wondering why an individual hasn't "advanced" to
a management position after 10+ years?

~~~
pcsanwald
I don't ever wonder this when hiring. It's very common to see someone who
tried management for a while and didn't like it or wasn't good at it, and have
concluded that they love coding for a living.

Technical management isn't for everyone, and isn't a natural progression from
being a software engineer. The transition is very difficult for most people.

------
jxramos
Glad to see things taking off via HN community. Keep up the good work.

------
life_is_short
I found a bug.

Job postings aren't sorted by date correctly. For example
[https://oldgeekjobs.com/jobs/California?page=2](https://oldgeekjobs.com/jobs/California?page=2)
shows jobs posted '2 days ago' while the front page shows jobs posted '30 days
ago'.

~~~
stevesearer
It looks like it may be listing 'Old Geek Jobs' posts first and then the
backfilled job posts from StackOverflow second.

~~~
life_is_short
Yeah, probably.

Now I wonder which of the job posts are 'Old Geek Jobs', for old geeks, and
which are not.

------
the_watcher
This is great. Great idea, and an extremely good example of building just an
MVP and going from there.

------
anotherevan
I was going to make a snarky comment regarding if this site is for old geeks,
then the blog should have an RSS feed, but if you go from the article to the
blog's home page the RSS feed is there. :-)

Are you planning to open this up for areas outside the USA? (Australia here.)

------
Lord_Zero
What I really like about this is how the interface is so dead simple. It could
be the Craigslist of job postings with the $50 barrier to entry to filter out
shitty posts. My advice is to not overdo it with features and KISS.

------
drdoom
Congratulations on seeing the opportunity and quickly moving to do something
about it. It is unique enough at first sight that you got early coverage in
the press, which is very helpful.

Quick question: I did not see anything unique to "old geek" in the website,
other than the URL of course. I guess it is an implicit assumption by both job
seekers as well as job posters.

On that note, where would this concept be headed if other job sites added a
simple attribute called age (or something similar but more palatable) where
job posters could specify their preferred age range, and job seekers could
search on it?

------
JoblessWonder
Great site! And thanks for taking my feedback in stride about the "tell people
you heard it on oldgeekjobs.com" not being appropriate for the scraped jobs!
The change (along with prioritizing paid ones) looks great!

------
altitudinous
Sir, a fine website, one that I cannot take advantage of because I am in
Australia. However a minor point - I do have some difficulty seeing the pale
green highlight around the positions, I believe it may be to do with my
red/green colourblindness, common amongst men, it is almost impossible to see
against the bold blue. If you are feeling creative maybe you can change the
colour of the highlight to a different less pale green or another colour.
Thanks again for your site and congrats on your success. Cheers.

~~~
altitudinous
I have since posted this directly under the medium article.

------
shostack
What are your marketing/PR plans now that you've gotten a few major press
hits?

All too often people aren't ready for the buzz when it comes, and see a sharp
spike that then falls off a cliff once the buzz dies down.

------
happy-go-lucky
On one hand, I'm getting older. On the other, my skills are getting better.
The younger people I work with can't keep pace with me. And, my employers
aren't unaware of the fact that it indeed is a zero-sum game, so my age (early
40ies) has never been an issue so far. I believe there're and will be many
employers who look at nothing but what you bring to the table. As a
businessman, you wouldn't be foolish enough to hire only noobs.

------
tudorconstantin
Idea to make even more money (if you get billionaire on it, please make me a
millionaire also :) ): there are services that post jobs to multiple job
boards. Create an API they could hook your site in easily and offer them a 20$
discount, so they can offer your service to their customers for 40$ and can
also win a 10$/job posted to you.

Examples of such sites that come to mind are ziprecruiter.com and
broadbean.com

------
encore2097
Awesome and congrats!

how'd you make those sweet gif screen caps?

------
xupybd
Any chance of opening this up to other countries?

------
xn
All new job listing sites should follow the lead of AngelList and
StackOverflow, and include a salary field.

------
adolfoabegg
Congrats John! this is perfect example of how ideas should be tested and
developed. Loved the story!

------
mountaineer22
Excellent job.

It is great to see the birth of an idea and watch it grow.

Thank you for sharing with us. It is greatly appreciated.

------
JonoBB
Well done and nicely executed!

That early "Hacker News Effect" really got you off to a roll, and you made the
most of it. Have you ever thought what would have happened if that Wordpress
write-up was not created, or didn't get such a good response on HN?

------
alpeb
Love the concept and the site. Minor gripe though, that I also find in most
job boards: searching for Scala also gets me all the entries with the word
"scalable" in them :-(

------
santa_boy
Wow thats cool! How are you actually getting end user views? Is it through the
PR articles or do you have a plan in mind?

What is a "faux price tag"? :-) .. how does it work?

~~~
ge96
Don't quote me: seems from the context he just threw it on there to see if
they would still use it. Which they did. So he actually setup stripe to accept
money. That's what I inferred anyway.

------
madshiva
Great! Congrats! I'm 33 and I start to feel old too when applying to some jobs
and when I see what you did this boost my motivation too! don't stop!

------
ge96
Once you grew/adapted to the growth is that $1000/mo still profit or overall
earnings?

Awesme btw posts like these inspire me, damn what is the next problem to
solve.

------
radious
I think this a great idea but why would anyone pay for posting an ad? There're
many free-to-post sites already.

------
alexdumitru
The jobs don't load with uBlock active.

~~~
chinese_dan
Why should this site owner cater to someone using adblock software? If you
want to see the jobs properly, add the domain to your white list.

~~~
icebraining
_Why should this site owner cater to someone using adblock software?_

Because he's trying to make money and ignoring this problem may lose him
users? It's not like he's actually showing regular web ads, so an ad-blocking
user is as potentially profitable as any other.

------
dannylandau
Don't get it, how do you know that age discrimination is not at play with the
jobs listed on your site?

~~~
icebraining
Self-selection. Why bother paying to post a job on a site called OldGeekJobs
if you won't accept old geeks as applicants?

------
Annatar
What about reverse job postings, where old people could post what they can do,
and where they want to work?

------
sharemywin
I think your definitely on to something. I can't wait to see how far you take
it.

------
betimd
Have you planned to share app source code? Or can you share it?

------
tracker1
If there's an insistance on a fixed-width font for the site, I really wish it
was something more like Consolas/Inconsolata etc... The job descriptions are
nearly unreadable on my display, lighter gray, with a relatively thin font
weight.

~~~
johnwheeler
I'll try it out with different fonts. Never even thought of that!

~~~
tracker1
Thanks, I know it came across fairly snarky, and that wasn't my intent, it's
just I had a lot of trouble actually reading the site. For reference, here's
the fixed width family bootstrap is using...

    
    
        font-family:Menlo,Monaco,Consolas,"Liberation Mono","Courier New",monospace
    

I'd add Inconsolata after Consolas...

------
ebel
made my day.

------
elkhourygeorges
Awesome!

------
fm328
congratz and great work!

