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Comment by startupfounder | Hacker News Reader

1. This has been submitted before, 302 days ago in fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nina4airbnb.com

2. This is actually a case study in how to market yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20150714043548/http://media.wix....

3. From the case study:

These are the numbers:

• 445,000+ Visits to Nina4Airbnb

• Hundreds of thousands of Tweets and millions of impressions

• 30,000+ New visitors to my personal blog

• 14,000+ LinkedIn profile views

• 2,000+ Emails and messages of support from around the world

• Global media coverage

• An interview with Airbnb

• A pipeline of interviews with dozens of other high impact companies

4. This is her blog post about it: http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...

5. Fireside chat: https://youtu.be/tcjaqeXjKuc?t=7m14s

View on HN

The blog post is worth a read.

This part was especially interesting to me:

the person interviewing me was saying he couldn’t contextualize my experience because i “hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford”.

What in hell does that even MEAN? "contextualize an experience?"

It means placing an experience in context, and being able to relate it to other contexts.

For example, if you know someone who works with PHP then contextualizing their experience could follow these steps: understand that PHP is a programming language, look at their code and see it is well architected, decide to hire them even despite inexperience in Ruby because they have the core skills.

Being unable to contextualize experience isn't the same as not having emotional empathy. It is being unable to have an actionable intellectual grasp of a topic.

True, that interviewer should either not be interviewing or perhaps not even be working in this industry then...

My best guess is the interviewer didn't know shit and could only use "facebook," "google," "stanford" as indicators that someone who did know shit considered the interviewee worthwhile.

probably. Most pre-interview programs are heavily biased for those keywords too. So, when her resume when viral, she got a interview through the front end PR campaign called "this resume went viral, do something about it". Then, the interview was exactly the same as the software screening, but with doublespeak.

Not sure, but I think it means they couldn't make an apples-to-apples comparison. To them, they wanted some Coca Cola and instead were presented with a pair of Air Jordans. Sure, they are nice shoes, but they wanted a Coke.

Actually, they got a Pepsi. Tastes the same, affects the body the same, the only thing different was the packaging. And to be honest, if they didn't hire her because of the interviewers bias then she may have dodged a bullet- that kind of thing really raises a red flag for what a companies culture really values. And now I'll be more wary if looking for a job at AirBnb

That's awful if true. Especially as a direct quote. So much for being inclusive.

SV is far from inclusive. Pedigree is every thing out here. Else, you're just in the 'minor' leagues trying to break in.

I have a great idea for a start up named "Burnr" to burn the whole fucking thing to the ground.

Must have 3 years experience as a molotov professional.

Ah! Thanks I knew I had seen this tactic before, but I thought this is a new attempt.

Regardless it's still a well done effort.

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