A typical conversation with a friend who's thinking of a career move:

Them: Who should I work for?

Me: 🤷‍♂️ What do you care about?

Them: 🤷‍♂️ Should I be caring about something?

Me: Growth, technical founders, mission, ...

But a new idea has emerged:

Do you care if your place of work is somewhere where political discussions & activism is allowed or banned?

Basecamp announced they didn't want to have political discussions in their company, and 30% of their workforce left in a single day. Founders run their companies as they see fit, and employees work with preference-aligned employers is the obvious change here.

So let's say you don't want to work for an employer based on your preference on the above question. If you have that preference, where would you specify it and how do you filter companies for this preference?

Do you see if the founder has clear positions on all these items? Practically, I don't read the mainstream news & don't have positions (mostly out of ignorance) and think many founders are in the same boat. Besides, who cares about my positions on the news cycle, would be a fool.

We don't know if this will become a trend in the coming years, but preferences will become more important. As well, privacy will become even more important.

Job boards have always been built employer-first: (1) search out open jobs, (2) apply & (3) we'll get back to you, assuming that you have a burning desire to join our company.

In this job market, the tables are turning, and it provides a glimpse of the future.

If there was a job board to end all job boards, it would need to be employee-first,  almost a place where talent is pitched by employers to come join them.

I decided to build a code/no-code hybrid job portal over a weekend: something that lets my friends filter companies & opportunities based on what they care about. Not just political activism, but things like open source, remote work.

So I was left with 5 questions:

  1. What would the job board look like?
  2. Do I build it with code or no-code?
  3. If hybrid, what to build with code & what not?
  4. Should I use Vue or React?
  5. What constraints do I need to finish it over a weekend?

Question 1: What if we could make a job board that would end all job boards?

In a weekend 😂

So here's what I looked at for inspiration:

keyvalues.io - 😎 choose your values to find your engineering jobs
nomadlist - 🏝 filter places to live remotely based on preferences

Both sites follow the same design pattern that I like.

What I think is needed is more insights into the company, day to day work, compensation, management and company norms around engineering, product, decision making & risk/reward mechanisms.

So to build this over a weekend, I'd need:

• no code: Airtable for database + forms  → building a database still sucks.

• code: Vue.js frontend, Airtable API  → thought about react for stayed with Vue

• stack: Github + Firebase + Vercel (host & deploy) → easy & simple infra  

Now on to the Design,

UX like Nomadlist - with a bit less colour and maybe even more emojis

sketch - no idea whats going on here

in the beginning, I thought about building the project in React.js, but decided to fall back on Vue.js since thats easy & familiar.

after a couple of iterations, we had something like this in Figma. Still no idea if the filter box can be done easily within Vuetify.

Figma design - lets see how well this maps to standard components

It can be done easily with React. What would be amazing is a library that lets me use react components in Vue without dependency hell. 💡⭐️

so it turns out its a custom component that would need to be built in Vue. keeping in line with the constraints, I'd say thats a quick skip and we're back to keyvalues like UX.

Click filters to filter companies :)

Set up the DB  - 5 mins with Airtable 🏆

Get API Access - 5 mins (try to use a readonly API key by following this workaround) of creating a new account with read-only and then using that account's API key.

Generate an API key

and then we got to building the site. A single page webapp with airtable as the backend was built out. The styling took longer than stitching the components together.

looked something like this.

For a weekend project it turned out ok, but I didn't want to work on it anymore when it was done. So the job board story ends here, at least for now.

p.s. a friend worked with me on this project