Almost... I've been sitting on a draft for months. Will publish it on my site when ready.
Some quick ones:
- Make value proposition clear. Just because they reached the signup screen doesn't mean they're already convinced to sign up.
- Show social proof on signup screen, such as customer logos or approximate number of users. Same reason as above.
- Offer SSO options. Google is especially popular
- Have an Obvious Next Step(tm)(R)(patent pending). Make it clear what the visitor is expected to do next by making that thing visually stand out, and muting (or removing) everything else. Notice in OP's signup screen that the background app preview is tinted, and the Twitter login button is the brightest thing, dead-center of the page.
- Have a product people want. This is a hard one. :)
> - Make value proposition clear. Just because they reached the signup screen doesn't mean they're already convinced to sign up.
I've sat at the signup/register/purchase screen so many times and muttered to my computer, "but I don't know what this thing does, why would I sign up?"
Playing coy was maybe cute in high school. Grownups communicate with each other, and nobody wants to do your job for you and pay you for the privilege (in cash, credit, or PII).
I often find myself in the same situation. A few years ago I started just putting in "whywouldisignupidontevenknowwhatimlookingat@notcomingback.com" or somesuch tailored comment. My hope is that it some human in the chain gets the message and can bring it to the exec that demanded agressive sign up tactics.
I dunno, joe rogan is more entertaining (In an I'll laugh with him sense) than lex friedman, and far more personable, if less knowledgeable than lex. Joe had a relatively good turn in newsradio, too.
Joe has a real talent for getting people to talk. I think he holds the conversation at an accessible level, he makes sure the audience is bought up to speed. If you watch what he is doing he is actually really good at his job.
I find it strange that they'd tarnish their reputation to try and compete with LinkedIn, but they seem to be a LinkedIn data partner? (not sure exactly what that entails).
Open your console on their site and paste this in:
See the first comment in which I detail my experience with Google ATAP which mirrors the OP's story. She demoed her invention in an interview with them & they patented it without her knowledge/consent.
I've spoken with some of these people and hear there are many more examples yet those people put it behind them or don't want to come out against the biggest tech company. That's too bad as for too long in history those in power and position have stolen from the rightful creators.
I think the opposite is true; when given no concrete feedback, one begins to hypothesize why they were rejected, and their mind will often point them to discrimination as the reason.
If one is given clear, concrete feedback ("We rejected you because you didn't come up with a simpler algorithm, and you lack experience with framework x"), there is little room for them to think they were discriminated against in any way but their skills/experience.
The issue is documentation, and the legal risks it can carry. If you get ghosted and believe it's discrimination, that is a very different beast than if you can twist the words of the feedback you've received to imply it may have been discrimination.
From the point of view of a company that employ many people who do hiring, someone is guaranteed to write something stupid. When people write code, they do bugs. When they write feedback, they do stupid.
Or even more likely, someone will inadvertly show his bias that could have stayed under cover. People are not that great in hiding their biases over many interactions.
We're dancing around a reason that the article misses: a lot of hiring decisions are discriminatory.
If they were confident about having processes with no discrimination, it would likely be advantageous to the company to show their cards and give the feedback.
Overt cleverness is jarring and irritating. I think that’s the sort of creativity they’re talking about.
When I was starting as a developer I got a lot of pushback on some of the creative things I did and ended up redirecting a lot of that energy to reliability concerns, including human factors issues (human errors cause bugs). At this point I take - and use - “clever” as an epithet.
The training is a mix of: obsession, up to and beyond exhaustion; grit, driven by passion; a relatively 'fast' metabolism, fueled by food and naps. Nothing magic, bootcamp-style.
Basically, working your day thing (studies, work, obligations) then spending all your free time nerding on something. It progressively morphed from goofing around to learning with a professional mindset, building stuff.
It's important to pace yourself; it's a marathon on a daily basis. However in the long run, over the weeks, it's more like an agile sprint: you work a lot for some weeks or a few months at most, then relax, rinse and repeat.
____
The happiness switch
I've found there are fundamental functions in human beings that pretty much describe us entirely. It's a model, deduced from reality, which in turn helps me 'mold' my reality (i.e. aspects of my personality, how I choose to experience things).
This set of skills can be trained; it seems to be 'working' with anyone, but there are 'prerequisites'; exactly which is unclear (for now).
One of the by-products of this is a happiness switch: your emotions inevitably vary, but you are able to maintain your desired "global state" nonetheless. So you do feel sad sometimes, or angry etc.; but at the same time, it's only one aspect of you, one function, namely emotions are the "language of the body", it's just information. They shouldn't drive you, but inform your decisions, your choices. That's one thing you can train. This is where Shakespeare's famous quote takes its full meaning imho: “nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Emotions are energy though: all our functions produce some 'effect', which may be usable, alone or in combination with others — for instance, cognitively we know that emotions act as a catalyst for memory, to break out of 'RAM' into long-term knowledge. This is a bridge (a powerful one, it's called 'passion' in some cases, 'impression' in other contexts...) between emotions and thinking.
The main sources are Stoicism and/or comparable schools of thought (Zen notably, and a cross-slice of many religions, myths), some critically validated modern 'self-development', cognitive studies (psychology, neurology, etc., e.g. the "hexaco" model), and books/authors/ideas in-between that demonstrate the empirical/statistical 'truth' of some principles (those that endure the test of time, with success). Also a bunch of business/consulting literature that strongly validates ideas, if only empirically — plus autobiographies etc. The spirit of the general enterprise is to validate sources by who speaks — e.g. only take advice from those who succeeded at what you seek, preferably the greatest, including people you don't like — and validate ideas themselves by experience, by real-world application.
So while the endeavor might seem quite intellectual, it's only the tip of the iceberg, the small gate of knowledge — immediately after lies practice, lifelong mantras. That's actual philosophy, what the word meant until the turn of the 20th century: practical advice and repipes for a good living.
