Ask HN: Do You Use Teamblind.com?
It seems super toxic to me and I would like to understand how used is within the HN community I don’t use Teamblind as often as I used to, but it played a huge role in my career growth. Coming from a developing country, it helped me level the playing field. Through the platform, I discovered FAANG(current employer for 6yrs now), Leetcode, structured ways to prepare for interviews, and even the fact that sign-on bonuses exist, something I had no idea about before. Teamblind has been so impactful for me that I’m more than happy to pay for it. While there’s certainly noise on the platform, I’ve learned to focus on the insightful conversations and resources that matter. If you are in the US it might not be so useful, but for us outside, it is gold. I've been on HN for way longer than Blind, but Blind had had the most impact in my career & I'm grateful for that. That’s awesome! I’m curious: what specific strategies or habits have you developed to sift through all the chatter and zero‑in on the conversations, resources, or people that actually push your growth forward? For example, do you rely on certain tags, follow particular communities, set daily reading windows, or use any filters/keywords? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you so others (like me) can adopt a similar approach. I first stumbled on Blind while job hunting, and since then I’ve used it as a resource, not a social media platform like most people do. I follow specific tags like software engineering and career, and I don’t keep notifications on (in fact, the only app with notifications on my phone is WhatsApp). For interviews, I search company-specific tags to find discussions and tips, ChatGPT makes it even easier now to extract insights from those threads. I also use it for compensation research. Occasionally, I’ll check company gossip, and I have to say, Blind has correctly predicted layoffs at my employer twice. Beneath all the noise, some people really do share valuable inside information. That’s why I treat Blind as a data-gathering tool, not a hangout. I mainly open it for interviews, negotiations, compensation benchmarks, or to get the general sentiment around a company. Honestly, I wish they had an API like Reddit’s, it would make pulling insights so much easier. What I'm not hearing in your tale is anything unique to Blind. All of that info exists elsewhere as well. Why go to the trouble of sifting through the noise to find that information? Is it just that you found it there first, or is there something compelling about Blind as a data source? I'd really love to know other sources that can give you real information from actual people about tech careers & compensation & all minutiae of interviews & weird company tips. Do share There are people who just make up stories and post them to the internet, especially on reddit, Threads. I feel like Blind is especially prone to this. It has the half-truth (verified working at so and so), it has anonymity, and people just fill in the blank space with whatever they like. Yes, not using it especially during a job search is foolish. The information asymmetry is against you, fight the machine! Is that like Substack? I never heard of it. it's more like a forum/reddit where you can access private forum for your own company by verifying your corp. mail address... Example: you can access google private forum by subscribing to blind using your @google.com email Nope. Logged on once, saw that the conversations were non-productive, and never logged back in again. Same. I signed up, found the conversations to be unproductive and unhealthy and deleted my account.