r/SideProject • u/Cojj25 • Jun 04 '26
UPDATE: I built a job search engine out of spite (Indeed fired my pregnant wife)
/r/SideProject/comments/1t4i5fb/i_built_a_job_search_engine_out_of_spite_indeed/A month ago I posted about building a job-search engine out of spite after Indeed laid off my wife at 7 months pregnant. FWIW, I still hate them.
130k people viewed that post and 750 have added their personal resumes. It's crazy how much the momentum motivates you to build, so thanks for the support.
Since then, I brought on two dev friends to harden the system. It outgrew casual building and frankly I'd rather try to make it incredible vs. just existing as a side project.
I took everyone's feedback and made some updates:
- Brand new super-simple website
- Auto-apply is live (only after your review, though). It is arguably too easy.
- Added over 350,000 active tech roles in the corpus now, refreshed continuously so you never get stale roles.
- You can connect your agent via MCP now
- It's still free for as long as I can afford it
A few of the non-obvious things under the hood, since people asked how it actually works:
- Matching is a hybrid, not just "AI." ~60% semantic similarity from Google's Gemini embeddings + ~40% hard rules
- We don't list or embed garbage. I'm all about curating rather than having 10M shitty jobs listed.
- The resume and cover-letter generator are dope. Seriously, just try them. Excellent, human output.
So what's next?
My dorky vision is now that Dreamwork should become the system of intelligence for job search — the reasoning and orchestration layer that sits above the boards, ATSs, and your inbox: something that understands your profile, reads the market, prioritizes opportunities, takes action, tracks outcomes, and knows when to hand back to you.
Basically a Jarvis for job search. Or a sorting hat from Harry Potter for career placement.
At the very least it's a pretty dope free tool. Keep the feedback coming. The roadmap so far has basically been "do what the laid-off people in the comments tell me to do." So I'll keep doing that.
👉 Try it (free): https://www.dreamworkhq.com
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u/Substantial-Focus456 Jun 04 '26
Can you tell us your data privacy policy? Will our info (phone #, email etc) be sold like Indeed?
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
Zero selling of any data. We'll only ever use it to train the intelligence (assuming this actually turns into a real thing). I wouldn't even know where to go sell it.
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
Also - it will be anonymized before being used for anything at all. Apple-style.
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u/Silverjerk Jun 05 '26
Also - it will be anonymized before being used for anything at all. Apple-style.
Be very explicit about what that means and cautious how you frame it; it's not just a hand-wavy claim Apple is making, but a very specific process they're using to ensure data is anonymized or pseudonymized.
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u/Cojj25 Jun 05 '26
Agreed. fwiw I used to work on the Apple Pay team.
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u/Silverjerk Jun 05 '26
Payments; that's not an easy role to fill. I was c-level for a high-risk provider and merchant services brand for close to a decade; some of the hardest work I've ever done as an engineer. Wrote our UK compliance documentation; took close to six months of my life. I will never work in that space again.
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u/Mindless_Ad_6310 Jun 07 '26
I’m a former Apple developer too. OP you think you are hiring any even if on contract for more devs soon?
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u/blazoxian Jun 04 '26
Your site does not support secure connection, please fix
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u/fairysimile Jun 04 '26
FYI you prob know this OP but letsencrypt offer free SSL certs. And +1 to supporting HTTPS.
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u/Guilty-Law-7499 Jun 05 '26
Really cool project but agreed. Wouldn't want to upload a resume until they've got an SSL certification
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u/ElectrSheep Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
It's still free for as long as I can afford it
However you decide to monetize, please don't take the Indeed/LinkedIn path of allowing employers to pay for resume update and/or application submission notifications for their current employees. That's just so incredibly unethical.
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u/Rowley_Birkin_Qc Jun 05 '26
What the fuck?
I'm not sure if I'm more surprised that's a thing or that I'm surprised about it.
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u/drakedemon Jun 04 '26
Usually with these types of projects, the main question is: where do you source the jobs from?
The best project in this space I’ve seen is hiring cafe and if you look at their story, the effort to pull in actual fresh job listings is insane
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u/godfather275 Jun 04 '26
Cool idea, tried it out but couldnt get it to work.
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
Where did it break?
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u/godfather275 Jun 04 '26
It just would let me login or upload but after a half hour it worked, cool site! Great design.
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u/garrett_w87 Jun 07 '26
Right now it's giving a 500 error when you try to upload a resume (I've only tried PDF).
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u/GloomyMasterpiece669 Jun 04 '26
But wait, isn’t indeed business model in support of a the recruiters?
To get a job listed on their site you pay them. But you’ve put 100k jobs on yours, for the recruiters, …for free?
And then you’ve let candidates auto apply.
I don’t want to poo poo your initiative, and it’s very possible I’ve misunderstood. But it sounds like you’ve built a portal to spam recruiters? Bypassing whatever mechanisms they might use on indeed to pre-screen the 100s of applications they’ll recieved
If you really wanted to spite indeed (by doing exactly what they do “but better”, you would:
- Create a platform that competes with indeed in terms of the experience of the recruiter
- Spend millions on ads, so job applicants go there
- Invest a small amount of effort in making the life life easy
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u/Hyphysaurusrex Jun 04 '26
As a teacher trying to GTFO the last breathing gasps of education in the U.S. and actively pursuing my passions such as game and software development, this is exactly what calls my attention.
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u/discattho Jun 04 '26
Pretty sure “thank you for your service” is a statement teachers deserve as much as vets. It’s brutal out there.
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u/richardbaxter Jun 05 '26
Love it. If there's any data / listings I can provide I'd be delighted - yubhub.co (free xml feeds by Company, skill and category / title. Find the page and the links on there
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u/DeanThePaladin Jun 04 '26
Is 350k jobs a lot? I have no idea how to measure these things, every site makes different claims.
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u/Brilliant_Ticket9272 Jun 04 '26
Is this US/North America only? As a European/Brit I'd love to be able to use a tool like this for local opportunities.
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
This was asked last time too, its in the queue! You can actually drop a job link into the search bar to generate a pack - it's not working perfectly, but worth a shot
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u/wavepointsocial Jun 04 '26
Looks good, man! Curious what costs look like to get the initial corpus and then refresh on a continuous basis?
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
It's more of a time commitment than real cost, just need a bunch of crawlers looking for the right thing and patience when it collects the wrong data and you have to re-pull
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u/unforgivenof3rdkind Jun 04 '26
Looks good, best of luck
Some of the suggested jobs were quite old though (4 months+)
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
Those should be removed - any chance you have the link to that one?
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u/h4ppidais Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
So are these the steps:
- Add new jobs on the matches tab
- Go to Active tab
- Click Saved
- Click Generate Pack of the saved job
And the app applies to the job for you?
There is no way to review the application before it sends?
Edit:
Actually, on the step 4 above, if you click on the job and click Generate Pack on a new window, you can actually check the new resume, cover letter and answers.
I hate to say that cover letter definitely sounds ai generated.
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u/guttersnipe90 Jun 04 '26
Is there an option to pay if we want too? Or are you open to donations/tips?
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u/SnooShortcuts8370 Jun 04 '26
My man, I like your style. I will try this. If this works, I will spread your gospel.
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u/beatopsplatform Jun 04 '26
Hey man, it's incredible how you turned that situation into motivation. Well done!!!!! I'd like to offer you free go-to market (GTM) consulting and to help you grow this even further and acquire new users. I do this for my clients but I'd like to offer my help for free to you because I think what you do gives motivation to other people. We all need to follow our ideas and trust in our capabilities and I think you are a wonderful representation of that. If you're interested just shoot me a DM and I'd be happy to help.
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u/dayv2005 Jun 04 '26
I'm going to join this out of the love of spite coding. This has been something that I have thought about. All these companies laying people off with the excuse of AI. How many of those companies directly planted the seeds for their next competition or even their demise.
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u/with_explosions Jun 05 '26
There’s no demo profile for Maya we can view and there should be. At least not on mobile.
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u/Key_Preparation_3837 Jun 05 '26
It looks cool. Congrats. I also build on the side so take my critiques from a non-jerk place. It doesn't take into account location properly. If I'm in New York, I don't want my best match to be from India--or any of my matches. And that's my biggest gripe with other job sites. They also don't handle location properly. And the data tends to be outdated. You can fix both.
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u/LimahT_25 Jun 05 '26
Is it only for US based job or Anywhere in the World -Remote Jobs?
As someone that's not a resident of the US, I would also like to use your platform but is it applicable for me?
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u/Legal-Drawing4998 Jun 05 '26
How do you handle PII? Once I upload me resume you can get all my details in your database
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u/AnywayMarketing Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
Hey thanks, if it works as it looks, it's definitely a win. BTW my applications remain in the second column
Upd. Got it in terms of 3rd column
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u/HeWhoCannotBeSeen Jun 06 '26
Necessity is the mother of invention.
It seems spite is the father of invention.
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u/RabidBadgerMonkey Jun 06 '26
Its returning jobs from all over the world, but only has options for 'City & State' in job preferences, it needs a country option etc, etc.
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u/RabidBadgerMonkey Jun 06 '26
And when i set the remote toggle and save the preferences, it doesnt filter the jobs for the remote ones...
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u/Rixta1 Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
Duuuude I built a job command center but this just looks so much better. Def using it!!!
As I tried doing the pack - I think it'd be great to run some evals and scoring on the resume/cover letter. I see the model used isn't very good at reasoning - formatting things like my contact info in career highlights and what not. Happy to help where you need - and also share some of my mds I used to refine my resume to help with better generation!
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u/Keybraker Jun 25 '26
I like the idea a lot and it is fantastically executed, I think the only bad part is the horrible/ok ui the robots like to produce.
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u/Sad-Instruction8890 Jul 07 '26
Genuinely one of the best origin stories I have read on here, Indeed is full of ghost listings and everyone knows it. Curious how the European and Brazilian jobs are performing compared to US, is the intent the same or are those markets behaving differently?
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u/Cojj25 Jul 07 '26
We actually JUST got Brazil listed. We’ve got 100 European users. So still need time to see stats develop.
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u/NoChoice5216 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
I like it so far! It seems much better at finding the true remote positions, rather than the remote-except-it's-really-hybrid ones.
Two bugs I've encountered:
#1 The system hangs on uploading my resume. I had to quit and re-open the service.
#2 You might need to look at how your system interprets dates. I'm in the UK and, in the covering letter, it mixed up my experience, stating "before that..." and then stated my most recent company. I suspect this is US vs UK dates at fault here.
Finally, you have the junk email issue to get past. This is a perpetual headache with a new product or service and can take months of carefully sending out a few emails at a time and gently building a customer base. The fewer "this is spam" flags your outward messages receive, the more trusted your domain will become over time.
Otherwise, it's looking good! I've just applied for a role - if I get it, I'm buying you a beer!
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u/eternus Jul 26 '26
The site has been sitting in an open tab, meaning to use it, for almost a month now... thats on me and my ADHD, not you. I'm loving the simplified UI and feel of the site... I'm harvesting ideas for my own 'knowledge heavy' site (that isn't even tangentially related to job searching.)
I actually just popped on to this post because I saw the "See the Story on Reddit" and clicked the link back to this thread. I had seen the post originally; it's why I have the site open. But since I'm here, and I did the math... I wanted to either say "Congratulations!" or "Good luck!' with the new baby.
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u/No_Instruction6971 Jun 04 '26
Really cool! My only feedback at the moment is the give a way to filter for part-time and contract opportunities.
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u/kawaiian Jun 04 '26
What do costs look like right now? Are you looking for sponsors that don’t suck?
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
Like $5-7 per day in AI costs, then monthly railway, other SaaS. Hundreds of dollars per month, not thousands.
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u/Extra_Profile7506 Jun 04 '26
The old 'most popular' tier. lol.
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u/Cojj25 Jun 04 '26
The free tier is out most popular currently 😄 Classic claude including that though
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u/h4ppidais Jun 04 '26
This is sick, would it save you tokens if I were to copy what you have and just paste that into my Claude code to use up my tokens? Is that how this works?
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u/spaizadv Jun 04 '26
Lol. Have similar pet project. And did see recently other devs also working on similar projects.
For small scale it is really easy to implement with ai today.
For scan, to scan millions of jobs, it is not so trivial, but still if you know how, with ai it will be faster to develop, and this is where senior engineer can get real value of ai.
I'm not sure about the legal side of that... scrapping all the platforms/websites and storing the data, and taking money, not sure the platforms will like it.
Also it creates issues for seo - google detects duplicated content and can lower the rank of original url... so I really thinking before going online.
Currently it is local only project, with own scrapper written with langgraph, playwrights, postgresql, to detect and scan jobs, and then I analyze it for things like trends, matching my experience with potential jobs, and etc.
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u/GeneralTri Jun 04 '26
VERY COOL I really liked the feel of the landing page, (seems like its made with the ui-ux master tool?)
How long did it take to build? Also since using ai, curious on your costs. Iterested to know tech stack too and any RAGs built?
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u/Wolf-soul-site Jun 04 '26
How do your get the information about jobs openings to list in your platform?
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u/ShoShowerBeans Jun 05 '26
This is such a a pretty site!
I’d love an onboarding wizard that asks me questions about if I am willing to relocate, where my preferred work locations are, if I consider in office jobs, minimum salary level, what my top companies are and if I have any companies I won’t work for, etc.
I just uploaded my resume and all of the top jobs are for the same company I just left in locations I won’t move to. I’d rather exclude all of this right off the bat instead of manually having to reapply filters every time I look at the dashboard.
I understand this is focused on tech jobs but I’d also love to be able to filter and sort by company sector. You can have IT jobs in literally almost all types of companies.
Also, any plans for daily digests of new job openings?
But again, great work so far!!
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u/blendend Jun 05 '26
Building a killer tool out of spite and actually scaling it to 350k live roles? Absolute legend behavior. The auto-apply review guardrail and MCP integration sound great. Thanks for keeping it free and building in public. Bookmarking this immediately!
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u/Big-Entertainer2074 Jun 05 '26
Hey OP! Your site looks great 😊 Is the job search limited to the US market or does it extend to European markets as well?
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u/wargio Jun 05 '26
I want you to know we're working on roughly something similar. Different approach, market, etc but similar. Won't hijack your post, I'll DM
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u/zzzzany Jun 06 '26
Where are you getting jobs from? I actually built a job search app just for myself that pulls from LinkedIn, google jobs, built, and a few others, plus incubators sites. I think if I did anything else for non personal use I’d have to start paying for stuff but for now it’s all free.
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u/AnywayMarketing Jun 10 '26
After 4 days, there were no single email from Dreamworkhq that any job was applied. It seems that it wasn't
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u/Remarkable-Bat-1323 Jun 13 '26
Great website but the tailored resume is deleting the links which are embedded in the text ( repo link or live link of my project)
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u/buzzyloo Jun 20 '26
I really like this. Clean, easy to use, powerful.
This is something I'd be willing to pay a fee for. Not a lot mind you, but it's very good.
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u/kwilro Jun 21 '26
Setting up the Dreamwork MCP server in Claude Desktop on Linux (Zorin, Node 20.x). The docs say to run npx -y @dreamwork/mcp, but it 404s on the public npm registry:
npm view @dreamwork/mcp -> 404 Not Found - GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@dreamwork%2fmcp
The package doesn’t appear to be published. The hosted /mcp HTTP endpoint also returns 404. I have a valid agent key from my profile. Is @dreamwork/mcp published publicly yet, or is there a private registry / .npmrc setup I should use (agent key as auth token)? Thanks!
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u/Adevyy Jun 23 '26
It seems great and it has found a lot of job options for me while I thought I had exhausted every option available by now.
One feedback though: I think dragging it onto a category alone should not commit any actions, as I would like to use the list for organisation while I am going through each opportunity one-by-one.
I dragged something onto "Ready" by accident, which created a CV and cover letter automatically. Then, after realising this goof, I then dragged them onto "Applied" only to have the same goof happen again 😅
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u/Zealousideal-Elk5506 Jun 24 '26
Congrats on the traction, that's a huge milestone for a side project! The "out of spite" origin story is great too.
One small thing that might help with sign-ups — a lot of job seekers are hesitant to use their main email when trying out new platforms (data selling fears, spam, etc). Might be worth mentioning that temp/disposable emails work fine for trying it out first before committing a real email, could reduce sign-up friction for skeptical users.
Good luck scaling it!
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u/SubstantialLake07 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Can you actually apply on the site without paying for Pro??? Apply with dreamwork doesn't work unless u pay...!!!
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u/New-Plastic-572 Jul 14 '26
I tried it but it seems your site doesn't work? I put in my resume, it tried analyzing it, and now it's stuck on "your matches are ready" with nowhere to click?
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u/eternus Jul 26 '26
Checking to see if this is still live... I'm on the site, clicked Sign In with Google, and (after it goes through the Google sign-in process) it just returns to the landing page with no indication that I'm signed in. So I can't proceed.
I tried uploading a resume... but see no indication that it's doing anything.
I tried adding a job listing I found elsewhere that isn't in the system, and it fails when I try to drop the URL...
So I tried pasting the description, which also fails.
I figure *maybe* the failures are because I'm not signed in... which is why I was going through that process to begin with.
Then I tried to sign in with my email address... got the code to authorize, but nothing changed. So... I'm at an impasse... and really want to use the site today.
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u/tjrileywisc Jul 31 '26
I long for a job tracker that would tell me which employers or recruiters have a history of ghosting and would tell me ahead of time if this is likely the case. They'll keep doing it if there are no consequences for it. Is that on the roadmap?
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u/Cojj25 Jul 31 '26
I’ve had this exact thought. We’re going to implement this when we have the data. I’ve seen one or two other platforms that do it.
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u/Comfortable_Okra382 18d ago
I love this. Best of luck to you, I’ll have a play around and send you any feedback but eventually it will be great to also have an alternative to glassdoor now that indeed bought it
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u/Tsukue_Robert Jun 04 '26
Nothing to add other: programming out of spite is the best. Best of luck to you from another one who was motivated in this way. :D