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by nrser 3286 days ago
yeah... are their any success stories with regards to these kind of post? all the ways i play it out in my head don't seems great...

1. someone at exec/board/mgmt-level somewhat detached from product development process sees it and comes in with the "see! this is what it should look like, this looks way better, this guy gets it and he doesn't even work here! you should hire him / do this." which doesn't tend to be received too well from the people doing the actual work, who for right or wrong have all sorts of reasons it doesn't look like that.

if they are forced to bring him in or do it they probably aren't going to like it / him.

2. someone on the team sees it and goes "well, this dude doesn't understand the massive complexities and risks involved in something like this but hey that one piece is not that bad of an idea, let me re-work some stuff", but it doesn't seem like it would help them much to bring him on-board... "uninvited" has a negative connotation for a reason.

of course if could play out very differently, but responses along those lines (if any at all) seem most likely from my experience. it seems like a good approach to rally community support for something, but the community is not the people building the product by definition.

4 comments

This is merely a way for him to demonstrate his design process on his own terms using a complex real-world project.

Sure, he might love to work at Ableton, but as a portfolio artifact this project may very well attract attention at other places which are interested in that kind of skill-set. I think that's really the intent rather than a single-minded, unsolicited appeal to just one employer.

Its not unprecedented. Googly-as-heck went much further [https://medium.com/@googleyasheck], spent 8-months publicly preparing for a google interview, blogged about it, then didn't get hired by Google. He instead got hired by Amazon. Not bad at all and not a waste of time-- though I bet it was hard for him to get rejected by his dream employer.

Phillip Sackl landed a design-job at Mozilla by doing something similar. It wasn't as complex as a full redesign, though.

The application: http://readyformozilla.com/

The design-work: http://readyformozilla.com/panorama/

Panorama was one of the most promising features Firefox had, but they killed it. There was a guy who maintained a plugin version and even did some cool improvements to it [1], but he abandoned it because of Mozilla killing their older, but more featureful APIs - even those that are e10s compatible. I still use this thing sometimes and I'm quite sad to see it go.

[1]: http://fasezero.com/addons/

Such a sad story, shared by many who supported Mozilla for so long. RIP Firefox Addons.
"This is my unsolicited redesign of the Ableton Live. I did this to showcase my design skills to peers working at Ableton, where I would love to work as a designer."