I had no idea what I was doing - MySEOLoveLetter
I had been working at Macys.com as an SEO Specialist for a little over a year and I spent that morning doing the usual things that you do when you work at a large corporation such as Macy’s. I took three trips to the coffee machine on the other side of the building, ran a couple Python scripts that did 80% of my job, and checked Facebook/Reddit/Hacker News/Gmail/Outlook/Skype/AIM. I’m not sure if they’ve migrated to Slack yet, but when I left, AIM was still the main method to communicate around the office.
At the beginning of every month, Hacker News has a “Who’s Hiring?” thread which I usually skipped. It’s a very tech-centric community, and most positions that were posted had nothing to do with SEO. You could imagine my surprise when I opened up the thread for the month of June and found out that someone by the username of “trg2” had posted that Airbnb was looking for an SEO specialist. I immediately created an account(and promptly forgot the password. The user profile still says that I work at Macy’s doing SEO) to reply to them. After I sent “trg2” a couple of emails, where I tried way too hard to impress them, we finally setup some time to talk to each other on the phone.
Thomas “trg2” Griffith Jr. is the most influential person that I’ve met at Airbnb, and from the first minute of talking to him on the phone I knew that the only thing I wanted in the world was to work with him and ask him why his username was “trg2” and not just “trg”. After half an hour of arguing about technical SEO, asking whether or not he ever had frosted tips and telling him why I wasn’t a complete idiot and he should hire me, he (probably) went against his better judgement and brought me in for an interview.
I don’t really remember much of what happened after that. It was a complete whirlwind of interviews, people, and furry carpeted walls of the interview rooms and before I knew it, I had an offer letter in my hands. Signing that offer letter took less than 10 seconds and I had no idea the crazy projects I would do, the amazing people I was going to meet and the friends that I would make.
You can actually still visit the Hacker News post that got this job here.