I mean, the candidate can design and build innovative custom hardware, but do they remember an obscure impractical algorithm from a second semester CS course? No? Obviously not a fit for this company.

I had an ad on Facebook marketplace for a synthesizer. The guy who bought it gave me his business card - cloud architect for a competitor. He didn't give it to me because we were in similar field - we had a pleasant conversation over shareEd hobby and he gave it to me then, after which I realized we were in same field, so clearly he gave them around a lot.

If I consider changing jobs, or if I need those very particular services he's getting a call :-).

Definitely still a market for regular cheaper business cards for stuff like this. I regularly keep cards of people like this were I might need their service in the future, but they don’t need to be fancy at all and I don’t think it really adds much value when they are. The market for “good service” in trade type labor that I’d always hire a guy I have even a weak social connection with over some random person I found online. I feel like there’s a higher chance of them not price gouging and caring about the workmanship.

But, I don’t think he’d be handing out $20 BOM cards that freely. I was more validating that there is still probably a market of people where $20 cards might make sense. As in the example I posed, a business card isn’t providing any additional information. By the time I meet these people in my office, we’ve already exchanged emails and had some conversations on the phone and are acquainted. That’s what led to the in-person meeting. I know their names and have them in my contacts.

But, just as it felt like a social faux pas to receive a business card at a housewarming party, I think it also feels like a faux pas to meet someone in a business environment (where you are the selling party) and not give out a card during the initial first handshake interaction. This is a pretty low volume and high value moment for that person so a $20 card is no big deal and could easily make sense.

I used to subtly watermark mine with nerdy silly diagrams, in the hopes that someone noticed the hints of color and gave them a second look. I even ran a plain vs watermark experiment, and the watermark had almost double the response.

Another trick was adding a "Valid until <YEAR> in the cover". It seems counterintuitive that a CV expires, but it made a few companies approach me for an updated CV.

I believe Sears famously used that same move (probably close to 100 years ago) to cause their catalogs to be stacked right on top of the Montgomery Ward one!

This is why my first prototype had a white border around it. The LEDs were red back then, so I don't know exactly what I was thinking, but I was aware of the problem.

https://github.com/Nicholas-L-Johnson/flip-card/blob/main/me...

>$10 per business card is extremely high, though.

> people comment with stuff anyone could google all the time

But presumably with some knowledge or review of it. Commenting with a link to the first Google result comes across about as well as quoting an LLM output.

>But that's my 2 cents.

Or is it really ChatGPTs 2 cents? Copy-pasting LLM responses is as useful as posting a "let me google that for you" link. It's a lazy response at a minimum.

Hold on, let me google a proper response to this.

ChatGPT actually puts your comment’s value at about 3 cents - darn inflation!