Roast my startup: did I solve a real job-search decision problem or overcomplicate it?

I've spent years as an engineering manager reviewing candidates, and now that I'm on the other side of the table doing my own job search, I keep running into the same problem:

I can find plenty of jobs. The harder question is which ones are actually worth my time applying to?

Job titles aren't consistent across companies. A Director role at one company can have very different expectations from a Director role somewhere else. Reading a JD and checking whether I have most of the listed skills doesn't really answer the question I care about:

Given my experience and career level, how competitive am I for this specific job?

So I built a tool around that decision.

It evaluates the role against your background and puts the opportunity into:

Apply Now — strong fit
Apply with Strategy — viable, but there are meaningful gaps
Not Yet — probably better to spend your time elsewhere

It then explains the assessment across areas like experience, skills, must-have requirements, and level alignment, so you can see what is driving the recommendation rather than just getting a score.

I've been using it during my own job search, which creates an obvious bias: I'm the builder and one of the users. I can easily convince myself this is more useful than it actually is.

That's why I'm posting here.

mycareerlevel.com

Solo founder. No VC. Built it myself.

Roast the product, the positioning, or the underlying idea. If you think the problem isn't real, the recommendation isn't useful, or there's a much simpler way to solve it, tell me. That's exactly the feedback I'm looking for.

Posted Sep 14, 2026, 8:03 PM UTC

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