Inspiration
We are computer science students and we, like many others, had to search for internships/co ops. It was a stressful time for us and our friends working out what jobs are good to apply to, and which offers are good to accept. It's difficult to know whether a San Fransisco, California job with high pay and very high living expenses is a better opportunity than a Hamilton, Ontario job with lower pay and much lower living costs. This results in students needing to spend many hours with Google and Excel trying to map out if jobs are good fits for them.
What it does
It does all the hard work of deciding which job is the best! A student merely needs to enter the addresses of the companies they wish to compare, along with an hourly wage for each.
Our system will fetch all the relevant information (ie rent costs, transportation costs, food costs etc), and will present them to the user, along with additional fields like "12 Month Income Projection". All normalized to the local currency.
From here the user will have an interactive widget to drag sliders for the different variables to filter out which jobs are better. (For example, the user can slide it to show the max they want to pay for rent, and drag a slider to the amount they want to make over the term).
How I built it
The website is built using JQuery, Jade and HTML/CSS. The backend is a NodeJS server that uses Import.IO to scrape the web for the information used to compare jobs, and Mongolabs to store data. IBM Watson Analytics is used to provide detailed analysis at the end, and to help the user find a solution.
Challenges I ran into
There weren't many examples of how to use the Watson Tradeoff Analytics tool outside of the official documentation. It took some time figuring out how to incorporate it with our project. Another problem was dealing with asynchronous Javascript issues with the load times to fetch data.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We managed to learn multiple technologies we had no experience with (Watson, Jade, web scraping), and we still finished on time with our team of two.
What's next for Job Choice
We want to add optional additional fields to the initial prompt, like "City crime rate", and "Distance willing to travel to work". We just focused on financial reasons to go to a location since we had limited time this hackathon, but there are many more aspects that would be great to compare.
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