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HN Who is hiring job posts over time
With the economic downturn over the last year and the recent rounds of layoff news, I was curious to see if the "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" job posts reflected that.
Here's the code used to scrape HN API, kinda hacky: https://github.com/bfung/HNAnalytics
Here's the data and the a chart on [google sheets](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18kLWHkrEedpl1eXzAht_se8GEKd0G9zrlz7SutP2uLQ/edit#gid=846434603)
A few things stick out: Dec and Jan are low job post months, as it makes sense due to holidays and fiscal cycles, and it shows in the # of posts.
Hope this helps would be job hunters in preparing for the next few months.
- mtmail 4y agoRelated from October 2022 "Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083279
- themanmaran 4y agoThe []() syntax doesn't work on posts. Clickable google sheets link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18kLWHkrEedpl1eXzAht_se8GEKd0G9zrlz7SutP2uLQ/edit#gid=846434603 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18kLWHkrEedpl1eXzAht_...
- faitswulff 4y agoInteresting that the url within the parentheses isn't recognized. EDIT - actually, none of the urls are recognized as links.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoIf they were, it would be trivial to get HN readers to click malicious links.
- faitswulff 4y agoIf HN readers can't be trained not to click malicious links, then no one can xD
- the_arun 4y agoI think it is not just readers of HN. Do search engines read urls (unlinked ones) to build their index? Cause then it will be very easy for spammers to post links & take advantage of HN's high rating.
- Archipelagia 4y agoI might be wrong here, but I think most search engines ignore links from websites with open submissions (like HN or reddit) exactly for that reason.
- dan-robertson 4y agoI think it’s just that urls in the text part of a submission don’t get converted to links.
- ndr 4y agoNice addition of the S&P500 as market reference. Is there any easy way to correct for HN traffic? For example, is that what's driving the change in volume in 2016?
- bfung 4y ago> Is there any easy way to correct for HN traffic? Hmmm I have a couple ideas, but nothing simple w/o some longer scraping or being able to find HN traffic data elsewhere.
- anon50118810 4y agoAlso for anyone looking to draw conclusions here, remember that the HN crowd including the hiring thread is a very small slice of the tech industry generally, and for most people you only need to find one job for your job search to be over.
- randomdata 4y ago> for most people you only need to find one job for your job search to be over. This is interesting as it relates to price rather than ability to find a job. Things would have to change dramatically to reach a point where someone won't pay you minimum wage to do tech work, but as difficulty in fulfilling positions declines the need to pay extraordinary and increasing salaries will decline in kind. This does give a good idea about what's ahead for compensation adjustments. The double digit percentage pay bumps people were taking advantage of over the last couple of years is no doubt over (for now).
- anon50118810 4y agoI'm someone who is indeed struggling to find a job, and in my case salary has little to do with it since so far I've been filtered before that's been an issue. There's actually no way to compete on price even if I wanted to, since employers are looking for luxury goods and offering to work for very cheap would send the wrong signal. I understand the market is very different if you have a great resume and everything is lined up. So I think a lower volume in the hiring thread has a stronger impact on people who are struggling, since they necessarily need to apply to a high number of places, compared to the impact on people who are going to get multiple competitive offers regardless.
- randomdata 4y ago> since employers are looking for luxury goods and offering to work for very cheap would send the wrong signal. I'm not sure that's the right perspective. It's true that offering Google a chance to hire you for minimum wage isn't going to win you a seat. But most potential employers aren't putting themselves in front of the market because they believe nobody out there will work for less than a healthy six figures (or whatever). I walk down the street of a small town and see endless businesses who understand where they could improve their business with tech, but also know they'd be bankrupted in a matter of days if they had to pay FAANG-level salaries. They don't even bother trying to hire tech talent. At $7.25 per hour, however, now you've got their interest.
- eatonphil 4y agoThis is awesome! I saw the number going down the last few months but good to see it in context with last year. And also the S&P 500.
- going_ham 4y agoIt seems 2020-2022 was boom for tech industry. Now the rate is going backing to pre-2020 which shows it was already in decline! That is quite surprising.
- arcturus17 4y agoYea, 2018-2020 sees a downward trend in hiring, while the S&P500 was still growing steadily. Thing is though, HN Hiring posts seem very FAANG and (even more) startup-biased? The S&P500 is more than that.
- soneca 4y agoI would say that FAANG is not part of HN Who is hiring at all. It seems to be almost 100% small and medium tech startups.
- arcturus17 4y agoI’ve occasionally seen a “my team at AirBnB is hiring” post but you’re probably right.
- cortesoft 4y agoAirBnB is not a FAANG. It is medium size.
- arcturus17 4y agoOkie-doke!
- ska 4y agoThis makes sense though, no? If you want to (consider) work at FAANG, it's not hard to know how to apply, and whether or not the front door is the best approach. On the other hand, lot's of companies that show up in places like HN you might not even know exist.
- 4y ago
- debacle 4y agoHiring has slowed to a crawl, and the hardest hit appear to be junior/low level devs not going into the startup space. I'm seeing a lot of hiring for senior positions. I'm getting more, not fewer emails for interviews as a CTO. Meanwhile, it seems like unless a new grad is headed to a FAANG they are not finding jobs the way they were a year ago. This is how things started in 2007, anecdotally. The ladder got pulled up earlier in the year, and then right around the holiday season everything fell apart. It took a good 2-3 years for everything to recover, but in that time salaries were down roughly 20-30%.
- AlwaysRock 4y agoA year ago when the pandemic was still front of mind for everyone? Finding a job when you are early career is almost always tough. Sure some times are tougher than others but its almost always very difficult unless you have a top degree or spent a lot of time doing interview prep.
- stu2b50 4y agoYep, the pandemic caused tech companies to hire like crazy because so much money shifted from physical goods to services to digital. Many companies saw it as a once in a lifetime opportunity to catch a long living change at the start. Didn’t really work out, hence many of the layoffs, but the job market a year ago was so hot it could melt steel.
- jcims 4y agoThis must vary by industry. I just left one big bank to go work for another one. Both are hiring like mad, both junior and senior roles. Both actually have pretty amazing internship programs and at least one has an incredible program for veterans.
- jcims 4y agoJust to add on to this, pretty huge demand for SWE/SRE roles in platform development (internal and public cloud) and security (compliance, automation, etc)
- bodge5000 4y agoAs someone else pointed out, this is just HN, a small part of the bigger picture. Its interesting, but in all honesty, I'll believe it when I see it. For the past ~3 years I've heard talk that last year X was a boom but this year Y is declining, then the year after I hear that Y was a boom but this year is a decline, and on the cycle goes.
- bfung 4y ago> just HN, a small part of the bigger picture. Yep, totally, very small picture. Personal experience, though, I was laid off in August 2022, first time in my 18+ year career. I found something else, but recently, many friends and ex-coworkers also were laid off from twitter, meta, and other techs. Hence I finally had time on my hands to code this up while waiting on interviews and such.
- d23 4y agoLooks like it needs to be normalized by overall site activity or something.
- ryandrake 4y agoI think it's hard to gauge who's actually hiring by reading HN "Who's Hiring?" posts or looking at job boards. I think a lot of companies maintain longstanding job posts without actually finding/hiring people. Or they keep interviewing but never commit. Like a fisherman with bait always in the water, never reeling anyone in. The posts should really be renamed to "Ask HN: Who's Interviewing?" or "Ask HN: Who's Fishing?"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ska 4y ago> I think a lot of companies maintain longstanding job posts ... Or, they are growing at a rate that supports a hire every month or three?
- anon50118810 4y agoIf you apply to a post with a qualified resume and don't get a response or get rejected for trivial reasons, and then see the job posted again the following month, that argues against the steady growth theory.
- erdos4d 4y agoYeah, I have as good a CV as anyone and I've never gotten anything off any of these hiring threads. I suspect many posts are just straight up resume collection schemes. If I post on the freelancers thread, I tend to average one reply and it is always some recruiter spamming a job they have, never actual freelance work.
- bfung 4y agoI found my most successful job via HN back in 2011 before the whoishiring bot was made, when these posts were less formal and structured. (Not sure how good or bad this is internationally, but great in the USA). The companies I’ve been with, I’ve always pushed recruiting to post here as a high quality source for leads.
- erehweb 4y agoNumber of comments on this and previous posts that this data is not useful for one reason or another (HN is a small slice, maybe employers are changing behavior, want to normalize by site activity, ...). It's good to note possible problems with data, but we should be sure not to throw the baby out with the bathwater - this is a useful data set giving evidence that hiring is slowing in late 2022.
- sandeep22 4y ago[dead]
- francisofascii 4y agoVery nice. It would be cool to make a "seasonally adjusted" value to even out the drops before the start of each calendar year.
- swyx 4y agointeresting slowdown from 2018-2020. how come we didnt feel it back then?
- mkl95 4y agoI have been getting a low volume of offers in the last few months. But the compensation I'm being offered is very high. Hiring freezes may be masking a specialist > generalist trend.
- deeptote 4y agoYeah, same. If you're a specialist and happen to have an in-demand skillset (backend, dist sys, GoLang), the volume of offers has been lower but still getting plenty of interest.
- update8887 4y agoWould be cool to combine that data with the one from https://github.com/joblisttoday/data https://github.com/joblisttoday/data
- jslakro 4y agoA couple years ago I made something similar (2019), also trying to analize trends based in the content of each job post: https://juansierra.github.io/scrapenstat/ https://juansierra.github.io/scrapenstat/
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