Show HN: “Who Is Hiring?” Stats Broken Down by Month | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: “Who Is Hiring?” Stats Broken Down by Month

gosmartsolutions.com

41 points20years42 comments

Some of these graphs display several non-exclusive (sometimes totally independent) things in a pie chart.

For example, the second one shows "on-site", "full-time", "remote", "intern", and "visa". Remote/on-site seems like a mutually exclusive pair, but full-time/part-time seems logically and practically independent from that (and "part-time" isn't shown in the pie chart); "visa" probably logically implies on-site; "intern" likely implies on-site in practice; and both "visa" and "intern" probably imply full-time in practice, but not logically; and I think "visa" and "intern" are probably logically and practically independent of each other.

And many jobs list multiple languages, multiple frameworks, and even multiple of the things in the "databases" category.

I suspect each datum is best considered by itself, as "N% of postings mentioned X". Could be displayed as a bunch of bar graphs or something.

Currently the charts only show counts that have 15 or greater results which is why part-time isn't showing. The table below the charts allow you to filter/search by part-time though. I will add a notation to the page that indicates the 15 count min.

I can group some of the different types together but after digging through the raw data I saw that there are a ton of different edge cases. I didn't feel comfortable implying anything because of this.

I'd be really interested in seeing a breakdown of locations, if possible. Naturally, most of these positions would be in California (from what I saw yesterday skimming through the thread), I was surprised to see there were fewer than 10 positions in either Denver or Boulder yesterday.

My thought exactly. And it's even more specific than California - I've been pretty disappointed with the number of positions posted for LA, and haven't noticed an upward trend. I would be very curious to see how % and # of positions in SF vs. other cities has changed over time.

I will try and add this to the next revision. Location would be interesting to see. I will need to pull in a reference table of cities/states in order to properly match locations to the text in the job posts.

It gets many times a framework called "flex", but it's misscategorized heavily. "flexible hours", "flexible working hours" and "we are pretty flexible" are just the first 3 examples I opened.

Ugh! Thanks for pointing this out. Working on a fix right now.

I also saw "flex-time" getting hit.

I expect also stuff like "you can flex your hours".

IMHO, "Frameworks" is a strange column anyway.

Thanks, I am putting in a fix for flex right now. Parsing out the Frameworks is a challenge but I think it is interesting data to see.

Check "react" and "backbone". They are probably false positives too.

I am not seeing issues with these doing a quick scan but I will dig through the data in more detail to make sure.

Thanks for sharing this, cool to see others analyzing this data. I've been compiling monthly trends for a few years[1] of languages, frameworks and databases too. I see you define the terms to search for as well. I need to do a better job of grouping, but here's the raw list I use[2]. What was the most interesting thing you've learned from the data so far?

[1] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2016/...

[2] https://gist.github.com/ryanwi/6135845

Very cool! I really like your "Rankings and movers" section and your compare feature is really nice. I was little surprised to see Python at the top and that a lot of companies are open to remote.

The most important raw stat is how many comments are there by month, over time? That will give some insight into how the tech ecosystem in general is doing.

I graphed this by month from April 2013 to April 2015 -- if you were to add the #s to today, you'd see a downturn in early 2016, but back up to April 2015 levels by now.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vzSbLNZjV9pqFclnPwxM...

I got excited seeing Rust listed as a language so many times. But almost all the results linked didn't have Rust. Just the word "trust" (which appears a lot...).

Oh no! I will put in a fix for that. Thanks for pointing it out.

It would be really interesting to see this for the "Freelancer? Seeking Freelancers?" posts. From what I've seen, people seeking work outnumber those seeking freelancers by something like 10 to 1. As a result it would take some aggregation to get an idea of the buy side of the market.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11814829

This would be interesting to see. Let me see what I can put together :)

I wonder if you could boost the solidity of the language data by tracing backwards from framework. For instance, I see one posting in your data where the framework is known (Ember) but the language is not. Of course we know Ember is a JS framework, so you could answer both questions.

A big mapping of Python => (Django, Flask, etc.) Ruby => (Rails, Sinatra, etc.) ...

Just a thought.

That is a great idea!! I will try and add this to the next revision. Lots I want to add now based on everyone's feedback.

Great job. Two issues:

1. There are problems with negatives. Example: no remote and remote not allowed are both matched as remote.

2. The pie charts don't fit their box at some window width.

It would be nice to see a trend diagram over all the months, one for every pie chart. That could be a separate page.

Thanks for pointing out the negatives. I will put in a fix for that.

I have it on my list to create some media queries to display the charts smaller on some of those smaller widths. Haven't gotten around to it yet.

The trend diagram is a great idea. I will work on that as time permits.

Full Time Positions:

January, 2015: 179

May, 2016: 342

That's nearly double in 16 months.

Would be great to see these in charts to quickly visualize the trends.

I think employers have gotten better with adding this information in some of the more recent months. Some of the older results lack a lot of data so it's not truly an accurate comparison.

As an example: May 2016 had only 74 results that were not matched up to a job type (full-time, remote, etc.) compared to Jan 2015 which had over 300.

Another factor is growing awareness of the Who's Hiring thread.

Anecdote:

My company isn't hiring any more or less people than they used to be, but we never considered the Hacker News Who's Hiring thread as a recruiting venue until I pitched it to upper management rather recently. So that's at least one example of new jobs appearing here that aren't necessarily new jobs in the economy, just new to Hacker News.

I'd be willing to bet other employers who began posting job ads here rather recently have similar stories. I doubt all the growth is strictly related to the tech hiring economy growing faster. Much more likely a combination of solid macroeconomic growth with Hacker News' (and similar venues') own growth combined with growing acceptance of advertising jobs this way by employers and employees.

I agree.

What kind of results did your company get from your HN post compared to some of the other venues?

Several of our applicants can be traced back to the Who's Hiring threads and I'm pretty sure at least one of our new hires in the last few months came from someone who found us via one of those threads. Not 100% sure; I'd have to ask the person on question if my assumption is correct.

But we only just started doing this a few months ago. Plus our hiring needs are pretty specific and aren't likely to align well with the majority of HN job seekers for a wide variety of reasons. As such we don't expect a flood of applicants from this venue. We don't need a huge amount of people though, so we're willing to be patient with it, keep posting our ad, and wait for the right handful of people to come along.

At the moment our highest ROI recruiting efforts are old-fashioned college recruiting events. We do a few different kinds at a handful of universities near us and found it to be a deep well of talented people eager to break into the field and we have a pretty solid training program to take entry level people and turn them into solidly productive engineers rather rapidly.

"we have a pretty solid training program to take entry level people and turn them into solidly productive engineers rather rapidly"

Love reading that!!

I really wish the "Who is Hiring" threads had a more unified formatting, to make it easier to search (and collect data) for certain things, especially location.

Fortinet Fortiguard* is blocking this website as malicious for some reason.

* Where do they come up with these horrible product names?

Where are you seeing this? Is this virus software you have installed on your system?

Microsoft, China based corporate network. No idea why the firewall blocked it, it just said malware.

Are iOS jobs just not posted enought to make the pie charts? No Swift, Objective C, "mobile" etc.

Very cool tho

For the current month swift has 15 and object c has 10. Each chart displays the top 10 that have at least a count of 15.

I think I am going to change this to simply display the top 10 for each chart and remove the 15 min count requirement.

Do this instead:

Lump the smallest ones together into "other". The number you lump together is the minimum needed to make "other" be at least 1% of the total.

Looks like Swift made it to the top 10 last month though http://www.gosmartsolutions.com/hn/?id=11611867

It's all loosely-typed interpreted languages for the web. You can see the bias in the existence of the "Frameworks" column.

This is San Francisco it seems. They aren't into making real things like spacecraft, factory robots, aircraft, engine controllers, CNC equipment, and disk drives. Real things tend to require factories, and that doesn't fit the usual get-rich-quick start-up mentality.

Heck, they aren't even into making any non-web things. They don't seem to do phone apps, firmware (BIOS, UEFI, etc.), 0-day exploits, regular old desktop applications, ASIC/FPGA/PCB dev tools, compilers, trading software, medical billing software, tax software, and timecard software.

From my perspective, there are no jobs in San Francisco. I couldn't stand doing web stuff. I don't see how people can tolerate it.

You left out the best:

machine code, a.k.a. hex bytes

assembly, a.k.a. assembler

C, a.k.a. C99, C11 (no, not C++, and "C/C++" is different too)

It's not that I left it out, it's just not in the data. Employers are not including this in their job posts.

It shows up in August 2015 at least, but doesn't make it onto your list or pie chart. There isn't an "other", so it just went missing.

Only 5 results for assembly so not enough to make it on the pie chart/list.

Having skimmed the jobs thread a few times I would say that's an accurate thing. Feels like 99% of the posts there are for website devs that know javascript.

I'm not sure if that's because 99% of software jobs involve website dev with javascript, or because the majority of the people that visit hackernews are. Hrmm?

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