Techmap: Find companies using technologies you love | Hacker News Reader

Techmap: Find companies using technologies you love

techmap.io

100 pointsjoergrech47 comments

Doesn't work.

Enter an address. Backspace across the whole field to clear it. It kicks you to a map with "unexpected error has occurred". Can't get back to input fields.

Can't find San Jose, ca, or any permutation I tried. California by itself gets hundred of hits, too many to scroll down to see if it has California, USA. Maybe sort by population?

Enter "Mountain View", and "mountain view mobile home park, Montana" ranks above the city of Mountain View, CA.

Another bad example is Portland, OR when searching “Portland”. I’d expect it to be near the top, as my IP should be pretty clearly from the US and Portland is one of the largest Portlands in the US. Instead, you have to scroll through 15 results to get to the US, and then it’s probably 30 deep.

I’m curious as to why you are calling this a startup. Are you actually planning to get investors and turn this into a stand alone business? How would you plan to monetize users?

There’s a pricing page, have you seen that?

No, I missed that. Thank you for pointing this out.

Monetization will mainly happen by selling "highlighted" / emphasized pins, popups or employer branding pages for companies looking for more employees / applicants.

Searched for Lucee in London, U.K. and it brought back a map featuring Target stores in the Lansing area. Going to be quite embarrassed if I find all Target stores using Swiss based open source ColdFusion servers.

Also relevant to anyone trying this approach to job hunting: https://stackshare.io/

Do you find it useful? The content seems quite thin

The goal is to increase the amount of information on the technologies and tech stack used in the companies step by step. Best case will be that companies will enter this data by themself to attract more employees / applicants.

At least on mobile, I don’t see any call for action (or “are you a company? get relevant candidates by adding your company stack - click here”). Also without clear data on page views, the pricing is hard to evaluate (if it’s a bargain or a rip off, all based on your average page views for a given geography). I probably want to pay by impressions / clicks, not a flat fee that I have no clue if anyone would ever see me in any search results. Sorry for the “jargonese” but the value metric (impressions / candidates contacting you) doesn’t match the pricing (flat). This needs some work before I’d put my money on it.

You are right but we want to generate traffic first before we can state any numbers on views or change the pricing to impression-based (This is a launch - we are not an older Startup).

However, other channels such as Job Boards are typically also not giving promises on the number of candidates / applicants.

If you want to generate traffic first, let companies post for free during the beta phase. Take money but give a long free trial, just my 2 cents. I need candidates but I wouldn’t pay for something that had zero guarantee anyone will ever even get a single page view. My personal humble opinion. Good luck with the launch, great idea and execution otherwise!

I like that I can find openings within biking distance. It's a major advantage!

I don't like that the labels don't differentiate between HQ and small branch office of a company/bank.

> the labels don't differentiate between HQ and small branch office of a company/bank.

Fun anecdote: my gf started working (engineering) for a bank last year during Covid lockdown. Last month she had a problem with her laptop; because of the complex security it couldn’t be fixed remotely. So she walked over to a neighborhood branch of the bank and plugged it into their network so IT could fix it.

Apart from that single brief visit she’s never met any colleagues in person and has never been in any of the company’s facilities.

Bug report for the operators:

After I entered a search, the website went completely dead with the following message:

> An unexpected error has occurred.

I tried to open a new tab and reload, but it's gone.

FWIW, I declined location API access.

Sorry for the inconvenience. There are some strange problems when the Browsers's navigation is disable that seems to behave differently on different Browsers. We'll try to fix it asap.

This is an interesting idea. There are a few bugs mentioned in the comments here but I think the current version is more than merely MVP quality.

Thank you. If you find any problems feel free to send us a screenshot or description of the problem.

Neat! Surprised to see so many results for Clojure. The mobile UX is pretty hellish, though. I’ll have to check it out again on desktop.

Tried searching up "Elm (programming language)" and it brought up 3 companies near me. None of which actually used Elm. One of them was just some fashion company named "West Elm". I don't think the data is 100% accurate, but still a useful tool nonetheless

Looked up "javascript" and it found a total of like 4 results in my entire country. I think this thing needs some time to get meaningful data before it becomes useful. It's like a search engine without anything indexed yet.

Interesting, JavaScript should result in relatively many good results. In which country did you search? Even in my old hometown with a population of ~25k I find seven companies. Currently, Asian countries and esp. China have few companies - mainly due to the language barrier.

Companies and countries with "technologies in their name" such as Jasper (city) or Java (Island) will currently cause false positives as we are only using regexes to identify the technologies. However, the words are used by these companies in their job ads or descriptions.

We've tested the mobile version on iPhones and Chrome developer tools. If you found a problem feel free to send us a screenshot.

I see a lot of Clojure results, but when I go into the actual page, I had to go to seven or eight different pages to actually see Clojure mentioned. I'm not sure where the data actually comes from.

Interesting startup. Looks cool. Where do you source the data from? Usings APIs for job search engines?

Looks like they’re scraping job ads. The careers page has a job requirement for a scraping position

We mainly collect the data from job ads, company directories, and tech sites (e.g., github). Basically, we crawl the web like the Google search engine and filter out relevant data.

I have been gather companies which use on-prem heavily.

https://github.com/viggy28/awesome-onprem

Would love to see more companies on this category.

Have you tried to search for "On-Premise"? You can use free text and do not have to select one item from the dropdown.

What are the legal implications when scraping stepstone and so on for their data? I am honestly curious because we build roughly the same for a university project one year ago.

Probably depends on your jurisdiction (US, EU, etc.). In general from a EU point of view, we crawl the data like any search engine (google, bing, etc.) and extract relevant data.

We're HQ'd in Portland, OR. But, we allow remote work anywhere in the US and Canada. How is that sort of situation handled by this service?

Do you have more details on your company? I love Portland

https://www.auxon.io we make software for testing and verifying the systems of connected computers that live outside the data center.

You are right that especially after corona the tech world will probably increase remote or hybrid jobs.

In our system we offer a search for companies with a specific tech stack - currently location-based but we might integrate a location-independent search in the future. Today a remote worker or freelancer can search for a company in their home region or a vacation spot and ask for remote opportunities.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the reply.

I checked my company and the result was funny knowing our business… Ok, it’s a big corp with several office, so I guess it’s harder to infer.

Nevertheless the I love the idea.:)

Search for C# comes up with nothing. Guessing it's a parsing error related to the # sign?

I'll check this - it might be caused by the parsers in Elasticsearch as they remove special characters such as the hashtag (#).

Lol. Two of the results they come up with for Haskell in the nyc area are my teams past and present.

Probably my fault for trying to use it from a smart phone browser but the struggle was real. Safari.

First thing it did was ask me if it could use my location. I said no. It then took me to a map centered on my current location! I don’t really care and only said no because I was prompted and default to better safe than sorry answers, but being asked and then ignored rubbed me the wrong way.

Next problem was the map kept flashing in and out little blue circles with numbers on them like “63” which I assumed meant this was the 63rd company in the database using Ruby on Rails (only tech I put in) but when I tried to zoom in it disappeared and a new number “43” appeared in a different location with “63” no where to be found. I zoomed in again and that one disappeared too. I was attempting to zoom in on the location of the number and can’t promise you I didn’t zoom in wrong but certainly felt like I was zooming in on the exact spot the number was located.

Anyway, that was when I exited. I am really interested in the concept and would check it out again from my desktop if if was on the front page again when I was browsing from home. Good luck with your product!

> First thing it did was ask me if it could use my location. I said no. It then took me to a map centered on my current location! I don’t really care and only said no because I was prompted and default to better safe than sorry answers, but being asked and then ignored rubbed me the wrong way.

It’s not using your location directly; it’s going to fall back to using the location tied to your IP since you denied it access to GPS/wifi data from your phone. Every single website you visit can get that location, no permissions required. If you don’t like that, you should already be using a VPN.

Sorry to disappoint - the geolocation is done as we need somewhere to start the map - maybe we will start with a world map or placeholder in the future.

The blue circles with numbers you mention are clusters / groups of companies (so the blue circle with 63 means 63 companies are close to the circle). The misunderstanding is probably due to your start with a phone as we hide the Legend with an explanation of the pins and markers.

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