10 Years of Hacker News "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" Trends | Hacker News Reader

10 Years of Hacker News "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" Trends

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110 pointsfasteddie3100352 comments

Semi-related - I continue to be amused by the number of people that blindly-copy things without understanding what's what. I've seen / heard people refer to LLMs for Vision, which are certainly a thing, but not always what people mean or intend.

And my favorite still is the job posting and experts that refer to "R, Python, SLQ, etc" elsewhere. [1]

This seems to be a copy-paste off of GlassDoor which has -still- not been corrected. [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22R%2C+Python%2C+SLQ%2C+etc...

[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/Job-Descriptions/Data-Sc...

That's hilarious. I found the DDG results to be more illustrative of your point though:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22R%2C+Python%2C+SLQ%2C+etc%22&ia...

Oh absolutely. It's pretty amazing tbh. I wonder how many people were turned away from positions because they didn't have "SLQ" experience?

This is great, thank you for putting it together

> More and more jobs are looking for senior and management level positions. It is increasing tough to be an entry level job applicant in tech

On top of this, at least in my recent experience, it seems like companies not only want more senior applicants, they are also a lot more picky about their experience and want them to know their whole tech stack, have a ton of practice doing interviews, and be great at leetcode

The current job searching experience, at least in tech, feels broken in many different ways

Unfortunately I can't change companies' application processes, but I've been able to make one part of the job searching process a lot easier

Shameless plug: I built an app that takes your resume + job preferences, then processes hundreds of listings to find only the best matches. It tells you why a match is good for you and provides application instructions. Command Jobs: https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs

> The current job searching experience, at least in tech, feels broken in many different ways

Yup, after being told I had a (Sr. level) job x3 times at just as many companies only for it to "fall through due to budget" I gave up. Looking at you Disney and Mozilla.

I'm riding with my current company until something changes in hiring. I'm missing money, but I'm enjoying life.

I think it is a lot harder for new Software Engineers to get into the field today. I was a self-taught engineer when I got into the field 10 years ago. Now I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 100 company. But now I'm hearing stories that companies are not even looking at self-taught Software Engineers.

As someone who graduates their degree in two days I can definitely confirm this. Even though I have sent out over 40 applications, maybe two came back to the phone-screen.. It really feels bleak to get any kind of junior role right now.

> But now I'm hearing stories that companies are not even looking at self-taught Software Engineers.

Same boat for me down to self taught and entry 10 years ago, I just avoided the management path.

I've had companies flat out reject me (for mid level roles) due to not having a SWE degree, even though I literally have 10+ years of professional experience in the area they're hiring for. I can only imagine self taught and no degree would get laughed out of the room most of the time now unfortunately.

> The rise of "Senior" and the decline of "Intern"

I don't know anyone who has anything positive to say about hiring juniors and between it getting far harder to wade through the avalanche of juniors with Coursera certs and AI making the easier work no longer require a human, I don't see a great future for them.

Even in my first job 4 years ago, the senior manager there said in a meeting "we don't hire junior engineers as they are too much of a burden", which was news to new grad me who I guess slipped through an automated filter. Granted, they didn't have anyone else with less than 5 years of experience working there.

It is going to be weird in a few years when the supply of more experienced devs has been throttled.

The issue is that hiring new grads only pays off if they stay for at least 3-4 years in my guestimation. If the new grad leaves before that timeframe they were most likely a net negative on the project/company and consumed more resources than they produced. Most new grads are desperate to get a job so they will take anything just to get experience so they can leave a year or two later for a company which they prefer, so unless you are google or facebook you are probably going to have issues retaining newgrads.

I wonder how much of that is basic economics? In a hot market, juniors get hired to fill a role with the idea that OJT will bring them up to speed soon enough to be better than an empty chair. When there are plenty of applicants, companies can be more selective.

My advice to new grads: Internships!!! Think ahead and use a couple summers to prove yourself to one or two potential employers. Where I work, a lot of our NCG pipeline is intern-driven.

Internships are why new grad job ads can say 1+ years of experience or even 2+ years.

The best candidates have that from summer internships + maybe a year-long internship (we called it a professional year at my school) or co-op.

Ooh, let me give you one data point on that.

I've had great success hiring juniors. One was a WebDev "bootcamp" graduate lady; I was hesitant but bit the bullet, and it paid of well. It was good for the team and, as she was coming from a highly-exploitative industry (Hospitality Industry) she was super grateful with all the perks and benefits in the Software Dev industry (shit, she was just grateful she wasn't sexually harassed... that's the state of things in hotel jobs apparently).

After that I hired another bootcamp graduate, Jr. guy with some mental handicap (sorry for my bad choice of words, English is not my first language). The dude had problems with oral communication; but given that we were a remote team, we had no problems communicating in writing through mail and slack. He was pretty good and passionate. And very grateful that we gave him the chance. I think he is still working in the company where I hired him :-)

Finally, at my current startup I hired another Jr dev, recently graduated from Software Eng. During my interview time I saw he was heavily "opinionated" but also open to accept that he didn't know stuff. I love opinionated+humble people. He has been amazing in my current team.

In my view, the problem with hiring Juniors is that a lot of times, companies are "lazy" in defining job openings. They want people that do everything and know everything. I compare it to the construction industry: As if someone hiring people to build a house wanted 30 architects/civil-engineer, and wouldnt want to hire lowly construction workers. The construction industry has matured enough to have very specific technical positions that can be filled by vast amount of workers.

This is what I've done. I try to break my teams so that I can (at least initially) provide a Jr developer with very specific, small, digestible tasks. It makes it way cheaper for me.

For example, I just recently hired a Jr. Frontend guy (just graduated) to work on Tooljet Dashboards. He was super happy to get the job, I could offer him around 40% more of what he was expecting, and I didn't have to ask a mid/sr level engineer to spend their time doing dashboards.

Small correction: the post says "2019 pandemic," but the pandemic was actually in early 2020. "COVID-19" is so named because it is traced back to a first case in China in December 2019. WHO declared it a global emergency on January 30, 2020 which is about when Western press started taking it more seriously. WHO announced "COVID-19" as the name of the new disease, following some international naming guidelines, on February 11, 2020. The graph shows a sharp dropoff in onsite jobs and sharp rise in remote jobs precisely in the February-March 2020 time period, which makes sense.

When does a pandemic begin is sort of an interesting question.

I agree when the virus is first seen is probably a bad date to use for historical context purposes, but I see the logic for it.

Was there any government which wasn't still downplaying the situation during first two months of 2020?

First cases outside China were reported in Jan. WHO announced the pandemic on Mar 11 and first related lockdown (outside China?) was announced in Italy 2 days later.

That is super interesting because I do not recall hearing about it or taking it seriously until early March 2020.

It really points to how USA centric our news is that there was a global health emergency declared in January, but we were so hyper focused on the upcoming election and Trumps antics that it was barely making the news. Or it was being purposely kept under wraps? It seems like something that should have been brought front and center as soon as we heard about it.

I have family in Italy and they were sending me e-mail warnings about the coming lock-downs in February 2020. (I just checked my GMail records to confirm.) Because by then Italy was already locking down. It was declared an emergency in Italy shortly after the WHO declaration and especially due to 2 confirmed cases found in Rome. You can read about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Italy

> That is super interesting because I do not recall hearing about it or taking it seriously until early March 2020.

I had a co-worker with family in China at the time and remember asking her about whether they were okay. But I also planned a family vacation out of the country for March 2020, which shows I didn't fully understand the ramifications.

Plenty of global health emergencies don't make it to developed countries. There are 3 ongoing such designated events right now.

COVID is one. Can you name the other two?

I'm wondering if there has been an increasingly inflationary use of the term "Senior" in job postings over the past few years. This data somewhat confirms my suspicion.

Anyone else has this impression?

Some of it seems to be that any job that is junior/intermediate gets swamped with anyone who has done a bootcamp or Coursera certificate.

Friend posted an intermediate job. Went though 20 resumes and then decided to scrap the whole process as none of them were any good.

Hiring is fundamentally broken at the vast majority of companies. Maybe the "senior" label is just to try and deter low quality candidates or maybe it's because they don't want to invest in any employee anymore for right or wrong reasons - employees leaving after a few years or maybe the company/management are focused on excel spreadsheets only.

Anyway, try applying to a job today or even pre-pandemic. Unless you went to a top school, are in the right geographic region (West Coast US, or NY area), or you have strong network connections, you're going to be going through a ridiculous number of job applications, then a non-nonsensical number of interview rounds, and maybe you'll get an offer.

Alternatively you spend 3-6 or more months studying leetcode and planet-scale system design, because random startups, banks, insurance companies also wants people who are only the of the best and pay "competitive salary".

The number of places that rejected me for trivial reasons is insane. I can only imagine what people entering the industry right now have to face, it can't be any better than it was.

Or an influx of low-quality entry level candidates, causing companies to bias towards senior hires.

Or the maturing of the industry in general, causing senior workers to be more common.

It's interesting what the "Decreasing Technologies" graph implies by omission. Assuming this means that technologies not included in that graph have been consistent through the same time period. Without a corresponding data view for "Increasing Technologies" there's not really any data on current trends.

Some while ago, someone posted a tool to analyze the frequency of any term on HN over time:

https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends

It seems to still work. And the numbers seem to be roughly in line with this article.

Thanks - I was curious to check "ninja" and "rockstar". They seem to have peaked 8-10 years ago (from a quick glance). Was surprised they are still used at all after taking that pounding from job ads for so many years.

I'd like a graph of just number of job postings over time, but I didn't find one. From the location graph, looks like SF jobs fell off a cliff, whereas the rest remained about constant? This would point to an overall reduction in open positions, no?

https://hnhiring.com/trends

Not a true top-line overall number, but the trend is obvious notwithstanding.

They all became remote.

The job location thing is a bit weird, with just Europe, NY and SF. That is basically meaningless except to show the post-covid decline of SF as an onsite location.

Most of the job ads I see are US only or US/Canada.

I think the increase in people looking for "senior"s has more to do with title inflation than anything else. Now anyone with more than 1 year experience is considered "senior."

The decrease in internship positions is possibly concerning, however, it might just have to do with the types of jobs that get posted to HN. I'd imagine advertising internships directly with colleges might be more effective and where companies might be concentrating their efforts. You'd have to analyze much more than just HN to make any conclusions about the broader job market.

If you have good interns you don't even have to advertise jr positions, you just hire your interns when they graduate. The place where I got my first job out of college I was like the only person who started as a Jr and wasn't an intern first. So lack of advertised positions doesn't mean that nobody is hiring jrs, but it absolutely could mean that.

Looks like remote work was getting popular anyhow, just that COVID accelerated it.

Does anybody know what the bump in 2017 is?

I'd really like to be able to see the data because I have some specific questions of my own...

If posting the database isn't possible could someone give some more hints in terms of the API's accessed to get this?

I could put this up on a GitHub repo. If I get time today, I'll post it and leave the link here.

Did this story get flagged or something? With the amount of votes it has, it should be at the top of the front page, but it's now around halfway through the second page (position 50+ aprox)

@dang what happened?

When comments are more than upvotes a front paste post gets auto-demoted.

Remember to upvote!

Yea it was pretty high up and then all the sudden page 3.

shout out to hckrnews.com for being a much better front page

> I used to be a Rails developer, but I'd never start a new Rails project today. Frontend frameworks and serverless backends have made Rails obsolete.

Feels like a bold conclusion to make based on a trend, when there are so many other explanations. If Rails is no longer in the hype cycle, but still is a superior solution, does that make it obsolete? If Rails shops generally have smaller teams, does that make them obsolete? Why did the author choose that one explanation?

Recently there was another similar analysis (looking at the details, it seems like this article might even be based on the one below)

Show HN: "Ask HN Who's Hiring" Trends: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39631301

Crypto and blockchain employment is rapidly expanding but no one posts on HN regarding crypto companies. The industry knows “The Orange Site” is not where you want to find candidates, or good conversation for that matter.

LinkedIn and random recruiter spam about crypto have also dried up in my anecdotal experience, so where are they hiring?

I would do some research on the industry, and then go direct to their websites and apply. You could also go to top tier VCs, look at their portfolio companies, then apply direct, such as:

https://www.dragonfly.xyz/#portfolio

and which site would have the good candidates and conversations, then?

I’m a ways out of that world now, but my colleagues still in it say that twitter and discord (and getting invited to the “right” private servers) are where jobs are found for blockchain.

... and how might one find the "right" places for that. lol. i just code holed up like a rat haven't really joined communities for it but yk

a man's gotta eat

Look into Layer2 solutions like optimism and arbitrum. Coinbase created their own chain called “Base” built on the OP stack. Many projects are building on these layers and looking for devs. Good luck!

epic ty

Bit off-topic but the one thing I miss on "Ask HN" is the "Idea Sunday" threads.

Would love if this also validated my perceived decline of MongoDB.

Seems about right

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