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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this would compare against a random sample of jobs on, say, Indeed or LinkedIn. My experience of Hacker News is that it’s a very biased group (in a good way) to the general industry.

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I've had few interactions with HN crowd as I've posted my availability for consulting/freelancing and I feel like I don't like the bias.

People needing freelancers for few weeks/months to complete projects where the requirements are glueing the usual APIs and solving the usual Safari bugs asking me Leetcode questions are out of their mind.

I am not applying for a full time position, I'm not a cofounder that is going to make or break your startup and no sorry I am not sharing your vision/mission whatever.

Discord is by far better for finding work in your domain and related to technologies you like, and you can ask for much more money because people already know you're experienced on the topics you share on that discord.

I assume there are specific Discord servers per ecosystem? How do you find those?

My primary domain is functional programming and effect systems (effect/zio/rio) related, all of those communities have plenty (even too many) gathering places that are one google search away or the related libraries (for me would be effect-ts, typescript and some other microsoft tooling) have official discords linked on GitHub or docs.

Another good source of work are local meetups/communities chats.

Mind to share the discord server/link?

I’m currently working with tamagui. I interact with their discord a lot, helping people troubleshoot or asking questions. I’ve gotten a few offers to consult through that alone.

Pick a framework or library, get involved.

>Discord is by far better for finding work in your domain and related to technologies you like

I've tried to interact on a variety of gamedev discords, and the results are about as dry as LinkedIn. But I suppose probing based on the 2020's market won't garner typical results. (still, open to checking out any suggestions. Far from a census here).

Money, though... ha. Less money and usually very few VC's so you're taking a hit compared to trying to grind interviews with EA/Activision. But that's games for you.

I've heard that many of the jobs posted on general jobs boards like that are never intended to result in a hire. They are posted when the company already knows who they are going to hire, but are legally obligated to post the position, or when the company wants to manufacture evidence that "no qualified candidates" could be found locally.

I’ve never heard of this outside of government contracts that require n+X. Is this a visa related workaround or what?

Or is it just chatter from the grapevine?

I can tell you that when I moved from a contract position to full time at Dell Services (now NTT Data Services), they had to review and possibly? interview 2 additional candidates despite hiring from within.

We did have many work visa employees though.

We worked with Healthcare clients. Big ones.

Could be visa-related, it's very easy to craft a posting that only your already-identified preferred candidate will qualify for. I firsthand know of companies that did this for H-1B employees.

Or any public sector job where positions have to be posted but you already have your internal hire, son-in-law, or cousin lined up.

But, it's mostly just rumor I've heard.

H1B visa workaround. Companies have to show that there are no qualified US candidates before they are able to use the H1B visa process. But there have been many abusers of the system. https://www.utahbusiness.com/systemic-abuse-of-the-h-1b-lott...

H-1B visas. To convert to a green card, you need to demonstrate a labor shortage, and a common way is to post job openings, look at the candidates, and tell the government "They all sucked compared to the guy we currently have."

If they don't suck, the guy fails the labor certification and may have to wait a year to apply for the green card again. However, he doesn't lose his job, and the qualified candidate never gets an interview.

So yes, it's pretty standard for the companies to post openings they don't have.

But I really doubt they post on the HN jobs board. Most will go through more formal channels.

I would say that's more prevalent in HN. A lot of the "Who's Hiring" posts are veiled show-and-tells. Some of those companies clearly have no intention of hiring. Even got an automatic rejection email from one of those (within a minute of applying). To be fair, it does work - I've discovered some interesting startups and market niches from the Who's Hiring threads.

Interesting. I hadn't considered that angle, and my expectation was that this would be less prevalent here.

As an opposite data point, when I was looking for a job I interviewed with multiple companies that I found on HN who is hiring. And one of them ended up hiring me. Two years later I work for them still.

There's usually tells that it's a compliance post.

Used to be very specific instructions about mailing a resume to an address with a reference number. And advertised only in the newspaper. But Immigration said they can't do that one anymore; has to be the same submission methods (email, webform, whatever) as an actually open position and advertised/listed in the same places too.

But they'll still have the other tells, which is very specific experience and education requirements which happen to line up exactly with their preferred candidate. Sorry, we did our best, but we can't find any local candidates with a 4 year BS degree, a minor in Clown Studies, and 3 years experience with very specific software that isn't used many places (experience most likely obtained at the hiring company during internship or while on OPT; or while on H1-B if this is in support of a green card, rather than in support of H1-B).

Yes, but I doubt they use the HN jobs board for that. In fact, it will hurt their chances. They can simply post on a very generic job board (e.g. Monster) and say no qualified candidate applied.

The HN job board is much more likely to produce a qualified candidate.

definitely a skew here, yes. You'll get about the same web dev role demand, but it feels like there's more of some deeper domains here (embedded, compilers, etc) and less of other domains (games, IT).

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