How long do job postings stay open? | Hacker News Reader

How long do job postings stay open?

33 points_tgxm43 comments

I worked for a company that kept one job posting open for more than 4 years. They've used it to hire more than 100 people, but unless you worked there you wouldn't know.

Interesting to hear this data point because everyone would just claim it was a sham job that some companies post to get a feel of the market.

Funny enough, on a local glassdoor clone the guys who failed technical interview discussed exactly this possibility precisely because the post was open for so long:)

Not too surprising. I've been at companies where a job posting is hyper-specific to one job description, as soon as I (as a hiring manager) change a single word, HR makes a new job posting and cancels the old one.

And also I've been in places like you describe, where one generic "Software Engineer" job posting is reused to hire many people into many teams, since they're all "Software Engineers" so they just recycle the same posting for everyone.

It varies a lot depending on HR culture.

We called them funnel reqs. They were perpetually renewed. It was to get people hired fast.

Admin & Office : 18 days

Software Dev : 22 days

Retail & Hospitality: 33 days

Would love to understand why.

- few jobs, much supply = can afford to be picky to get the best

- not much difference between applicants = hire first that meets requirements

- switching costs are high = be picky

- high impact on team/culture = be picky

None of these explain the data.

From what I could see, big retailers have a lot of "evergreen" openings which makes sense as they can have multiple locations and there is a lot of churn. And there are obvious outlier sub-categories like warehouse workers etc which have median times <7d, I didn't break it down in the blog as it's too much data to present. But other than that, I don't have enough search data to draw meaningful conclusions. (say around supply/demand)

The only notable data point is the precipitous drop for software engineering from 40-60 days historical averages. lt basically says that tech has become just like the rest of the job market, competitive for applicants and heavily gatekept by insiders, and that will be quite a reckoning for those who never experienced in their professional life a "normal" job seeking process.

The rest are just noise.

I actually think there is a different effect at play which is the technical need is growing in seniority and complexity as people have large established software systems. The junior market has high accessibility but the senior actually takes a while to get anyone through the door. My current job had been advertised for 6 months, it needed a relatively insane set of knowledge and skills where I only really had maybe 50-60% of the ask. I literally had to learn all of GCP from scratch and I was still a better fit than you're likely to find. I think this is also the same trend AI is making worse as the demand for junior also goes down you'll see these averages climb as most hiring becomes more senior.

There is little debate the tech job market is currently bad, for juniors worse but for seniors too, widespread layoffs from large companies, etc.

What you are describing sounds more like the extreme pigeonholing the industry has been practicing for years, where companies expect 100% productivity from day one, use automated screening for keywords like "MongoDB" or "GCP" etc. How much effort does it really take to learn GCP enough to handle a certain given product, perhaps string together a few Cloud Run instances, a PR triggered CI pipeline with Cloud Build, add a few Compute Engine workers, bind everything together and protect it with Armor and IDS etc.? Not the entire GCP, just what a given company would need; it's adult Lego for god's sake. It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI.

The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity, since the labor was so mobile and relatively expensive. Maybe with a less mobile workforce, this will change but I won't hold my breath.

Sometimes I find the pigeonholing thing is just siloing and laziness. The last guy did our infra, nobody else wants to learn it, so the trivial thing to do is just hire on a tick-box basis.

I'm at a company now where one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch. Couldn't even be bothered to learn enough to hire for it. And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it.

Hate React if you want but come on guys, it's not a massively complex framework to learn the basics of.

> one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch.

React is close to an industry standard, sounds like bad management. Again, you don't have to know React to hire for React, just bring "smart and gets thing done" people onboard and trust them on their word that they can quickly learn anything they need to get it done. Clear responsibilities and goals, trust, swift consequences if that trust is breached.

Yes, I don't disagree. Well, it's a place where engineering has seized power through obstinance and used it to do whatever they find interesting or resume-positive. Luckily I'm just consulting here as a favor for an old friend.

> And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it.

Why do you need to specifically "hire for a framework"? Wouldn't any front-end developer be able to pick up any front-end framework (unless it's outside the javascript space entirely, and requires knowledge of purescript, rescript, elm, rust, clojure, scala, etc.)

I don't want to dox myself by getting too specific, but yes it's essentially a frontend framework for backend engineers in a niche lang (at least, niche for frontend). So they'd just hire more backend engineers in their language of choice.

I think this might actually be fine for internal tooling, but this is a customer-facing web app. It's now incredibly clunky and every feature takes an age to get out. Full page reloads for everything, etc.

> It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI. > The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity

I guess it highly depends on where you are. Majority of the interviews I have attended were "We have this <problem>/<client request> and do not have expertise/capacity to solve/deliver. Can you come in and start closing tickets? yes/no". SRE with extensive experience in Ansible is barely eligible for a junior role at a shop using Puppet, a frontender working with Angular is unwanted at a react shop, Oracle DBA is a leper in the eyes of Postgres shop.

I am at my current place mostly because in the interview I have said "Hey look, buddy. I'm an engineer. That means I solve problems, not problems like "What is beauty?" Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy." My team does not have a single "Certified Foobarizer Expert", but tickets tend to move through the pipeline one way or another.

I think hospitality can sometimes struggle to get strong candidates at all so might leave positions open longer hoping for better applicants.

I read some time ago that hospitality is the lowest-paying industry. It’s unrealistic to expect strong candidates there.

I would wonder how much of it is _generic_ job postings. Like, unless you're really huge, you probably don't need to constantly hire, say, receptionists, so you'll put up an ad for a receptionist, get a receptionist, remove the ad. If you're moderately big, you may be fairly constantly hiring software engineers, so you put up the ad and leave it there. If you're in retail or hospitality, you are probably constantly hiring people, and many of the roles are quite generic, so you're more likely again to have long-lived ads.

I would not recommend the standard resume -> job portal -> application pipeline to anyone seriously looking for gainful employment. The signal:noise ratio is not in your favor. The current meta for tech jobs is an OSS portfolio, sponsored competitions, self-produced apps, and technical blogposts, roughly in that order. You will get much farther by solving real problems with public visibility.

If someone does that, how do they then convert it into a job?

happy to display that I'm clued-out, but what does 'meta' mean in this context? Clearly not the company, nor the general 'meta' modifier to something to describe qualifying criteria about it, like meta data for phone calls. it sounds closer to the term 'alpha' that investors use to describe competitive advantage (and even that term I wonder about).

Very popular term in gaming

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/what-does-meta-mean-in-...

Thank you! (Starts down fresh rabbit-hole...)

Meta is short for metagame. In videogames, and even in some sports, there are decisions made above/outside of the typical strategy of the game which players call metagame. For example, drafting players in football is metagaming. Or choosing what pickleball paddle to use is metagame.

An expanded view of that is that there's usually a "current" meta strategy that people tend to adhere to, kind of like a convention. And if you stray from that, you lose, even if your strategy would succeed in a vacuum.

For example, if the current meta is for employers to mainly use referrals/networking to hire, it would be a bad strategy to apply to postings.

Thank you! Very helpful clarity, indeed sounds like an incredibly useful term!

Agree the standard resume -> application etc. is tough. It has always been tough even at the best of times.

Most jobs are through friends/network etc. If you really think you're a great fit but lack the network try figuring out who the right person is and reach out directly.

If you're a new grad then internships etc.

> If you're a new grad then internships etc.

If you're a new grad, haven't you lost the status of "current student" that most-to-all internships require?

Some people just want a job, not to package themselves like a sales pitch. It’s about putting bread on the table, not performing personal branding theater — yet the job market has become wildly disproportionate to the reality of the work.

The reality of any matching market is based around first impressions and theater. Dating, college apps, hiring, real estate transactions, etc.

Some people just want to buy or sell a house. FSBO with some cheap cellphone pictures will sell far slower than a staged house with professional photos, MLS listing, and a launch party for local agents.

Do many high schoolers care about volunteer work, taking a second language, etc? No. Is it expected to be a part of their application and essay for a good school? Yes.

> Do many high schoolers care about volunteer work, taking a second language, etc? No. Is it expected to be a part of their application and essay for a good school? Yes.

Note that this is only true in countries where the first priority of the "good school" is to obscure their admission goals.

But no employer has ever said "I just want an employee". So only someone naive in the extreme would imagine with the power dynamic in play the sales pitch isn't necessary. That a job is even advertised means the hardest part of the sell has already been done for you internally, but also probably has less favourable terms. If all you ever think is "I just want a job" you will almost always undersell yourself and have the worst jobs. The best ones aren't even advertised and are created purely on your own salesmanship.

People keep parroting this point, but I don't think it actually applies, it's just one of those things that gets reposted a lot on the internet. When we're hiring a candidate, I generally don't go through their Github repos or blogs. I talk to them about what they've worked on and what they've done. Hobby projects can be a good starting point to talk about that, as can be blogs, but really you could start with anything. Most people start with their current day job and that's perfectly fine. You don't have to be coding both inside and outside of working hours do be a good applicant.

I'd go as far as saying it's counter-productive. I have a hobby-level project with actual users earning me some money on the side while requiring very little day-to-day involvement (roughly 2h per week) and there's no quicker way to get my door shut doing interviews than by mentioning it.

There's simply no way to package that which doesn't make the other side think that I'm gonna steal company's time at best and that I'm only looking for like a temporary gig until it takes off at worst.

You assume hiring managers are looking at OSS?

In my experience, they don’t. They might click to see the GitHub profile but rarely open any repo to check the code.

I've never had a potential job reference a single thing on my github, and I've been a user since 2007. Usually I had to point out, when trying to get a job using e.g. Rails, that I had contributed significant code that they were using in production.

Also, be under 40.

Huh? Im over 40 its only getting easier to get hired... Not sure where the ageism meme came from other than perhaps older generations who learned compsci pre the internet got left behind a little bit in the made takeoff of software. I am over 40 without a family or partner though, so I suspect the bias is far more about how much of your life is work energy.

What type of companies though? Because startups definitely seem to discriminate. I think partly because it's easier to convince a 20-something that working 6 days a week for mythical equity is a good deal.

  > its only getting easier to get hired

How could one know? How many times have you been hired in the last couple of years?

Does this take into account whether the posted is actually using those applications from the end of the window?

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see "Oh, I'm still getting emails about this listing, guess I should close it" when candidates are already in round 2.

SDE jobs are usually deliberately kept open to satisfy the H1B/PERM testing. Most big tech company does it so they can hire H1Bs and in turn do day 1 PERM sponsor as an incentive for H1B hires

Intriguing: Product/Design roles linger longest (median 30.5 days). Remote-heavy categories like Customer Success at 27.8 days? Great for targeted applications in security ops.

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