Where to join a startup? Analyzing 'Who is Hiring' posts on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Where to join a startup? Analyzing 'Who is Hiring' posts on Hacker News

garmr.posterous.com

61 pointsgghootch32 comments

If anybody is interested in doing more of these sorts of analyses, I have the corpus of who's hiring posts since January 2012 in JSON format available at http://hnhiring.me/data/comments-{thread-id}.json.

The thread ids for fulltime/freelancer for each month are here: http://hnhiring.me/data/threads.json.

Interesting! I was looking for this some days ago :)

I would be interested in seeing a follow-up analysis where the figures are adjusted to account for the resident populations in each of the listed cities (and metro areas).

Looking at US cities only, the Bay Area is utterly exceptional in terms of tech/startup career opportunities. Amsterdam (at 4.15 jobs per 100k) is better than NY or LA, but is an order of magnitude worse than San Francisco.

  City		Pop	Jobs	Jobs/100k
  New York	8175133	165	2.018315788
  Los Angeles	3792621	58	1.52928542
  Chicago	2695598	21	0.779047914
  San Francisco	805235	344	42.72044807
  Boston	617594	64	10.36279498
  Washington	601723	23	3.822356799
  Seattle	608660	42	6.900404167
  Austin	790390	30	3.79559458
  Palo Alto	64403	89	138.1923202

  Amsterdam	820256	34	4.1450474

I think that all those figures prove is that HN has a Bay Area bias, not that "the Bay Area is utterly exceptional in terms of tech/startup career opportunities".

I mean, it is great, but a developer would have no problems finding a good job in New York or Boston, at least.

The numbers do match up pretty closely with careers.stackoverflow.com, atleast.

Another possible interpretation of the jobs/population number is "which cities have lots of job openings despite not being dominated by the tech industry," if someone wanted to be somewhere more diverse. Though, unsurprisingly, the answer is basically "the big ones" so it's not all that interesting there.

I agree that this may be the case.

My aim in posting these figures was just to give an example how correlating the number of job postings with each area's population can give additional meaning to the data. So instead of being fooled by a population graph masquerading as a job graph, we can see where jobs outpace the population, and by how much.

For a more detailed analysis, marshaling job postings from additional startup-focused job boards and correcting the city population figures to reflect the metro areas would provide a minimum level of rigor to the data. Comparisons between startup job postings and 'corporate' postings could provide a bit of extra perspective as well.

I think a more correct measure would take the population of the entire bay area into account, since many people who work in startups don't live in San Francisco or Palo Alto directly.

I tried those posts three times now and they did not work for me. Not even a phone interview. Sure I am a recent grad (this december) who comes from a developing country (visa issues) and I lack open source experience, but my internship was with a good company and I happen to know a lot about various issues that face my fellow developers. Hopefully someone with a similar circumstance can advise me on who to work around this.

Side projects. Start 'em. Build 'em. Talk about 'em.

Everyone comes out as a fresh-faced college graduate. Differentiate yourself with your side projects. It's good for your skills and it's great on your resume.

"Fresh-faced?"

I think it's reasonable to expect that graduates have a significant number side projects by the time they exit. Anything less seems indicative of a lack of interest.

I think reasonable people can disagree on your point.

I can imagine many scenarios where someone wouldn't have a plethora of published side projects coming out of school.

Such as?

It seems absurd that someone could intend to seek employment in this industry (and likely spend 4 years studying it and it's related fields) without producing anything real.

It does seem crazy, but anecdotally, it's pretty common.

The number of people in my CS degree that couldn't program - at all - was astounding. I did a final year subject on databases, and ended up in an end of semester group project with two students that didn't know the difference between a table, and a database.

We have a university here locally that is a join venture between two other major universities in the state, including sharing professors, curriculum and resources. It draws many, many working adults (as well as traditional students). There are many such students who work and attend school full time to get their degree and have not had time to do a bunch of side projects. Life gets in the way sometimes. Plus, you don't need someone whose whole life/only hobby is programming. My standards don't include "must spend free time practicing their trade".

If one has open-source projects, great. If not that doesn't even come close to excluding them.

I can see how an overachieving/motivated 11th grader (you) might think this, but it is neither what "reasonable" hiring managers expect or what the average student produces. Maybe the situation is different at top-10 colleges, but my experience is that maybe 10-15% of a cohort will have >= 1 side project upon graduation. Most students don't even bother learning languages outside of what's taught in class.

Startups have limited amount of funds to invest in their human resources so they will always be look for the best, the ones who take initiative, who goes all out to make something done right. I wouldn't give up hope just yet - start building something outside of what's formally required of you. Make an app, publish it, sell it and talk about it. You'll need to wear multiple hats in a startup so in addition to coding, if you can do the other stuff, you'll be a huge asset.

As jeffclark said, do some side projects.

On the visa side of things- it can be difficult. While it isn't actually that difficult to sponsor someone for a visa, it does involve more work than hiring a 'normal' employee, and if a company hasn't done it before they may be reluctant to.

My recommendation is to take a job with a larger company to start with. Get the visa that will allow you to be in the US. Network, prove yourself in that environment, then transfer your visa to a smaller startup.

I was under the impression that visas are issued to the company - not to the person - and thus can't be transferred from company to company. Am I mistaken?

I was in a very similar situation to you - international visa, interested in innovative/startup work, few opportunities to develop my skills before coming to the states for college, coming from a developing country with narrow opportunities. I spent about a year after graduating working as a software consultant for startups for dirt-cheap (15$/hr work-from-home, 30-hours-per-week), and doing an internship, working on side projects (as suggested repeatedly here). Both these helped me learn a lot about both startups, consulting work, making ends meet, and knowing my strengths. I was able to better understand what value I can bring to a startup environment, and what values I want a startup environment to have so I can feel fulfilled. About a year after graduating I was able to find my way to a great Bay Area startup, and here I am, putting myself to good use, and feel quite prepared to even start my own venture in the near future. After wading through tons of paperwork, since that visa issue doesn't just disappear. Good luck on your venture! Feel free to reach out for help and info on your type of situation.

Yep, your situation is very similar. Can I email you somewhere?

Why do you say "I doubt anyone would have me"? J1 visas aren't that difficult.

You can just try reaching out and talking with people, a lot of companies do office hours, you can schedule meetings with them through Skype or Google Hangouts.

I have been working on a platform (engager.io) to help companies and people to find place based on their preferences, we are in early stage, right now one of our features is precisely office hours, so you can schedule a meeting with someone from this companies. Right now we got a couple of companies from NYC, planning to add more and release new features soon.

For now it's a combination of factors. Weak programming skills + no driver's license is the gist of it. Both will likely be taken care of in six months, though.

This analysis is wrong. Or at least missing a lot of data.

I personally posted jobs from Edinburgh, Scotland on the Who's Hiring thread of the month (and ended up making two hires from it) in 2012. My most recent post on Who's Hiring was the number one voted post on that particular topic. Not sure how the data was collated, but it's not accurate.

Hi there, as mentioned in the post it only collected data on the top 25 startup hubs as identified by the Startup Genome Project (ok, and Amsterdam). Edinburgh is not on that list, so I didn't check for it. I did now: in total it's 3 since january 2012.

Note: not sure why, but the data does seem off from time to time. Manual Command-F for San Francisco for this month's hiring finds 26, while data.scan(htmlpage) finds 28...

There's definitely been more than three jobs listed for Edinburgh in January 2012. I'm in Edinburgh and was looking for work most of last year, so I was paying attention at the time!

When posting job postings to HN, please, please, always make the location extremely prominent. Preferably in the title.

I can't comment on YC job posts to say this, although the one on the front page right now gives the location, which is awesome.

Article commenters were surprised about the high London figures. Here in the UK, I've seen massive growth in the hacker community at the grassroots level. The Hacker News meetup (http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/) was 20 people in a pub back in 2010. Now it's 400-500 hackers in a large auditorium every month. Google Campus in East London is full to bursting every day with people working on their own projects. It's pretty inspiring to be a techie "between jobs" here in London

It's interesting to see Melbourne and Sydney at the bottom of the top 25 list. I heard the other day that 20% of the Australian workforce is in IT -- more than the US and UK. So it seems we have a lot of non-startup IT companies (or, more likely, companies that don't identify that way or appear on HN)

I find it very interesting that location IS so important for a service that can be entirely locationless.

Is Mountain View not considered? I would think it would be top 5. Maybe even #1. I just popped open a single who's hiring thread and found 14 mentions.

It look like that non-english-speaking country does not post a lot on HN.

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