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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Job boards are a funny thing, it's a fairly easy thing to program, and yet companies will pay good sums of money to post an ad because it is to hard to find decent help AND companies are already paying money to advertise job openings.

Value created !== programming complexity

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Job boards start easily, but you'd be surprised at how much they can spiral into some of the most convoluted code you've ever seen. They're almost the exact definition of a scope creeping CRUD app. This is compounded by the fast that an MVP job board is so low hanging that corners are often cut into oblivion, causing inescapable technical debt :)

I expect "We work remotely" was rooted partially in an attempt to burn down the old job board codebase and start over with more defined and scalable scope.

This.

I started a bunch of niche job boards (pythonjobs.com, bigdatajobs.com, railsjobs.com, etc) using a 3rd party platform - but wasn't happy with the platform so built my own.

Fast forward blood, sweat and tears I now offer the platform as a SaaS offering for other looking to create niche job boards (www.JobBoard.io).

Starts out as simple CRUD - gets much more complex - especially when multi-tenancy is involved.

not sure why this deserves a downvote - was showing agreement with previous comment w/ some proof of pedigree/perspective to the view.

People tend to discourage posts with "This."

Easy to program, but how do you get it off the ground? It has the same chicken and egg problem every two-sided marketplace does. 37Signals can do this because they've built an audience.

The mall analogy works just fine: You're not paying the high rent for a small space -- you're paying for the foot traffic.

>> Value created !== programming complexity

I don't see why that's so funny. Isn't that the hallmark of all successful software businesses?

Your looking for:

   valueCreated > programmingComplexity

Not really. Your looking for valueCreated > programmingCost. A problem can be complex but still lucrative to solve.

They are also funny because they don't work...

The number of positions filled through job boards has dropped by more than half in the last decade.

Last year, only 1.3 percent of hires came from Monster.com and 1.2 percent from CareerBuilder... yet Monster.com alone sucked up nearly $1 Billion in revenue from ad postings that are largely ineffective.

For more, see: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/08/ask-the-hea...

The News Hours article does not say "only 1.3% of hires came from Monster" but instead says:

"Monster.com was reported by employers as the source of ALL hires only about 1.3 percent of the time." (emphasis added)

So 1.3% of employers on Monster got 100% of hires there and 98.7% got less than 100% of hires, perhaps none, on Monster. If this statistic, from a survey by the way, means anything, it does not mean Monster was responsible 1.3% of US hiring. Ditto for the 1.2% at CareerBuilder.

This is pretty typical of articles on News Hours's business blog - provocative and seemingly informative but generally poorly written and researched and often ideological. You will often know less after reading their articles, or more accurately, know more things that are wrong.

Here's the actual survey from careerXroads that this was based on. I have no idea how reliable it is.

http://www.careerxroads.com/news/SourcesOfHire2013.pdf

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