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Comment by resoluteteeth | Hacker News Reader

I think another interpretation is that it's become easier for companies to keep jobs "open" and collecting applicants without really having to put in effort to find people. Or, to put it another way, the idea of an "open job" has become meaningless, if it was ever meaningful in the first place.

As a metaphor, we can imagine many people wanting to buy apples, but not being willing to pay the 1$ the supermarket will charge. They could create an "apple opening", posting on an apple selling site looking for people who are willing to sell them apples with certain qualities for a given price that depends on the individual, for example 5 cents. Then, we could poll consumers to see how many have apple openings. Perhaps we could find millions of such unfilled openings, but would this tell us anything about trends in the quality of apples or actual apple consumption?

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The same is happening with real estate, people have started to post apartments "soon for sale" without any starting price or fixed bidding time, years before they are ready to move, just in case some crazy guy happens to drop by and put a bid that is higher than the actual market value. The cost of advertising to a wide audience has simply dropped so much that you can constantly keep fishing even though you don't have anything actually ready, and to beat the competition everybody has to do it, its just a race to the bottom. MVPs are also a good anlogy to this, present a half working website just to see if people are interested and if enough are you can continue with development.

The attention is not endless, though. Consumers will eventually respond with scepticism, I think.

This is a good point. There's an actual bottom in the race to the bottom. Past that point, nothing will get attention.

A relevant read: Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html

I finished reading the article, and only then realized that it's from 15 years ago. Incredibly relevant still, and in my experience companies still pinch pennies when hiring developers

It's amazing how much has changed since the time of that article. I can't remember the last time I saw cubicle walls.

This aligns with my person experience in a startup incubator. If I was a ruby/php/js guru willing to work for £25,000/year plus a bit of equity, I could take my pick of 100s of jobs.

I've seen it happen with some startups that jobs are posted as "open" to attract applicants when they are not really hiring, or not removing those postings once filled to passively collect resumes and make it look like the startup is bigger than it is.

I really don't like this as it hurts the applicants time and distracts them from finding a place that does want to hire them now.

And sometimes to be seen to be in a growth phase when in fact they are stagnant.

It's pretty easy to puncture that though, simply ask how many open positions they have for each department and when the last hire was for each department. That will show quickly whether or not they are actually growing and at what rate. (You can't lump them all together because with a larger company one department may be growing while another is declining).

Great point. One corollary is that with the increase in volume (and churn) of places to post a job, single openings & fuaxpenings are likely to be double/triple/N counted.

That's a reasonable theory, but it doesn't correspond with the stats about "labor quality" problem.

Sure it does. There's a problem in that there's not enough quality labor willing to work for peanuts and then watch their life get destroyed when a major medical event happens.

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