from Hacker News

10 Years of Hacker News "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" Trends

by fasteddie31003 on 4/1/24, 3:11 PM with 52 comments

• by mikehollinger on 4/1/24, 3:35 PM

  Semi-related - I continue to be amused by the number of people that blindly-copy things without understanding what's what. I've seen / heard people refer to LLMs for Vision, which are certainly a thing, but not always what people mean or intend.

  And my favorite still is the job posting and experts that refer to "R, Python, SLQ, etc" elsewhere. [1]

  This seems to be a copy-paste off of GlassDoor which has -still- not been corrected. [2]

  [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22R%2C+Python%2C+SLQ%2C+etc...

  [2] https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/Job-Descriptions/Data-Sc...

• by nico on 4/1/24, 3:44 PM

  This is great, thank you for putting it together

  > More and more jobs are looking for senior and management level positions. It is increasing tough to be an entry level job applicant in tech

  On top of this, at least in my recent experience, it seems like companies not only want more senior applicants, they are also a lot more picky about their experience and want them to know their whole tech stack, have a ton of practice doing interviews, and be great at leetcode

  The current job searching experience, at least in tech, feels broken in many different ways

  Unfortunately I can't change companies' application processes, but I've been able to make one part of the job searching process a lot easier

  Shameless plug: I built an app that takes your resume + job preferences, then processes hundreds of listings to find only the best matches. It tells you why a match is good for you and provides application instructions. Command Jobs: https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs

• by MattGaiser on 4/1/24, 3:31 PM

  > The rise of "Senior" and the decline of "Intern"

  I don't know anyone who has anything positive to say about hiring juniors and between it getting far harder to wade through the avalanche of juniors with Coursera certs and AI making the easier work no longer require a human, I don't see a great future for them.

  Even in my first job 4 years ago, the senior manager there said in a meeting "we don't hire junior engineers as they are too much of a burden", which was news to new grad me who I guess slipped through an automated filter. Granted, they didn't have anyone else with less than 5 years of experience working there.

  It is going to be weird in a few years when the supply of more experienced devs has been throttled.

• by pixelmonkey on 4/1/24, 3:33 PM

  Small correction: the post says "2019 pandemic," but the pandemic was actually in early 2020. "COVID-19" is so named because it is traced back to a first case in China in December 2019. WHO declared it a global emergency on January 30, 2020 which is about when Western press started taking it more seriously. WHO announced "COVID-19" as the name of the new disease, following some international naming guidelines, on February 11, 2020. The graph shows a sharp dropoff in onsite jobs and sharp rise in remote jobs precisely in the February-March 2020 time period, which makes sense.

• by hubraumhugo on 4/1/24, 3:33 PM

  I'm wondering if there has been an increasingly inflationary use of the term "Senior" in job postings over the past few years. This data somewhat confirms my suspicion.

  Anyone else has this impression?

• by flankstaek on 4/1/24, 3:39 PM

  It's interesting what the "Decreasing Technologies" graph implies by omission. Assuming this means that technologies not included in that graph have been consistent through the same time period. Without a corresponding data view for "Increasing Technologies" there's not really any data on current trends.

• by mg on 4/1/24, 3:39 PM

  Some while ago, someone posted a tool to analyze the frequency of any term on HN over time:

  https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends

  It seems to still work. And the numbers seem to be roughly in line with this article.

• by stavros on 4/1/24, 3:30 PM

  I'd like a graph of just number of job postings over time, but I didn't find one. From the location graph, looks like SF jobs fell off a cliff, whereas the rest remained about constant? This would point to an overall reduction in open positions, no?

• by lbrito on 4/1/24, 3:31 PM

  The job location thing is a bit weird, with just Europe, NY and SF. That is basically meaningless except to show the post-covid decline of SF as an onsite location.

  Most of the job ads I see are US only or US/Canada.

• by astura on 4/1/24, 3:39 PM

  I think the increase in people looking for "senior"s has more to do with title inflation than anything else. Now anyone with more than 1 year experience is considered "senior."

  The decrease in internship positions is possibly concerning, however, it might just have to do with the types of jobs that get posted to HN. I'd imagine advertising internships directly with colleges might be more effective and where companies might be concentrating their efforts. You'd have to analyze much more than just HN to make any conclusions about the broader job market.

  If you have good interns you don't even have to advertise jr positions, you just hire your interns when they graduate. The place where I got my first job out of college I was like the only person who started as a Jr and wasn't an intern first. So lack of advertised positions doesn't mean that nobody is hiring jrs, but it absolutely could mean that.

• by stabbles on 4/1/24, 3:31 PM

  Looks like remote work was getting popular anyhow, just that COVID accelerated it.

  Does anybody know what the bump in 2017 is?

• by sgt101 on 4/1/24, 3:29 PM

  I'd really like to be able to see the data because I have some specific questions of my own...

  If posting the database isn't possible could someone give some more hints in terms of the API's accessed to get this?

• by nico on 4/1/24, 3:58 PM

  Did this story get flagged or something? With the amount of votes it has, it should be at the top of the front page, but it's now around halfway through the second page (position 50+ aprox)

  @dang what happened?

• by hakunin on 4/1/24, 5:29 PM

  > I used to be a Rails developer, but I'd never start a new Rails project today. Frontend frameworks and serverless backends have made Rails obsolete.

  Feels like a bold conclusion to make based on a trend, when there are so many other explanations. If Rails is no longer in the hype cycle, but still is a superior solution, does that make it obsolete? If Rails shops generally have smaller teams, does that make them obsolete? Why did the author choose that one explanation?

• by nico on 4/1/24, 3:55 PM

  Recently there was another similar analysis (looking at the details, it seems like this article might even be based on the one below)

  Show HN: "Ask HN Who's Hiring" Trends: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39631301

• by monero-xmr on 4/1/24, 3:36 PM

  Crypto and blockchain employment is rapidly expanding but no one posts on HN regarding crypto companies. The industry knows “The Orange Site” is not where you want to find candidates, or good conversation for that matter.

• by TheChaplain on 4/1/24, 6:13 PM

  Bit off-topic but the one thing I miss on "Ask HN" is the "Idea Sunday" threads.

• by AirMax98 on 4/1/24, 3:41 PM

  Would love if this also validated my perceived decline of MongoDB.

• by dartos on 4/1/24, 3:28 PM

  Seems about right