Show HN: HackerNews-new-jobs – insights into fresh and recurring job ads

h1fra · a year ago

Nice to see the trend confirming my suspicion, the market has been complicated for the last year and it's not really improving (whether you are hiring or looking for a job)

BillFranklin · a year ago

I found the same - market is actually getting worse (if HN is representative of the market). This month there were more job seekers on HN than jobs for the first time since 2014.

https://bilbof.com/posts/tech-hiring-is-bad-right-now

daemonologist · a year ago

This site I think counts only top-level comments, and the streams have been crossed since ~April 2023: https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/ . The overall trend is the same though - the market seems pretty historically bad.

There's also Indeed postings data, which unfortunately only goes back to 2020 but is similarly bleak: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

andersa · a year ago

This is a rather depressing graph, what happened in 2022-2024?

lubujackson · a year ago

The tax change that causes companies to have to weirdly treat developer salaries as some sort of asset such that they can only write off 20% of it per year. Outcome of this is killer for startups and causing a huge issue everywhere.

Bottom line: If a company makes $1MM in revenue and pays $1MM in salary, they owe taxes on $800k profit. Yes, this is actually the law now.

awongh · a year ago

Has anyone heard opinions from the incoming administration on getting this changed?

I guess the one area this tax law particularly affects are bootstrapped revenue-generating (non-VC funded) startups with high dev costs? i.e., actual running businesses not playing with monopoly money.... which maybe Elon doesn't care about....

dragonwriter · a year ago

> The tax change that causes companies to have to weirdly treat developer salaries as some sort of asset

The salaries are not an asset, they are the cost of creating the asset. They are capitalizable similar to (but on a different schedule than) costs of acquiring software that is not developed in house.

ryandrake · a year ago

The "Section 174" tax change always gets brought up, but wouldn't that be kind of a "tail wagging the dog" explanation? Surely, if it's worth it for a business to hire talent, then it's still worth it regardless of some esoteric tax rule. Are there actually companies sitting there in their Hiring meetings saying "Gee, we really need to expand our business and hire some engineers--if it wasn't for this tax law, we'd be hiring!"

neilv · a year ago

How do non-developer salaries affect those taxes?

(In 2024, if a company paid salaries for a software developer, a novel writer, and a cook, does each of those 3 positions affect taxes in the same way?)

seeking_re_msw · a year ago

do you have a link to the tax change?

surely tax changes come in the form of congressional+presidential bills and amendments

myth_drannon · a year ago

And to put a more depressing angle to the graph, HN and Who's hiring were not that popular pre-2017, and now 2024 numbers are lower than the pre-2017 data

tredre3 · a year ago

> HN [...] were not that popular pre-2017

Is that true? What happened to change that in 2017?

I've been around longer than that and I admit I haven't seen that much of a difference in engagement around here. But over such a long period it could easily have gone unnoticed by me!

The only thing I've noticed is the increase in activity during the recent Reddit shenanigans (which resulted in a drop of quality of the conversation on HN, but it seems back to normal now).

BerislavLopac · a year ago

Interest rates were raised from nearly zero, where they were for a number of years. When the interest rates are that low, high-risk investments like VC are more attractive then alternative (having a low chance of high returns is better than guaranteed no returns at all).

robbie-c · a year ago

end of ZIRP

game_the0ry · a year ago

This and over-hiring.

nemanja_codes · a year ago

Collapse, unfortunately.

seeking_re_msw · a year ago

Interest rates

OccamsMirror · a year ago

Location / remote / hybrid would be interesting to visualize.

nemanja_codes · a year ago

True, I thought about it, technologies too, and other filters. Currently website has clear focus new/repeated job ads. I will see how much public interest is there for the website and if it is worth adding more features.

jcuenod · a year ago

This looks lovely! Good work.

On my wishlist are some fuzzier categories:

  1. Tech trends (rust, docker, postgres...)
  2. Role trends ("ml engineer", "full-stack developer" ...)

nemanja_codes · a year ago

Thank you, I highly appreciate it. As is website has clear and strong focus, it's "fresh" vs "repeated" job ads. Naturally, you would always prefer to give a shot with company that just posted a fresh ad, then to apply for a role that is repeated in 10 months of previous 12 but company still hasn't found a candidate that satisfies criteria.

For the additional filters, by technologies and role types it would be of great help if I could find some high level indexing and fuzzy search tools/libraries. I would probably need to migrate from SQLite to Postgres and when I am already there probably use ORM too.

Certainly, I would need to do serious research, if there is enough public interest in the current website and I manage to find some contributors with data science and information retrieval experience maybe we can add many interesting filters like tech, roles, location, visas, remote, etc.

ryandrake · a year ago

This is great! I had long ago started a similar project to parse HN job ads month after month looking for the ones that just stay the same each month, which might suggest the company is probably "fishing" instead of "hiring". But it never really got off the ground. This platform seems more than capable of doing that kind of analysis and more. Great work.

nemanja_codes · a year ago

Thank you very much, very much appreciated. I was curious to see how much people would be interested in such website.

mdaniel · a year ago

It would appear you have a non-trivial "company" parse problem, based on eyeballing the "First Time Companies" section. I do appreciate the problem of trying to do semantic analysis on HN comment text, but several of them follow the "X@Y" nomenclature and a few others are "X-Y" so it doesn't seem to be insurmountable to try and fix

nemanja_codes · a year ago

This is just a first iteration of a quick prototype to gauge public interest in the idea. It just looks for the "|" separator in the comment title, which is something that majority of posters enforce.

https://github.com/nemanjam/hn-new-jobs/blob/main/constants/...

If people show constant interest I can iterate it further, enhance it, ad features, etc.

mdaniel · a year ago

Well, if that's your attitude then I wish you all the luck with your project

I was also going to say $(git commit -a) is evil based on <https://github.com/nemanjam/hn-new-jobs/blob/main/data/datab...> but it seems that you just want an always changing binary blob to make your git repo grow without bound :-( https://github.com/nemanjam/hn-new-jobs/blob/main/.gitignore...

thih9 · a year ago

Possible bug report, I noticed a company that posts regularly but I didn’t see it listed: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=spark_CM

nemanja_codes · a year ago

Here it is:

https://hackernews-new-jobs.arm1.nemanjamitic.com/search?com...

thih9 · a year ago

Something still looks off, the earliest ad is from 2024-07, but the company posted more recent ads too.

I guess this is because they changed their ad’s headline from:

    ChartMogul | Remote (EU) | Full-time

to:

    ChartMogul (https://chartmogul.com )| Remote | Full-time

Other companies are similarly affected, e.g. Medusa:

- listed: https://hackernews-new-jobs.arm1.nemanjamitic.com/search?com...

- earliest ad listed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222858

- more recent ad on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42315828

Perhaps it’s the “)|” bit causing problems with some regexps.

BerislavLopac · a year ago

This is nice, but I find this one more detailed: https://hnhiring.com/trends