I think it'd be really interesting to see what kind of data exists for hires that have resulted from HN hiring threads or otherwise. Maybe an anonymous survey or something could capture this?
I've yet to see a working survey in HN, especially if the group asked is small (people who applied and/or got hired). I asked the question open now (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811805" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811805</a>), let's see.<p>From older questions like <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826312" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826312</a> (and others I can't find right now) it seems companies get good candidates. But the who-wants-to-get-hired and freelancer posts don't get enough contacts, those threads also receive much less upvotes and disappear faster from the frontpage.<p>Personally I wonder if users realize the who-wants-to-be-hired thread has multiple pages? There's a 'More' link at the bottom because it got over 500 comments.