Hacker News “Who is Hiring?” top-level comments over time

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A reminder that all Hacker News posts and comments are available on BigQuery and can be queried for free: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;console.cloud.google.com&#x2F;marketplace&#x2F;details&#x2F;y-combinator&#x2F;hacker-news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;console.cloud.google.com&#x2F;marketplace&#x2F;details&#x2F;y-combi...</a> (the `full` table is up-to-date; ignore the others)<p>Here&#x27;s a query for a rough reproduction of what&#x27;s asked in the title:<p><pre><code> WITH whoishiring_threads AS ( SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE `by` = &quot;whoishiring&quot; AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(title, &quot;Ask HN: Who is hiring?&quot;) ) SELECT FORMAT_TIMESTAMP(&quot;%Y-%m&quot;, `timestamp`) as year_month, COUNT(*) as num_toplevel_posts FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE parent IN (SELECT id FROM whoishiring_threads) GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1 </code></pre> Which results in something like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdoOZdo5H2cY_VyiSMXeFSQfBo&#x2F;edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;spreadsheets&#x2F;d&#x2F;13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...</a><p>Still a bit of room to clean up the query, though, and there are some differences from the chart in the post.

I started and abandoned a little side project a while ago where I wanted to see which employers tended to have the exact same (or fuzzy-the-same) &quot;Who&#x27;s Hiring&quot; post month after month. Goal would be to find some signal about which posts were actually resulting in hiring (in other words, the company didn&#x27;t come back with the same posting) and which ones were just trawling for the same job month after month without actually hiring anyone. Was going to call it &quot;Who&#x27;s Not Hiring?&quot;

Since I spent a lot of time looking at &quot;Who is hiring post&quot; for fun anyway, I was looking for a way to make it productive and came up with a different idea [0].<p>I was wondering if you could detect the slow rise of a new technology and profit from it. Either by retraining or more directly, in the case of crypto, by trading on that info. I put together something, focused on a couple of crypto technologies and as luck would have it, it&#x27;s still online !<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datum.alwaysdata.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;data-hnjob-trends&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datum.alwaysdata.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;data-hnjob-trends&#x2F;index....</a>

I like this. I&#x27;d also love to see the venn diagram of &quot;Who is Hiring?&quot; top-level comments and a mix of the best and worst feedback about those companies and their hiring processes during that time. I want to see if companies are getting better or worse. I just wasted over a month with a company only to get feedback like, &quot;The CTO wanted you to know the Bitcoin whitepaper more&quot;. Companies, as the market gets more competitive, are only doing shadier and shadier things with their time and communication.

Had a similar thought a few years ago and added a total posts chart to go along with the technology trends, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hntrends.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;may.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hntrends.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;may.html</a><p>Looks like you have June 2021 as the all time high as well. Doesn&#x27;t look like June 2022 is going to get even close, which makes sense based on current freezes&#x2F;layoffs.

Can we overlay this with the nasdaq or some other stock index&#x2F;other economic indicators?

Haha, I had fun making this a week ago, to learn more about the inverse: &quot;Number of &#x27;layoff&#x27; posts on HN vs NASDAQ&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;v4qPut5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;v4qPut5</a>

Your blog post starts by discussing posts being down this month (June 2022) but the graph provided starts in 2011. For the sake of the discussion, a second graph that starts June 2021 to current, and in monthly increments would be more enlightening. Because ultimately I think that&#x27;s what we all want to know. In your copious free time would you mind adding that?<p>Thank you for writing this.

Anecdotally, after two years of literally just looking at tumbleweed in the application inbox, as a still-hiring company I have rarely felt as swamped with really interesting candidates and annoying recruiters as in the past four weeks.<p>The tide has turned for sure.

Very cool! Would be interesting to try to control for hacker news popularity - something like total upvotes or total comments as a denominator might make this look even worse.

Forgetting which bit of macroeconomics this comes from, but the labor market is one of the slowest to settle (i.e. find equilibrium). Capital (real estate&#x2F;manufacturing investments, stuff used to make stuff) are the slowest. So the capital unemployment rate should generally be greater than the unemployment rate, for instance.<p>The anecdote of Tesla posting a bunch of jobs just before the 10% reduction was announced comes to mind. Lagging indicator stuff.

Front page! Way to go Joe!

Meta-side question I&#x27;ve had since being part of this community for awhile, how come when a YC staked company posts they are hiring comments are disabled? As I post this &quot;Generally Intelligent&quot; (YC S17) is hiring for ML people (spot 15 per my last refresh.)

From another point I would like to check who wants to be hired posts by comparing who is hiring. I can see that hundreds of ML engineers and Data Scientists looking for a job but on the other side there are not that many jobs for ML folks.

Another way to interpret these results is that HN has gotten more popular as a place to source talent. It would be interesting to see top-level comments by number of total users on the site (as a proxy for popularity).

Very cool to see this data analyzed! I wonder if the number of posts could be normalized against some other measure of HN popularity. Maybe total number of posts?

I wonder if you could find out how many positions from HN get filled up.<p>Say by comparing with an employees official job site and the HN post role.

In economics data, they tend to do seasonal adjustments. I would be curious to see if there’s seasonality here.

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Am I supposed to see a dip at the end? Hmm maybe if you squint quite a lot!

Uh, so, HN predicted the pandemic? :) Curious what&#x27;s going on there.

Ouch. White diagrams on a black background. Someone needs a lesson in design.