Where to join a startup? Analyzing 'Who is Hiring' posts on Hacker News

If anybody is interested in doing more of these sorts of analyses, I have the corpus of who's hiring posts since January 2012 in JSON format available at <a href="http://hnhiring.me/data/comments-{thread-id}.json" rel="nofollow">http://hnhiring.me/data/comments-{thread-id}.json</a>.<p>The thread ids for fulltime/freelancer for each month are here: <a href="http://hnhiring.me/data/threads.json" rel="nofollow">http://hnhiring.me/data/threads.json</a>.

I would be interested in seeing a follow-up analysis where the figures are adjusted to account for the resident populations in each of the listed cities (and metro areas).<p>Looking at US cities only, the Bay Area is utterly exceptional in terms of tech/startup career opportunities. Amsterdam (at 4.15 jobs per 100k) is better than NY or LA, but is an order of magnitude worse than San Francisco.<p><pre><code> City Pop Jobs Jobs/100k New York 8175133 165 2.018315788 Los Angeles 3792621 58 1.52928542 Chicago 2695598 21 0.779047914 San Francisco 805235 344 42.72044807 Boston 617594 64 10.36279498 Washington 601723 23 3.822356799 Seattle 608660 42 6.900404167 Austin 790390 30 3.79559458 Palo Alto 64403 89 138.1923202 Amsterdam 820256 34 4.1450474</code></pre>

I tried those posts three times now and they did not work for me. Not even a phone interview. Sure I am a recent grad (this december) who comes from a developing country (visa issues) and I lack open source experience, but my internship was with a good company and I happen to know a lot about various issues that face my fellow developers. Hopefully someone with a similar circumstance can advise me on who to work around this.

Why do you say "I doubt anyone would have me"? J1 visas aren't that difficult.<p>You can just try reaching out and talking with people, a lot of companies do office hours, you can schedule meetings with them through Skype or Google Hangouts.<p>I have been working on a platform (engager.io) to help companies and people to find place based on their preferences, we are in early stage, right now one of our features is precisely office hours, so you can schedule a meeting with someone from this companies. Right now we got a couple of companies from NYC, planning to add more and release new features soon.

This analysis is wrong. Or at least missing a lot of data.<p>I personally posted jobs from Edinburgh, Scotland on the Who's Hiring thread of the month (and ended up making two hires from it) in 2012. My most recent post on Who's Hiring was the number one voted post on that particular topic. Not sure how the data was collated, but it's not accurate.

When posting job postings to HN, please, please, always make the location extremely prominent. Preferably in the title.<p>I can't comment on YC job posts to say this, although the one on the front page right now gives the location, which is awesome.

Article commenters were surprised about the high London figures. Here in the UK, I've seen massive growth in the hacker community at the grassroots level. The Hacker News meetup (<a href="http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/</a>) was 20 people in a pub back in 2010. Now it's 400-500 hackers in a large auditorium every month. Google Campus in East London is full to bursting every day with people working on their own projects. It's pretty inspiring to be a techie "between jobs" here in London

It's interesting to see Melbourne and Sydney at the bottom of the top 25 list. I heard the other day that 20% of the Australian workforce is in IT -- more than the US and UK. So it seems we have a lot of non-startup IT companies (or, more likely, companies that don't identify that way or appear on HN)

Is Mountain View not considered? I would think it would be top 5. Maybe even #1. I just popped open a single who's hiring thread and found 14 mentions.

It look like that non-english-speaking country does not post a lot on HN.