Tell HN: "Who's Hiring?" Threads Are a Mess
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1352571I've never been a fan of how hard it is to sift through "Who's Hiring?" threads, but the recent "Who's hiring in <region>?" threads are not the solution. They clutter up the homepage more, and they still don't fix the fact that there's 63 comments on the "Who's Hiring in Europe Thread?" and there probably aren't more than 5 for any one city (so if you don't want to relocate, you're still getting a low signal:noise ratio).
What we need (unless pg were to want to actually add some kind of structured hiring functionality, which seems unlikely) is a standardized format that makes it easy to Ctrl+F through them to find things you want.
Here's a proposed format:
<general description of the job, mentioning the company name, what you're doing, the level of experience it is, etc. whatever you want>
Location: <List any way someone would refer to your location or locations nearby-enough that it still applies. Include the word "remote" if you'll accept remote workers>
Technologies: <List all of the technologies that someone in this job will be using>
Position: <Include the word the word "developer", "designer", or "infrastructure" if it's one of those, but you can go into more detail>
So first you describe the job like normal (but possibly leaving out some of the info that will come later), then you add what amounts to metadata to make it easy to search through.
Here's an example of how a job (http://posterous.theresumator.com/apply/JbAS4A/) would look when translated to this format (Note that I'm not associated with Posterous and that I may be misrepresenting the job in this post. I just chose it because it was on the jobs page.):
Posterous is looking for battle-tested, seasoned, war-hardened backend infrastructure engineers who love building and maintaining software used by millions of people. You'll work with a driven team of like-minded software engineers to build the next great Internet treasure. You are a skilled craftsman when it comes to capacity, uptime and scaling, and love it when your site is humming along like a well-oiled machine.
We want someone who has built for massive scale and will be able to build our tech stack to support hundreds of millions of uniques per month.
Compensation includes full time salary, generous equity compensation plan, and benefits.
Location: San Francisco, SF, Bay Area, Silicon Valley
Technologies: Linux, NoSQL, MongoDB, Casandra
Position: Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Note that I listed "Silicon Valley" as a location even though it's not. Someone looking for jobs in the Valley would probably be willing to consider jobs in SF, so they should list it. When it doubt, list it.
It's a little rough and certainly needs some tweaking, so I'd love comments on how to improve it. But I think that some standardized format like this could make it a lot easier to look through these. If you're looking for a Rails job anywhere, Ctrl+F for "rails". If you're looking for a job in NYC, Ctrl+F for "NYC" or "New York". Much easier than having to look through them all.