Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?

https://hnhiring.com/trends

by awll • 1 year ago

111 87 1 year ago

hnhiring.com

devKnight• 1 year ago

everything is trending down. is that because there are fewer job posts over all?

locusofself• 1 year ago

that's the only thing I can intuit from this graph. The relative popularity of languages seems irrelevant.

rossdavidh2• 1 year ago

So, thank-you for confirming that it's not just me. :)

rossdavidh2• 1 year ago

Actually, it does also confirm that, although it hasn't gotten better yet, during 2024 it did stop getting worse, at least.

scoperesolution• 1 year ago

Trends? Start your own business because nobody is hiring. That's the trend i'm seeing... sigh.

thaumaturgy• 1 year ago

Sincerely, yes.

A lot of talented people are struggling right now, but could take the time and energy they're spending on fruitless job applications and devote it to some modest-scale side project with commercial potential.

Worst-case scenario, you get an interesting portfolio project and something to talk about at a future interview. Possibly, you get something that pays the bills and avoids having to deal with everything that's gone wrong with tech hiring.

If you've been laid off from a technical role, you probably came away with enough knowledge to build a competing micro-service.

TheCapeGreek2• 1 year ago

Few people, even in decently earning roles like in tech, will have the runway to try and make something successful on their own all of a sudden after job loss.

Starting a freelancing practice is more likely to bear fruit, but it's a very different ballgame of overheads than "just" the core job itself, if you want to get the full rewards of being a freelancer.

conductr7• 1 year ago

Web 2.0 came out of the dotcom bust. As a HN oldtimer, I really wish I was seeing more posts on HN about people partnering up to build cool stuff right now given there’s ton of collective idle bandwidth out there. Maybe it’s happening somewhere else and HN is not the place for that these days?

CalRobert2• 1 year ago

Well, I tried to do something cool but I had rent to pay and kids to feed so I needed to get a day job (I was very fortunate to find one, on an HN who's hiring thread no less).

However, I don't have the savings a lot of people here seem to, perhaps because I'm in Europe.

myth_drannon• 1 year ago

It's more visible on twitter and build in public trend. But we are still far from the dotcom crash desperation, not sure if we ever will reach it.

harimau7773• 1 year ago

I mean, I'd love to do that. I just don't have the money.

jonshariat• 1 year ago

Thanks for putting this together. Curious if HN traffic is also down but intuitively this feels right.

askonomm2• 1 year ago

Looks like the downtrend has slowed, and almost stopped. This aligns with my observations on local job boards to me, and some programming language specific Slack channels I'm on that have #jobs boards, in that there's a slight uptick in jobs right now. This is good news, it seems.

layoric• 1 year ago

Do you think that is just the time of year or more significant?

askonomm2• 1 year ago

I'm not sure really, but I also did get a recruiter contact me for the first time in like 2 years. This is all anecdotal of course, but I'm hopeful.

kevin_thibedeau2• 1 year ago

There's always an uptick at the beginning of the year.

araes• 1 year ago

Somewhat correlates with the Layoffs.fyi trends [1][2].

Extreme lack of layoffs Q3 2020 to Q1 2022. Big rise through 2024, peaking at Q1 2023 and then slowly declining. Mostly tapered off to 2021 and 2022 levels near the start 2025.

Also, complimentary chart from Stackoverflow about the general trends in questions related to these categories [3]

[1] https://layoffs.fyi

[2] [layoffs.fyi chart] "Tech layoffs since Covid-19", https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRluXcoyZOl3...

[3] StackOverflow Trends, https://trends.stackoverflow.co/?tags=reactjs,python,typescr...

ProjectArcturis• 1 year ago

Anecdotally, I've been getting a lot more recruiter spam lately.

Jaygles• 1 year ago

Same, although most of the LinkedIn profiles of the recruiters are incredibly sparse. For me some of it might be scammy/spammy

mattmanser• 1 year ago

Here in the UK I was seeing the recruiter emails begin to return to more normal levels in Sept/Oct. Albeit with lower salaries than 2022/23.

But then it all abruptly stopped and disappeared again for a few months.

It's now started again but very slowly.

myko• 1 year ago

Same, though primarily for leadership positions. Most probably looking for someone to run an offshore team.

el_benhameen• 1 year ago

Yeah. Really slow in November/December (I assume holidays, budgets, etc.), but seems to be picking back up.

CoastalCoder• 1 year ago

Very cool.

Probably not so easy, but I'd be really interested in seeing the relative trends of (related to AI) vs. (not related to AI) job posts.

worik• 1 year ago

What a dreadful graph on the front page

y-axis has no units.

x-axis has no years

Two many data to be able to follow it

Sigh

stanleykm• 1 year ago

x axis has years but the months are inconsistent. Y axis is probably just the count of posts but that could be clearer

cryptoz• 1 year ago

Remarkably consistent downward trend for Android :(

kevin_thibedeau2• 1 year ago

Other than Typescript, they're all on a downward trend if you omit the COVID bump.

pkaye• 1 year ago

If you graph iOS and Android they are both on a downward trend.

OptionOfT3• 1 year ago

It's been really quiet. I was laid off twice in 2024. First in April after 10 years at the same place. There wasn't a lot. Got a new great opportunity, but restructurings happened, I was the last to join and... again laid off.

But now it feels even more quiet than April-May-June. I've been debating cutting down my cover letter into a couple of lines just telling the company why I find the role interesting, and removing the rest.

But it's hard.

bilsbie• 1 year ago

For one data point I always did better with a short, generic cover letter than a customized one.

Maybe employers like you more if you don’t look too interested?

OptionOfT3• 1 year ago

But these days half of the employers ask why you want to work somewhere, which is gauging interest.

So unsure. Plus, I haven't had success with my previous cover letter. So I figured I'd change something.

roland352• 1 year ago

I've stopped doing cover letters entirely and have had more luck. I've heard the same from others too.

I do have a few separate resumes with different focuses, and tweak a one sentence summary at the top.

dom96• 1 year ago

Great graph, crazy that we still haven't recovered to 2018/2019 levels

aprilthird20216• 1 year ago

We likely will not

Trasmatta• 1 year ago

2021 was such a bizarre year in so many ways. It feels like a post COVID fever dream in retrospect, and seeing that massive jump in job listings that year is a reminder of how weird it was.

thr0w• 1 year ago

The market was so insane.

cudgy3• 1 year ago

The job market and the capital markets are still insane. Unfortunately, I don’t think we reached the bottom yet given the astronomical real estate prices relative to incomes and high market valuations relative to earnings. Some signs of reality are starting like Real estate prices starting to fall in the Sunbelt of the US. The obvious commercial real estate bubble has not completely burst yet. So many markets are hanging like guillotine’s ready to drop. Markets have been buoyed by excess capital and rampant speculation by the wealthy for so long now; its shocking how long the charade has lasted.

conductr7• 1 year ago

My armchair macroeconomic take is Covid should have been an enormous financial depression but they flattened the curve and caused bubbles in some cases by printing so much money we’ll be paying the price for decades. It was certainly a huge reallocation/consolidation of wealth. I even think the somewhat untold story is just how much less well off a lot of Americans are. Like in my world, what I’ve seen amongst my access to HR data at a handful of large companies, the executive class (maybe VP and up) did great, the low/minimum wage class did great (labor shortage helped wages net of inflation), but there’s a huge mass of people in the middle that perhaps are only making 10% more than their 2019 wage right now after all the inflation. House prices ~doubled so unless they were already a homeowner acquiring one is basically impossible now, especially with rates were they are. They didn’t own much stock so largely did not participate in that either. It’s a different world and I think we can’t say for sure what will happen next.

aprilthird20216• 1 year ago

Yeah, when people talk about the emptying of the middle class, I never really thought about it much till I saw it happen with COVID. You either made it out one end, or are sliding down to the other.

joshdavham• 1 year ago

Nice timing with this post! I guess there will be another new HN Who is Hiring? in a couple days

dartos• 1 year ago

As someone who’s been in the industry for 15 years and got laid off just today for the 2nd time in the past year.

This is depressing.

mttpgn• 1 year ago

What a great reply this graph can make the next time we see VCs on X complaining how, "Everyone I talk to has so, so many engineering positions they just can't fill". By these measurements, the job market looks worse now than it did at the troughs of lockdown.

ErikAugust• 1 year ago

Ha. Not that anyone lies to VCs or anything.

Glyptodon• 1 year ago

Midpandemic was great for hiring in my memory, but I guess that was after the lockdowns probably.

harimau7773• 1 year ago

Personally, I'm getting close to just giving up. I've completed hundreds of applications, contacted hundreds of recruiters, and spent hundred of hours studying. All with nothing to show for it. Every single job I see has hundreds of applications. I have no idea what to do.

rr8082• 1 year ago

IPO market is still dead. VC companies are all stuck in PE purgatory. AI was a bright spark but now Deepseek is killing that dream too.

aaronblohowiak2• 1 year ago

this is something i dont understand because P/E's are so high, why so few IPOs?

rr8082• 1 year ago

Who knows, maybe the private valuations are even higher, or maybe they think there will be a boom this year which will be a better time to sell.

cudgy3• 1 year ago

Interesting take on deepseek. I think deepseek may be a breath of fresh air slightly leveling the playing field for small startups and individual developers, Assuming the claimed reduced training cost are real.

notatoad• 1 year ago

does this account for all the listings? or is there a mystery "other" category that's rising as these ones fall?

cudgy3• 1 year ago

The listings in this graph are almost entirely from the San Francisco Bay area.

lolinder3• 1 year ago

I know this doesn't make things better, but it bears repeating: much as the media would like it to be, this is not caused by AI. Two major things happened in 2022 that everyone knew would cause this if they stuck around:

* The Section 174 changes went into effect, requiring all software to be expensed as R&D, which means it can't be deducted from profits directly and instead has to be amortized over 5 years [0].

* Interest rates went back up starting in Feb 2022 and continuing through Aug 2023. This chart [1] is a near-perfect mirror of the job trends.

I know this doesn't help anyone who's struggling right now, but it does serve to emphasize that this didn't just happen, and it wasn't the result of technological advances making us obsolete. Federal policy was set up to encourage an enormous amount of investment into software development, and it's now... not. Turns out politics matters.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34627712

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DfOX

Sytten• 1 year ago

I really don't understand why nobody is talking about it anymore. It's a big deal for startups.

harimau7773• 1 year ago

What would be the point? Politics is hopelessly broken so even if people did talk about it there is nothing that we can do about it.

guyfromfargo• 1 year ago

Thank you for posting this! I can’t believe section 174 is not more well known. I run a small software company and hiring an engineer is literally 5X more expensive as hiring a marketing or support person in a post section 174 world.

la64710• 1 year ago

Yes but there is also another force that I see playing out now. With two decades of continuous training companies have grown an army of people overseas who can do any software or IT jobs at a level good enough to really be competitive to domestic workers. Offshore locations today are not the same it was twenty years ago both from quality and quantity perspective. No point in staying blind to this phenomenon.

aprilthird20216• 1 year ago

I think the most competition to domestic workers is offshore workers working in their same timezone.

Hiring within the country of the company is a bit of a prestige move a more profitable / affluent company can do to afford political power. Similar to German car manufacturing

aprilthird20216• 1 year ago

If anything, AI hype is actually helping keep many of us employed. And if/when it bursts, there will be more layoffs.

Interest rates have an effect, but we also couldn't have survived with NZIR and Federal money printing like during COVID.

meragrin_3• 1 year ago

If anything, AI hype is actually helping keep many of us employed.

AI is also going to keep many of us unemployed. I'm running a small version of Deepseek R1 locally and it does an extremely good job of predicting of where I'm going in a number of situations. I went to pull out some code into another function. As soon as I finished typing the name of the new function, it immediately suggested the exact code I was planning to move into the new function. All I had to do was hit tab. I didn't have to do the copy and paste myself. This was thirty lines of code and it chose the correct starting line and ending line.

baggy_trough• 1 year ago

requiring all software to be expensed as R&D

This is false. You don't have to expense maintenance as R&D.

meragrin_3• 1 year ago

* The Section 174 changes went into effect, requiring all software to be expensed as R&D, which means it can't be deducted from profits directly and instead has to be amortized over 5 years [0].

I get the short term initial issue. I don't see why it would be an issue to stick current level of staffing until it normalizes 5 years later. I'm not sure this was ever a major issue. It just seems like a convenient excuse to cover up something else.

Interest rates are obviously definitely an issue.

this is not caused by AI.

It may not be caused by AI, but it is going to affect hiring numbers from now on.

rtpg• 1 year ago

I feel like the 174 issues might be more painful for smaller teams? Like if almost all your costs are in salaries, and you bring in a new person, suddenly you're booking profits despite not having cash profits?

That was my understanding, at least. That R&D salaries make this all weird.

pllbnk• 1 year ago

We will see by how much. I seriously doubt it improves productivity by a huge margin; if I had to guess, it would be in the ballpark of 10-20%. In the end, it's not the main driver for hiring or lack thereof. Companies that will need to get stuff done and that will be able to make enough money will hire as much as they need to get it done.

lolinder3• 1 year ago

The Section 174 changes are terrible for startups, but yes, they're only inconvenient for established companies. Many startups won't even last long enough to amortize all of their dev expenses, especially if they owe taxes on "profits" earned during those first few years. The whole startup ecosystem (which is what this set of job listings is largely measuring) relied on being unprofitable and therefore untaxable.

It may not be caused by AI, but it is going to affect hiring numbers from now on.

That remains to be seen. I can say with high confidence that we did not have tech that was capable of reducing the need for engineers from 2022 to 2024. It's hard to predict the future.

lgleason• 1 year ago

Basically the entire market is dead right now.

aprilthird20216• 1 year ago

If this is dead, I don't see many signs it's going to liven up soon...

phyzix57612• 1 year ago

As lolinder stated, one of the main causes of this is Section 174 where software is now amortized as R&D over 5 years which means companies can't treat is as a regular expense. This leads to companies hiring less.

There is a bill that is stuck in the Senate which aims at reversing this (among other things): https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7024

Please reach out to your senators and tell them to support this bill so our job prospects can return to normal.

holyroller• 1 year ago

This is effectively a subsidy for the tech industry, why is this incentive necessary here? It's not specifically targeting startups from what I can tell and potentially just a kickback to large employers and investors.

aaronblohowiak2• 1 year ago

Why is forced amortization of payroll a subsidy?

phyzix57612• 1 year ago

All software jobs, including those in startups, are affected by the amortization rule. It makes it harder for startups to afford more software engineers because they have to pay taxes on cash they don't actually have.

The only companies the new amortization rule helps is big established firms that can afford to amortize because they have excess cashflow.

belter• 1 year ago

The chart correlates well, with similar references from the US and similar related markets (see [1], [2], [3] and [4] ).

At a more macro level, for the United States, I looked at U.S. unemployment data, for the last 80 years. Starting from 1945 until today Jan 2025. All jobs, not only Technology. What jumped out immediately is a clear cyclical pattern: Unemployment peaks occur, on average, every 7–8 years, with some variability.

- Shorter Gaps (3–5 years) showed up in the 1950s and early 1960s, often tied to small recessions.

- Longer Gaps (10–11 years) happened before the early 1990s recession, again around the early 2000s, and more recently between 2009–2010 and 2020.

- Outliers include the early 1980s (double-dip recession pushing unemployment above 10%) and, the 2020’s pandemic spike, which briefly soared past 14%.

Overall, the business cycle hasn’t radically changed over 80 years: Expansions that push unemployment down to historic lows, followed by recessions that create sharp spikes in unemployment.

Assuming 7–8 years is a decent rule of thumb, and based on US history of the last 80 years, we are in for a next continued peak into growing unemployment, until at least 2027–2028.

At a smaller scale, local trends in geopolitics, tariffs, AI adoption, and political dysfunction reflect (or confirm) the broader macro trend.

Plan accordingly...And hope I am wrong...

[1] Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

[2] Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in Canada: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXCATPSOFTDEVE

[3] Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in Germany: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE

[4] Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United Kingdom: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXGBTPSOFTDEVE

vipartX• 1 year ago

CTO para revolución musical. 0 cash, 10% equity. Si puedes codear más rápido que un tweet de Musk, DM.

Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?

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