[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Would a DB of startup tech stacks be valuabl...
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Ask HN: Would a DB of startup tech stacks be valuable to you?
I'm imagining the user would be a Hiring Manager or Recruiter
looking for Engineers. If they need Ruby Engineers with startup
experience, they click the Ruby box from a tech drop-down list and
the search will retrieve the startups that also use it. Ideally,
you'd be able to sort by geographical area, founding year, latest
funding phase, number of employees (e.g. 50-200), and more. I would
also aim for matching the right area of the stack - for example,
the option to pick Python AND Backend, so you don't end up with
startups using Python only for Data Science/ML work. Note: I did
try the StackShare API and there is no filtering feature. So if you
purchase the 1,000-company plan, you have no control over what they
send you. It'll be a randomly generated list of 1,000 companies
that use the technology you requested, a hodgepodge of companies
all around the world, big and small, new and old. I look forward
to hearing your thoughts. Thanks!
Author : lsj0627
Score : 12 points
Date : 2023-02-21 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I would use it in a job search.
|
| I'm sure tech sales people would find it useful as well
| lsj0627 wrote:
| You're right. I forgot to mention that it'd be useful for job
| seekers, e.g Rustaceans, click that box ad find your companies!
|
| Question: how would tech sales people use it? I'm not familiar
| enough with the field to know their use case.
| chzblck wrote:
| This already exists in many of the Sales tools that are out there
| today.
|
| Zoominfo, Apollo, and Seamless all have the ability to show what
| types of technology a company is using.
| lsj0627 wrote:
| I didn't know this - I thought they were just sales prospecting
| tools with tons of features, but nothing involing to finding
| company tech stacks.
|
| Do you have experience working with these products and seeing
| its capabilities in finding the technologies companies are
| using?
|
| Thanks.
| chzblck wrote:
| Yes - In sales currently and use it to segment accounts. Ex -
| AWS/GCP/AZURE lab/hub/bitbucket.
|
| Apollo.io is free to sign up and use.
| lsj0627 wrote:
| Very interesting. And the same with other technologies,
| e.g. what companies use Rust or Vue.js?
| lsj0627 wrote:
| Actually, disregard my question - I decided to just do the
| Apollo Basic trial and view the Technologies in the
| Advanced Search.
|
| It's limited to cloud providers, as you mentioned, and just
| a few other tools (only one or two being tangentially
| related to the tech stack data needed for the idea
| presented it my post).
|
| It's a bummer, because I would like this product to already
| exist!
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| If I wanted to know what tech stack a site is using I would just
| pop open Maltego and find out. Which it seems like you are doing
| but just automating over a large list of companies and storing
| results in a db.
| lsj0627 wrote:
| Well, you lost me. I just went over to Maltego and it seems to
| be an investigations tech company (forensics, security, threat
| intelligence).
|
| How do you use this to find a company's tech stack?
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| Install the software, open it up, put in a website you want
| to know the stack of, scan it, get results back. It's been
| awhile since I have used it, and the interface/UI has a bit
| of learning curve, so might not be super intuitive on how to
| get the tech stack info, but it's there somewhere.
| lsj0627 wrote:
| I'll give it a shot - thank you!
| nithayakumar wrote:
| Ive seen data sets like this and they've been bad. My main issues
| have been that dataset isn't kept updated, theres no sense of
| proportion (e.g. is 1% of the team java or 50%), and there's
| often not enough companies in the dataset.
|
| So bad that I probably wouldn't buy this data without some proof
| that its good data
| lsj0627 wrote:
| This is really helpful feedback, thanks!
|
| Yes, keeping it updated is a hard job, but it needs to be done
| regularly.
|
| Can you elaborate on the sense of proportion problem?
|
| And as far as enough companies, can you give me an example of a
| specific search you might conduct and how many results you'd
| expect?
|
| Thanks!
| jonas-w wrote:
| I think any website where you can filter without any algorithms
| that think they are smarter than you, ads, seo, etc. is valuable.
| Imagine you had "direct" DB access to the data google, reddit,
| twitter, hackernews (we have HN on google bigquery, and its
| awesome), github, stackerflow, youtube, ... hold. Anyone who
| knows exactly what they want, will find it. People that don't
| know exactly what they want, may find it harder to find anything.
|
| I don't know about your specific use case, but personally
| anything like that is valuable to me.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| In HN style I'm going to suggest You could "just" scrape job
| postings for software Devs and get the same thing and have much
| more confidence it's accurate what people are using.
| lsj0627 wrote:
| Great point, thank you. However, I think this leaves out many
| companies - those that don't have job postings.
|
| I think a job board like startup.jobs would solve this by
| creating a job archive - then it would be prime scraping
| material. But it's only a job board with (mainly) current jobs.
|
| Thoughts?
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| >Great point, thank you. However, I think this leaves out
| many companies - those that don't have job postings
|
| Unless you're planning to cold call people and get them to
| pinky swear to tell you honestly what they're using or you
| have some other plan then you're somewhat stuck anyway for
| companies that don't post jobs.
|
| Also worth noting but plenty of companies won't even really
| tell you anyway. E.g plenty of companies will have language
| like "systems programming language" or "object oriented
| language". When they could be using anything from C-family to
| Haskell (leaving aside how secretive many Haskell jobs are or
| being hidden in custom dialects) You are going to be running
| into all kinds of human BS, it'll be fun but a can of worms
| nonetheless.
|
| >I think a job board like startup.jobs would solve this by
| creating a job archive - then it would be prime scraping
| material. But it's only a job board with (mainly) current
| jobs
|
| Not sure how much experience you have modelling data but this
| can also be trickier than expected to capture postings by
| date even leaving aside the fun of unstructured data and
| differences in models between platforms and your judgement
| calls needed to decide where you're crawling.
|
| Having cut my teeth scraping property listings of competitor
| websites you come to realise most boards incentivise people
| to delete and repost ads so they boost their recency score
| and appear higher in the search. So now you will have
| duplicates messing up your data which you want to deal with
| if you're trying to create value off your data.
|
| The classified site also doesn't like this so will try to
| stop this gaming of the system so that game of cat and mouse
| will normally mess up your scraping and dedupe logic too.
|
| As said it's a potentially fun can of worms to open. I was
| just making a joke about HN commenters tendency to massively
| underestimate the oceans of complexity that seperates their
| hello world project from an enterprise grade "just a CRUD
| app" system that people pay for. E.g all the people that
| could totally build twitter with a sqlite DB and some bash
| scripts + sellotape etc.
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