[HN Gopher] Insights from over 10,000 comments on "Ask HN: Who I...
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Insights from over 10,000 comments on "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" using
GPT-4o
Author : comcuoglu
Score : 161 points
Date : 2024-07-04 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tamerc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tamerc.com)
| lukasgw97 wrote:
| Crazy, didn't know that React is so important! Well done!
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Nice work, OP. Looking at the graph, I sure hope we did not hit
| "Peak HN" in Q2 2023.
| comcuoglu wrote:
| IMHO, I believe the peak was due to a combination of Zero
| Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) and the pandemic, both of which
| have faded out this year. Elon Musk's highly publicized firing
| of a big part of the Twitter work force also set a precedent
| for lay-offs in the industry. But I am still optimistic that we
| will many such peaks ahead of us.
| raydev wrote:
| > Elon Musk's highly publicized firing of a big part of the
| Twitter work force also set a precedent for lay-offs in the
| industry
|
| Layoffs across the industry were already well underway when
| Musk completed his first round. I think some tech company
| execs were happy to use Musk as a high profile excuse, but
| investors everywhere were demanding layoffs/corrections as
| early as Summer 2022.
| rareitem wrote:
| I really like the graph at the 'what javascript frameworks are in
| demand?' part. Any insight to share about that?
| comcuoglu wrote:
| Yes, later this week I will follow up with something to tell a
| little bit about the animation and the sphere positioning, that
| graph was kind of the most fun in writing this blog post. Thank
| you for your feedback!
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Honestly I would just prefer to see it ranked as a table or
| similar to the databases on.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| Surprised to see Redux featured so prominent in JS frameworks
| section, since it is so often criticized while many praise newer
| competitors like Zustand.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| or Jotai!
| pacomerh wrote:
| From my experience some of these companies that are already
| using new state libraries still have code in older libs like
| Redux and it's important for them to hire candidates that
| understand how they work since they changed the way you think
| about state, and if you understand that it's very likely you'll
| understand the other ones.
| blowski wrote:
| I wonder how this would compare against a random sample of jobs
| on, say, Indeed or LinkedIn. My experience of Hacker News is that
| it's a very biased group (in a good way) to the general industry.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've heard that many of the jobs posted on general jobs boards
| like that are never intended to result in a hire. They are
| posted when the company already knows who they are going to
| hire, but are legally obligated to post the position, or when
| the company wants to manufacture evidence that "no qualified
| candidates" could be found locally.
| 7thpower wrote:
| I've never heard of this outside of government contracts that
| require n+X. Is this a visa related workaround or what?
|
| Or is it just chatter from the grapevine?
| fishtacos wrote:
| I can tell you that when I moved from a contract position
| to full time at Dell Services (now NTT Data Services), they
| had to review and possibly? interview 2 additional
| candidates despite hiring from within.
|
| We did have many work visa employees though.
|
| We worked with Healthcare clients. Big ones.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Could be visa-related, it's very easy to craft a posting
| that only your already-identified preferred candidate will
| qualify for. I firsthand know of companies that did this
| for H-1B employees.
|
| Or any public sector job where positions have to be posted
| but you already have your internal hire, son-in-law, or
| cousin lined up.
|
| But, it's mostly just rumor I've heard.
| Onawa wrote:
| H1B visa workaround. Companies have to show that there are
| no qualified US candidates before they are able to use the
| H1B visa process. But there have been many abusers of the
| system. https://www.utahbusiness.com/systemic-abuse-of-
| the-h-1b-lott...
| roncesvalles wrote:
| I would say that's more prevalent in HN. A lot of the "Who's
| Hiring" posts are veiled show-and-tells. Some of those
| companies clearly have no intention of hiring. Even got an
| automatic rejection email from one of those (within a minute
| of applying). To be fair, it does work - I've discovered some
| interesting startups and market niches from the Who's Hiring
| threads.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Interesting. I hadn't considered that angle, and my
| expectation was that this would be less prevalent here.
| codetrotter wrote:
| As an opposite data point, when I was looking for a job I
| interviewed with multiple companies that I found on HN who
| is hiring. And one of them ended up hiring me. Two years
| later I work for them still.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's usually tells that it's a compliance post.
|
| Used to be very specific instructions about mailing a resume
| to an address with a reference number. And advertised only in
| the newspaper. But Immigration said they can't do that one
| anymore; has to be the same submission methods (email,
| webform, whatever) as an actually open position and
| advertised/listed in the same places too.
|
| But they'll still have the other tells, which is very
| specific experience and education requirements which happen
| to line up exactly with their preferred candidate. Sorry, we
| did our best, but we can't find any local candidates with a 4
| year BS degree, a minor in Clown Studies, and 3 years
| experience with very specific software that isn't used many
| places (experience most likely obtained at the hiring company
| during internship or while on OPT; or while on H1-B if this
| is in support of a green card, rather than in support of
| H1-B).
| epolanski wrote:
| I've had few interactions with HN crowd as I've posted my
| availability for consulting/freelancing and I feel like I don't
| like the bias.
|
| People needing freelancers for few weeks/months to complete
| projects where the requirements are glueing the usual APIs and
| solving the usual Safari bugs asking me Leetcode questions are
| out of their mind.
|
| I am not applying for a full time position, I don't care at all
| about your mission and I'm not a cofounder that is going to
| make or break your startup, I don't give two damns if you think
| you're gonna revolutionize _insert the usual sass but we do it
| better_.
|
| Discord is by far better for finding work in your domain and
| related to technologies you like, and you can ask for much more
| money because people already know you're experienced on the
| topics you share on that discord.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| > Using Selenium, I used a script to google iteratively for
| strings query = f"ask hn who is hiring {month} {year}" to get the
| IDs of the items that represent the monthly threads.
|
| FYI, you could've just used the hackernews API, and get all posts
| by the user `whoishiring`, which submits all these who is hiring
| posts. And then filter out only the posts where the title starts
| with "Ask HN: Who is hiring?", as this bot also submits the 'Who
| wants to be hired?' and 'Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?' posts.
|
| https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/whoishiring.json?...
| comcuoglu wrote:
| This makes just so much sense and would spare me 65 lines of
| code. Thank you!
| SushiHippie wrote:
| No worries! Btw in your database graph "Snowflake" seems to
| be off by two positions, as it has a smaller count than
| ElasticSearch and ClickHouse, but appears in front of them.
| tagyro wrote:
| Also NER would have done a better job imo
| codetrotter wrote:
| Also if you want to manually browse them, look at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
| herodoturtle wrote:
| What a great write up - thank you.
|
| Someone in NYC give this person a job! ^_^
| klyrs wrote:
| GPT-4o is not a person.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| Did GPT-4o do the write up?
| gajnadsgjoas wrote:
| This should have "Show HN" tag Also you don't have to use
| selenium or HN api - there are DBs with updated HN data
| comcuoglu wrote:
| Could you maybe link me one of those? I've googled a bit but
| didn't find ready-to-use DBs with that data.
| pvg wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563
| comcuoglu wrote:
| Thank you, looks promising.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40782787
|
| Also the clickhouse dataset, which is free.
|
| Google BigQuery can become very expensive.
| pvg wrote:
| It's handy but I think for your use case, the regular API
| works fine. For instance, you could have just pulled all
| the whoishiring posts
|
| https://hacker-
| news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/whoishiring.json?...
|
| without the googling hoops. Not that this is very helpful
| after you're done!
| pvg wrote:
| Show HN is for things someone has made that other people can
| try and this is a write up which is perfectly fine as it is -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
| fragmede wrote:
| > To post, submit a story whose title begins with "Show HN".
| pvg wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by that. Most reading material
| is just fine as a regular post and can't be a Show HN,
| thats very near the top of the thing I linked:
|
| _On topic: things people can run on their computers or
| hold in their hands. For hardware, you can post a video or
| detailed article. For books, a sample chapter is ok.
|
| Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists,
| and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so
| can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead._
|
| Things that can't be Show HN can be perfectly fine regular
| HN posts, just like this thing already is.
| gajnadsgjoas wrote:
| Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to
| submit your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use
| of the site should be for curiosity.
|
| I don't know, 0 posts and two comments, first post with
| self promotion right away. I had a feeling it's not
| allowed, oh well
| pvg wrote:
| I'm completely confused here, sorry. Are you talking
| about this submission? People submitting their own work
| with their first post is totally fine, especially if
| they're around to talk about it. These are some of the
| best threads HN has to offer, often. The guideline is
| about not using HN to post your own stuff exclusively but
| it's, you know, a guideline rather than a mathematical
| constraint so the trivial case of posting your own stuff
| on HN for the first time is not merely fine, it's a good
| thing.
|
| Edit: Maybe I'm figuring it out, is it that you thought
| that self-posting is strongly discouraged and that 'Show
| HN' is a label you're supposed to use to identify self-
| posting? They're not directly related, Show HN is just a
| special HN category with its own subsection and its own
| extra rules. Nobody _has_ to use it but if you do use it,
| the post has to be within those rules. The other,
| somewhat orthogonal thing is that you can post your own
| stuff (in or outside Show HN), just don 't overdo it.
| BadCookie wrote:
| Interesting data, but I think the percentage of remote listings
| is misleading. Many "remote" jobs now require you to live within
| commuting distance of a particular city, usually SF or NY.
| comcuoglu wrote:
| I agree, I've realized too late that I should have introduced a
| "Hybrid" category in this.
| gwd wrote:
| Nit: There appears to be both a "React Native" and a "React-
| Native" bubble in the JS framework graph.
| pacomerh wrote:
| there's also a Node.js and NodeJs
| comcuoglu wrote:
| Both fixed now, thanks.
| omoikane wrote:
| > https://tamerc.com/posts/ask-hn-who-is-hiring/#what-javascri...
|
| "Node.js" and "NodeJS" are drawn as separate spheres, is that
| intentional? Similarly for "Vue.js" and "VueJS". (Maybe the same
| for "Angular" vs "AngularJS" too, although the former might be
| referring to Angular TypeScript).
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Angular and AngularJS are distinct from each other; the other
| pairs are not.
| serial_dev wrote:
| AngularJS support has officially ended as of January 2022.
| Angular is the actively supported "version".
|
| My vague memory of this is that AngularJS from v1 to v2 was
| such a huge difference (and arguably some percentage of the
| community qualify this update as a colossal f up), that they
| decided to go with a different name, and they also came to
| their senses and their backwards incompatible changes are no
| longer so bad.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I'm convinced Angular's adoption of RxJS for HTTP requests
| was a cunning move to cement job security.
| comcuoglu wrote:
| Thanks, is fixed now.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Any chance you could run a comparison of the number of Rust vs
| Golang jobs over time?
|
| I seem to have noticed that Rust has gotten more common than
| golang in the job postings, but it's hard to verify without code
| because there are so many false positives for "go" on any post.
| andrepd wrote:
| Using a 100 billion parameter LLM to `grep --count` surely is
| something
| snek_case wrote:
| Can't wait to be able to run this locally using electron.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Read the second part of what they said
|
| > it's hard to verify without code because there are so many
| false positives for "go" on any post.
|
| Hence grep being insufficient in this case.
| gammarator wrote:
| You can't really trust that the LLM gets it right either,
| though.
| fragmede wrote:
| It didn't. As noted elsewhere, there the bubble cloud has
| Vue.js and "Vue Js", among others.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Using a 100B parameter LLM to overcome the large amount of
| experience required to learn how to do natural language
| processing one's self rather than using a library to do it
| sure is something.
|
| I should write a bot to analyze users and hide those who are
| actively and regularly negative online or on a particular
| forum and hide their comments.
| echelon wrote:
| > I should write a bot to analyze users and hide those who
| are actively and regularly negative online or on a
| particular forum and hide their comments.
|
| Yes, please! I'd sponsor this work if you want donations.
|
| A browser plugin would be even better.
|
| I want to filter out (or at least highlight): ads,
| sponsored content, clickbait, rage, negativity, trolling,
| crypto (much of it anyway), assholes, rudeness, politically
| partisan, spam emails, etc.
|
| If this could work on every website, and eventually every
| pane of glass (phone, etc.), it would be truly magical and
| absolutely game changing for the trajectory of the
| internet.
|
| I want more signal and less negativity. And fewer people
| trying to sell me on things (unless those things are
| interesting ideas).
|
| This is the correct way to fight the algorithm and the
| walled off platforms.
| comcuoglu wrote:
| While this made me laugh and there is some truth to it, the
| nice thing when running the process described in the blog
| post is that you don't need to know what or how you want to
| count - the LLM has the knowledge to classify it correctly
| enough to get good estimations. Go and Rust are both good
| examples of words that have multiple meanings and are
| pre-/suffix to many other words.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| There's 3 matches for " go " on this page (before writing my
| comment) but only 2 of them pertain to GoLang.
| IanCal wrote:
| It's not doing that though, and if you'd done classification
| tasks you'd realise the huge benefit that comes from taking a
| computationally expensive system and using it to solve _one
| off problems_ that were very time consuming, and doing it
| easily.
|
| The article says it cost ~$50. That's _astonishing_. That 's
| 25 minutes of my billable time.
| comcuoglu wrote:
| In total numbers I got 539 jobs saying that they want Rust
| experience and 695 want Go experience. I think I should have
| added another line-chart showing the programming language
| distribution over time, thanks for the idea.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Thanks for looking this up. It's especially interesting bc if
| I search "golang" on LinkedIn jobs, I see 5,185 results (in
| the US), but I only get 148 results for "rust".
|
| Hardly scientific, but shows the risk of using Hacker News to
| draw overly strong conclusions of language popularity.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| -
| localfirst wrote:
| how do you create these perfect tables with just text?
| genghisjahn wrote:
| We need LLMs for this?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Really cool.
|
| I'd love to see a similar analysis to "Who Wants to be Hired".
| What trends exist in folks struggling to find work? That can help
| point people to how to target their career growth.
| t-writescode wrote:
| This is very neat! Thanks for using your time and literal dollars
| to work through this!
|
| As an added detail regarding the "remote" v "in-person", another
| interesting statistic, to me, is to know how many of those in-
| person job-seeking companies are repeats! It could absolutely
| mean they're growing rapidly, OR it could mean they're having
| trouble finding candidates. Equally, missing remotes could mean
| either they're getting who they need OR they're going out of
| business.
|
| All interesting plots on the graph!
| comcuoglu wrote:
| This kind of input is exactly what I've hoped for submitting it
| here, thank you. I agree!
| magicalhippo wrote:
| We're a growing B2B company in Norway. We struggled for years
| to fill in-person positions. We've been at least 2-3 devs short
| for the past 6+ years.
|
| That is, until December last year. Then it was like a flood
| gate had opened up. Suddenly we had tons of candidates to try
| to select from.
|
| I knew things were bad over in bay area and such, but I didn't
| expect it to hit the market over the pond here so quickly and
| abruptly.
| jddj wrote:
| Nice charts, which lib? I'm on mobile currently and can't easily
| dig any deeper to answer my own question
| comcuoglu wrote:
| Chart.js (with the geo plugin for the choropleth chart) and
| three.js for the bubble-chart.
| bobbywilson0 wrote:
| Cool analysis with GPT-4o! I was doing some messing around with
| the same dataset recently around the "Who is Hiring" and "Who
| wants to be hired". Although I was just using pandas and spacy.
| (I was job supply and demand with the US FED interest rates here:
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bobbywilson0/hn-whos-hirin...)
|
| I can actually see how nice it would be for an llm to be able to
| disambiguate 'go' and 'rust'. However, it does seem a bit
| disappointing that it isn't consolidating node.js and nodejs or
| react-native and react native.
|
| I'm curious on the need to do use selenium script to google to
| iterate, here's my script:
| https://gist.github.com/bobbywilson0/49e4728e539c726e921c79f....
| Just uses the api directly and a regex for matching the title.
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| alberth wrote:
| Is 10,000 comments a large enough sample size to gain insights
| from?
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| If you read TFA then you will see the answer is yes. Not deep
| insights though, it is basically just keywords and a few
| numbers.
|
| I think bytes is generally a better metric than number of
| entries, naturally 10,000 books will have a lot more insight
| than 10,000 one-liners.
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(page generated 2024-07-04 23:00 UTC)