

Where to join a startup? Analyzing 'Who is Hiring' posts on Hacker News - gghootch
http://garmr.posterous.com/where-to-join-a-startup-analyzing-who-is-hiri

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necubi
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
<http://hnhiring.me/data/comments-{thread-id}.json>.

The thread ids for fulltime/freelancer for each month are here:
<http://hnhiring.me/data/threads.json>.

~~~
abuiles
Interesting! I was looking for this some days ago :)

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condiment
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).

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.

    
    
      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

~~~
untog
I think that all those figures prove is that HN has a Bay Area bias, not that
"the Bay Area is utterly exceptional in terms of tech/startup career
opportunities".

I mean, it _is_ great, but a developer would have no problems finding a good
job in New York or Boston, at least.

~~~
majormajor
Another possible interpretation of the jobs/population number is "which cities
have lots of job openings despite not being dominated by the tech industry,"
if someone wanted to be somewhere more diverse. Though, unsurprisingly, the
answer is basically "the big ones" so it's not all that interesting there.

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why-el
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.

~~~
keerthiko
I was in a very similar situation to you - international visa, interested in
innovative/startup work, few opportunities to develop my skills before coming
to the states for college, coming from a developing country with narrow
opportunities. I spent about a year after graduating working as a software
consultant for startups for dirt-cheap (15$/hr work-from-home, 30-hours-per-
week), and doing an internship, working on side projects (as suggested
repeatedly here). Both these helped me learn a lot about both startups,
consulting work, making ends meet, and knowing my strengths. I was able to
better understand what value I can bring to a startup environment, and what
values I want a startup environment to have so I can feel fulfilled. About a
year after graduating I was able to find my way to a great Bay Area startup,
and here I am, putting myself to good use, and feel quite prepared to even
start my own venture in the near future. After wading through tons of
paperwork, since that visa issue doesn't just disappear. Good luck on your
venture! Feel free to reach out for help and info on your type of situation.

~~~
why-el
Yep, your situation is very similar. Can I email you somewhere?

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abuiles
Why do you say "I doubt anyone would have me"? J1 visas aren't that difficult.

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.

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.

~~~
gghootch
For now it's a combination of factors. Weak programming skills + no driver's
license is the gist of it. Both will likely be taken care of in six months,
though.

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nemesisj
This analysis is wrong. Or at least missing a lot of data.

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.

~~~
gghootch
Hi there, as mentioned in the post it only collected data on the top 25
startup hubs as identified by the Startup Genome Project (ok, and Amsterdam).
Edinburgh is not on that list, so I didn't check for it. I did now: in total
it's 3 since january 2012.

Note: not sure why, but the data does seem off from time to time. Manual
Command-F for San Francisco for this month's hiring finds 26, while
data.scan(htmlpage) finds 28...

~~~
semanticist
There's definitely been more than three jobs listed for Edinburgh in January
2012. I'm in Edinburgh and was looking for work most of last year, so I was
paying attention at the time!

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danielweber
When posting job postings to HN, please, please, always make the location
extremely prominent. Preferably in the title.

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.

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cbeach
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 (<http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/>) 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

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lessnonymous
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)

~~~
duaneb
I find it very interesting that location IS so important for a service that
can be entirely locationless.

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jacoblyles
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.

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olivier1664
It look like that non-english-speaking country does not post a lot on HN.

