
Ask HN: Why are there never any job postings for non web positions? - nsnick
Why are there never any job postings for non web or mobile jobs on Hacker News?  Even in software engineering, there are a lot of other fields.
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vinceguidry
Web development is hot right now. Really really hot. In Atlanta, code school
grads with little experience are getting snapped up as soon as they graduate.
I'm having to look to Eastern European remote talent because salary
expectations in the US are unreal.

Literally every company needs a web presence, and it's quickly getting to the
point where the usual crappy UX just isn't cutting it.

It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software
engineering. You have to stay on top of trends, keep building your skills. You
don't deal with algorithms much, but your OOP needs to be on point if you hope
to build something maintainable for the web.

Most of the potential talent has a subtle disdain for web work, everyone wants
to be a game dev or do stuff that's math-heavy or algorithmic.

So giant shortage of good web programmers.

~~~
Tossrock
"It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software
engineering."

I would disagree with this point, as evidenced by the fact that people coming
out of code schools are still getting hired. To do software engineering in
other fields (financial, embedded systems, game dev, operating systems,
enterprise LOB, cloud platform, crypto, big data/distributed systems, etc)
takes a lot more experience and training. A competent programmer can crank out
a rails based Mom & Pop small business site in less than a day. You can't
really crank out Big Table, or Unreal Engine. However, the market size for
small business web sites vastly exceeds that for Big Table.

~~~
atmosx
> A competent programmer can crank out a rails based Mom & Pop small business
> site in less than a day.

I never wrote any code in C, but given a tutorial I'm pretty sure I could
create a client-server application to exchange time in milliseconds between
two hosts. Would you use it instead of your NTPd daemon in a production
server? Of course you wouldn't.

Likewise, I'm very sceptical when I read about programmers who _learned_
Javascript in a weekend or wrote a rails application in one week without
knowing Ruby. Is it possible yes? Do I trust the app or the programmer
absolutely not.

Web development is not considered programming by friends of mine that indulge
themselves in (linux) kernel development, write (or try to write) code for
drivers, do reverse engineering and what not.

But to create a modern website these days you need to know lots of things:
CSS3, HTML5, Rails, Ruby, Javascript (Angnular? Ember?), you also need to know
how to combine them. How to setup everything in order to mitigate attacks,
etc.

Ruby and Rails are easy to learn but hard to master, same goes for JS (with
all the whistles and bells that the language comes and the various frameworks
try to elude one way or another). There's also Go, Python, PHP... Same goes
for all these languages: Easy to learn hard to master.

So, any language can be _hard_ or _easy_ depending on a wide variety of
things, but web-dev is not _easy_ these days. It's easy to be mediocre, it's
not easy to be _good_.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Having done both for a living, I would argue that Linux driver development is
easier than web dev.

To do either well, you have to have a model in your head of what the entire
stack is doing.

With Linux driver development, you have to have a much more accurate model of
a much smaller stack compared to web dev.

Broad or deep? Specialist or Generalist? Some people are better at one than
the other, but others will be the opposite.

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yellowapple
Because this site has been overrun by (and/or revolves around) Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs who don't give a damn about something unless it's in the form of
a single-page noSQL web-scale big-data in-the-cloud CrappucinoScript
imperatively dysfunctional HTTP2 Wangular.js monstrosity written by "hipster
rockstar ninja devs" wielding Macbooks and plaid shirts and pocket calculators
and half the inventory of ThinkGeek in a mockery of actual programming? ;)

More seriously, it's because web developers are in high demand, so there are
going to be more postings for them; having a proper web presence is absolutely
vital to modern businesses nowadays, and that requires developers to establish
that presence. Hacker News is also run by YCombinator, which specializes in
funding startups - a market which tends to lean very heavily on web
development, since many of those startups are based on web apps - and
therefore will already have an inflated quantity of web development jobs by
that virtue alone.

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logfromblammo
Journalists and novelists are both writers, but they do not compete in the
same niche.

The former will need to do several hundred writing jobs per year, while the
latter may only need two. Thus, 99.5% of writing jobs may be for journalist
stories. Any novelist looking for commissioned work will not want to sift
through 200 posts to find even one relevant listing. So people posting such
jobs would probably get better results on a site that explicitly excludes the
noise.

In short, there are more "lightweight" postings because the people who solicit
them and do them need to secure new work more often. If you can make 20
websites in the same time that you could build one enterprise application, you
will probably see that job advertisements are 95% for websites and 5% for
business software.

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minimaxir
The job postings are only for YC companies, of which there are not-as-many
non-web/mobile companies.

~~~
bengali3
FYI see these monthly posts as well:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822808)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822817)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822810)

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gizzlon
As others have said, web development is hot right now. In my experience, it's
hard to find people willing to build customized back-end stuff. It's probably
too expensive, and companies just buy whatever ready-made solutions that kind-
of cover their needs. (think ERP, CRM's etc)

The demand for web-devs might be artificially high right now, as most normal
people have not yet discovered that they do not really need a programmer to
build their website. I think Squarespace / Wix / WP etc, maybe with a custom
design, should cover most websites.

I've been doing back-end web programming as a freelancer for a few months, but
it's _really_ hard to find good clients, so I'm moving to something else.

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jtbigwoo
It's partly selection bias. The content here probably doesn't have as much
appeal for the middle managers who do a lot of the hiring at big companies.

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polvi
All YC companies build technology, however many (most?) are building
technology for markets that traditionally have not used technology in a modern
way. These are things like cleaning (HomeJoy), flower delivery (Bloomthat),
t-shirts (Teespring), etc etc. Theses technology enabled businesses are the
ones that primarily use web/mobile, and thus all the jobs.

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mwfunk
I always assumed it was because HN is somewhat specific to YC and SV startups,
and pretty much everything that YC and other VCs are investing in right now is
mobile and/or web stuff.

There are plenty of other tech jobs, just not necessarily in the startups that
YC focuses on.

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drtse4
If you are referring to the monthly jobs threads i was wondering the same
thing, i would have expected more people searching for mobile developer
(especially freelancers), but i guess mobile apps are not yet the new
"website".

~~~
rday
Over the past 6 months I've had multiple clients drop their mobile requirement
to focus on web. I think it has mainly to do with scope creep and cost.

All those extra features that you can cram on a web page need that much more
effort on mobile. People, for some reason, seem to be understanding that
mobile costs a LOT of money, so they wait until later. But they expect to be
able to build the web side really cheap, so they stick with that and argue
price.

Just my little anecdote....

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mathattack
The warning sign of 1999 was Marketing majors becoming web developers. Are we
there again?

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serve_yay
"Why does everyone listen to Taylor Swift? There are lots more musicians than
just her."

~~~
willlma
Yeah, why is that?

