

Show HN: New job search site for hackers - programmer01
https://www.staticjobs.com/?from=hn

======
fsk
How about some ads that aren't posted by headhunters?

[https://www.staticjobs.com/search.php?query=php+new+york](https://www.staticjobs.com/search.php?query=php+new+york)

Cybercoders, Kforce, Randstad - all bottom feeder headhunters.

Actually, that's my #1 want in a job search site - the ability to filter out
all ads that don't explicitly include the company name, the real client, not a
headhunter.

~~~
programmer01
We heard you. We'll try to attract direct employers and come up with a feature
to eliminate staffing agencies from the results while keeping the interface as
simple as possible.

We're still an early stage start-up and there are just to few jobs in our
database.

~~~
fsk
That's the #1 hard part about a new job search website.

If you have no jobs, why would the candidates search there?

If you have no candidates, why would anyone post their jobs?

Surprisingly, I only get decent interviews from Craigslist. I tried a couple
of others with zero conversion rate.

~~~
programmer01
Agreed. By creating this thread, we were trying to attract both job seekers
and recruiters/direct employers.

------
MichaelCrawford
It would be helpful to me if I had the option to disable posts from third
party agencies like Yoh and Kforce. I prefer to apply directly to the
employer.

~~~
programmer01
Michael, I hear you but haven't you noticed that most employers use third
party agencies these days? Don't know about OR, but it's very true for NY and
NJ (and probably CT). That's why there are threads about jobs being difficult
to find. On one hand there are plenty of jobs, on the other hand there are
none (or too few).

We're very sympathetic with all the job seekers but right now there are just
too few jobs in our database. Eventually we may introduce a special keyword to
omit staffing agencies from the search results or something like that.

And thank you for your input too! Good luck with your job search!

~~~
eropple
_> haven't you noticed that most employers use third party agencies these
days?_

I have not noticed this in MA, and companies that do this go to the bottom of
my response list. I had the same reaction as the grandparent poster, and
something that tries to foist those sorts of things off on me is an immediate
"nope, I'll look elsewhere."

~~~
programmer01
I understand you very well. We're from NYC and most jobs here are in the
financial industry. They pay really well but it's hard to go through all those
staffing firms and, later, interviews.

My co-worker says "there's life outside of financial industry" but, somehow,
we get to stick to "financial" jobs.

Well, that's been my experience for the past 15 years or so.

~~~
eropple
There's a reason why I only chat about consulting opportunities with fintech
companies. =) Ain't got time for FT for them.

~~~
programmer01
Still, financial industry has lots of high paying jobs as well as bonuses to
neglect it.

Would you resist making 140K on a base full-time? Keep in mind benefits and
bonuses too.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I get offered quantitative investment jobs all the time, as I have substantial
experience with finance.

I eventually came to regard it as unethical, so I turn those jobs down.

~~~
eropple
And if you're good you can make $140K base outside of finance (and outside of
NYC and SF, too) without too much digging, too.

~~~
programmer01
In most places $140K is about the ceiling. In NYC it's not. Plus finances pay
bonuses.

Furthermore, what does it mean to be good? If you're smarter than your
interviewer or know more, they'll reject you. In general, I would say selling
yourself has nothing to do with your programming skills.

~~~
eropple
My total take-home at my last job was about $180K. I'm 27. I'm not top-of-
market in Boston; top-of-market is around $220K and that's assuming an
average-ish bonus situation. And, no, I tend to be better prepped and,
usually, more knowledgeable than my interviewers, because that's what they
would be paying me for. Because I am good at what I do, I have a deep and wide
base of knowledge and have significant successes in my past, and they know it.

You're digging a real deep hole and making your project seem remarkably
unserious. I would suggest that you stop.

~~~
programmer01
Ok, thanks! Let's stop.

------
showerst
Searches for "Washington" and "Washington, DC" found nothing for me. When I
browse I see "District of Columbia", nobody actually calls it that.

~~~
programmer01
What is it called? We chose to use full state names rather than the
abbreviations, i.e. "New Jersey" rather than "NJ." That's why "District of
Columbia" rather than "DC."

Right now at least one keyword such as Java needs to be specified in order for
the search to return results (assuming there are jobs with those keywords).
Adding a location (you can have multiple cities and/or states) narrows your
search down to jobs in those cities or states.

We may change the logic to return all the jobs if only a location is
specified. This seems to be the confusing part. (We're analyzing job searches
to improve them.)

Thanks for your feedback!

------
programmer01
Hey Hacker News!

We're a new job search site for all computer professionals. Please, check us
out! We made the website intentionally simple but we're C++ programmers, not
designers. Therefore, we would appreciate any feedback, both positive and
negative.

YC-funded start-ups and everyone else, if you're looking to post your jobs,
please, give us a try. We're giving 25 free jobs to promote our site but if
you need more, contact us and tell us you found us on Hacker News. We'll
figure out something for you.

Those who need a job or looking for a change, we don't require you to register
to submit your resume and never will. Just a few basic fields to fill out and
you're done!

Thanks, folks!

~~~
danappelxx
Not a huge deal but from a design perspective the Times New Roman really hurts
my eyes. Just changing it to something smoother like Ubuntu or Arial would
make it 10x better for me. The blue hyperlinks also look a little ugly to me
on the plain white background, so I would either change their color to be a
little lighter or add a slight grey background.

The site itself is great, though.

~~~
programmer01
What's your OS? And thank you for your valuable input!

I developed most of the site on my 15.6 inch laptop running Ubuntu. I just
loved Ubuntu's Times New Roman and didn't like its Arial. On Windows it's the
opposite. Arial looks much better.

Similarly, blue hyperlinks looked great on my laptop's monitor but they're so-
so on other monitors.

And you just confirmed both of my thoughts! There's indeed a great contrast
between blue hyperlinks and white background on most monitors. And the font is
hideous on Windows too, :-(.

We're going to fix both problems soon. As well, we're analyzing job searches
to improve them. There's a lot of room for improvement both on the front-end
and back-end.

~~~
danappelxx
My response came from a windows desktop with a fairly nice monitor. I just
checked on my macbook (retina, 15"), first on osx, and then on Ubuntu. You're
right, it looks much better! I still think that loading the ubuntu font from
google fonts would be better (and then using arial/tmr as a fallback) but to
each their own.

As far as the general design, I don't want to be too harsh but the website
looks a little 2005 to me, if you judge by this (obviously unofficial) scale:
[http://i.imgur.com/7f24Qfs.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7f24Qfs.jpg). This reddit
thread is a great place to find good websites
([http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/2zpk4u/best_site...](http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/2zpk4u/best_sites_for_web_design_inspiration/))
but a few quick suggestions would be to toss the plain white background, make
the main search box a little more pleasing, making the logo and text a little
bigger, and try a more modern design for the actual job list (I would look
into something like what hckrnews.com does or one of these
[http://www.freshdesignweb.com/free-css-
tables.html](http://www.freshdesignweb.com/free-css-tables.html)).

Also, and I hate myself for saying this, but you may want to look into using
bootstrap ([http://getbootstrap.com/](http://getbootstrap.com/)). I was
originally against it since it makes websites look similar and I generally
like to write my own code, it does make it easy to modernize projects.

~~~
programmer01
Thank you for all your feedback again! You were not harsh at all and I can't
help but agree with you. We'll try to improve it on the front end and back end
and if we make enough money, we'll hire a professional designer.

------
chjohasbrouck
I think the biggest threat to this site's success is that it lacks
differentiation in a market that's already extremely saturated.

One problem the current job search sites have that you might be interested in
tackling, is that they lack a way of objectively measuring the capabilities of
the applicants.

There are software engineers that are 100x as productive as some others, but
the pay for all of us is always within a factor of 3 or 4. If you can solve
that problem, employers will love you for helping them hire better engineers,
and qualified applicants will love you for getting them higher-paying jobs.

~~~
programmer01
Thank you for your feedback!

My partner has exactly the same thoughts. The market is indeed extremely
saturated and there's huge money in it. However, I haven't seen good websites
(in my opinion, that is) without all that clutter and visual noise.

Our focus is more on simplicity and we don't want you to spend hours on our
site. Instead, we want you to quickly find a job, send your resume and move
on. When you need a job, of course.

We too discussed the problem you suggested. That, however, imposes an
additional burden on job seekers. Think about it. Interviews used to be 50
minutes long with one interviewer. Now we have phone screens in addition to
face-to-face interviews, tests, job seekers have to fill out forms with
hundreds of fields, meet with a bunch of interviewers, post JSON objects to
URLs and other "clever" things.

This is not normal and we want to change that. I wonder if anyone else has
given a thought to the whole situation.

Anyway, it's not our final decision and right now we just don't have the
capacity for all extra stuff.

------
mrmondo
Feedback: To be honest if I saw it while browsing links to check out I'd
immediately disregard it due to the design - it seriously looks like an old
geocities template. Even if your content is good - I think the design needs to
be worked on, it doesn't need to be flash, but just modernised.

~~~
programmer01
mrmondo, you've got a perfectly valid point! The website was developed by C++
developers. We can write CSS but modern web UI isn't our strength, :-(. And
thank you for your input too!

------
fotoblur
My first view shows me the site is already flooded by recruiters. That's a
deal breaker got me personally.

~~~
burger_moon
yup searched 'angular' and only recruiters showed up no _real_ companies. If I
want to sift through a sea of recruiters, indeed does a great job of that.

~~~
programmer01
Gents, it's in the subject. We're a new site and to be honest, it is difficult
to attract and satisfy both job seekers and recruiters. We'll do our best to
attract direct employers!

~~~
burger_moon
I still gave your thread an upvote because I hope it does take off and get
better. I was just a little disappointed to see all recruiting companies.

~~~
programmer01
Sorry to disappoint you and thank you for an upvote!

By creating this thread, we were raising awareness among job seekers _and_
recruiters/direct employers (not just job seekers) but right now it's too
early to judge.

A couple of direct employers signed up yesterday and we all can help each
other by telling our employers about this site. Yeah, I know I need it more
than you.

------
user12345hghft
I am a social sciences research professional following hn. Naturally all job
board announcements are geared towards programmers and engineers...

Any idea where i should go to find research jobs? Apart from the crappy Indeed
and LinkedIn that is...

~~~
programmer01
Unfortunately I don't know how to help you. If you're in academia, maybe you
should check various colleges and universities' websites?

~~~
pXMzR2A
(I'm the OP, was on my phone so ended up with a diff account.)

Unfortunately, I am trying to move from academia to the private / non-profit
sector's 'research associate' etc roles. Finding it to be truly difficult.

Thanks for the reply though!

~~~
programmer01
Why do you want to move out of academia? Get a tenure and you'll be doing your
research plus you'll secure a job for the rest of your life.

~~~
pXMzR2A
> Why do you want to move out of academia? Get a tenure and you'll be doing
> your research plus you'll secure a job for the rest of your life.

In short, the privatization (education for profit) and adjunct (severe labor
exploitation) issues are horrible in that sector and I want no part in these.

These are the same issues both the non-profit and private non-academic sectors
deal with too, but the private and non-profit sectors do not have the same
amount of hypocrisy and blindness as academia when it comes to sticking a ten-
feet pole on fire up one's ass.

------
programmer01
By the way, our friend Evan has jobs paying up to 180K in NYC. You might want
to contact him.
[https://www.staticjobs.com/search.php?company=Quantitative+S...](https://www.staticjobs.com/search.php?company=Quantitative+Systems+%28QS%29&order=desc)

~~~
mkoryak
err, 180K and 2+ years of professional programming experience with.. blah blah
blah

2 years of experience and 180k?! What do I get for 10? Im in the wrong city I
guess

~~~
programmer01
That's the problem. Most recruiters stuff every keyword they're aware of into
their job ads and raise salaries to get resumes but 180K in NYC is definitely
not the limit.

I know that man, though he never placed me. He has jobs in HFT field and
financial industry in general.

How true those 180K I don't know.

------
EugeneOZ
Not intended to find remote work - always "location". It's not even funny in
2015.

------
aceperry
It's fast but needs some work. I get a lot of false hits, especially when you
add the city.

~~~
programmer01
I wonder how fast it'll be when (hopefully) we have more jobs in the database.
Just curious to know.

And a great catch! The search is not perfect yet. False hits are returned if a
city name occurs within a job description itself. For example, you search for
Java in San Francisco, other jobs will be returned too if they contain San
Francisco.

We're aware of this issue and it's on our top to-do list. Plus we're analyzing
searches to make them better but right now there are just to few jobs in our
database.

And thank you for your input too, old man!

~~~
aceperry
"old man!"

???

~~~
programmer01
Sorry, didn't mean any offense. I meant it as an old-fashioned way of saying
"good friend", etc.

