

Tell HN: "Who's Hiring?" Threads Are a Mess - jackowayed

I've never been a fan of how hard it is to sift through "Who's Hiring?" threads, but the recent "Who's hiring in &#60;region&#62;?" threads are not the solution. They clutter up the homepage more, and they still don't fix the fact that there's 63 comments on the "Who's Hiring in Europe Thread?" and there probably aren't more than 5 for any one city (so if you don't want to relocate, you're still getting a low signal:noise ratio).<p>What we need (unless pg were to want to actually add some kind of structured hiring functionality, which seems unlikely) is a standardized format that makes it easy to Ctrl+F through them to find things you want.<p>Here's a proposed format:<p>&#60;general description of the job, mentioning the company name, what you're doing, the level of experience it is, etc. whatever you want&#62;<p>Location: &#60;List any way someone would refer to your location or locations nearby-enough that it still applies. Include the word "remote" if you'll accept remote workers&#62;<p>Technologies: &#60;List all of the technologies that someone in this job will be using&#62;<p>Position: &#60;Include the word the word "developer", "designer", or "infrastructure" if it's one of those, but you can go into more detail&#62;<p>So first you describe the job like normal (but possibly leaving out some of the info that will come later), then you add what amounts to metadata to make it easy to search through.<p>Here's an example of how a job (http://posterous.theresumator.com/apply/JbAS4A/) would look when translated to this format (Note that I'm not associated with Posterous and that I may be misrepresenting the job in this post. I just chose it because it was on the jobs page.):<p>Posterous is looking for battle-tested, seasoned, war-hardened backend infrastructure engineers who love building and maintaining software used by millions of people. You'll work with a driven team of like-minded software engineers to build the next great Internet treasure. You are a skilled craftsman when it comes to capacity, uptime and scaling, and love it when your site is humming along like a well-oiled machine.<p>We want someone who has built for massive scale and will be able to build our tech stack to support hundreds of millions of uniques per month.<p>Compensation includes full time salary, generous equity compensation plan, and benefits.<p>Location: San Francisco, SF, Bay Area, Silicon Valley<p>Technologies: Linux, NoSQL, MongoDB, Casandra<p>Position: Senior Infrastructure Engineer<p>Note that I listed "Silicon Valley" as a location even though it's not. Someone looking for jobs in the Valley would probably be willing to consider jobs in SF, so they should list it. When it doubt, list it.<p>It's a little rough and certainly needs some tweaking, so I'd love comments on how to improve it. But I think that some standardized format like this could make it a lot easier to look through these. If you're looking for a Rails job anywhere, Ctrl+F for "rails". If you're looking for a job in NYC, Ctrl+F for "NYC" or "New York". Much easier than having to look through them all.
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tptacek
Speaking as someone who has hired multiple times from HN:

I agree that the nascent trend of "Who's Hiring in XXX" has got to stop.

I strongly disagree that what we need is to formalize the job listings and
make them searchable.

I strongly disagree that we need to loosen the "YC only" restriction on job
ads.

I strongly disagree that what we need is a YC-style job board.

I'm with the other commenter on this thread that said that one of the
strengths of the "Who's Hiring" thread is that it's a way to learn about what
people are doing and what companies are engaged with HN. It's not a job
database. It's a conversation. When I've posted positions here (note: we're
still hiring!), I've been thrilled to get comments and questions and to be
able to answer them publicly.

My suggestion:

There's already a leader list, and there's already a user profile. news.arc
should just look at people's profiles as they're saved, and if the profile
says "we're hiring", add that user to a list of users who are hiring. Keep
another list. If you want to scan through everyone who's hiring, there's your
database. The rest of us can just keep talking about what we're doing and
having conversations and not worry about optimizing things or geeking out on
how to run a job board.

~~~
JarekS
One thing that comes to mind after reading this comment - maybe what we really
need is a HN startup directory? A list of startup names as titles, comments
and voting (so you would easily know which one is interesting).

~~~
rglullis
<http://startuply.com>.

Guess who funded them?

~~~
neuromancer2600
Nice. However, there's only 2 jobs in Berlin from Music Pictures whereas it
said clearly on the other post that SoundCloud is also hiring in Berlin.
<http://ventureloop.com> lists more here but then again those are all VC
backed. So, somehow another job board didn't solve the problem.

------
loire280
I've never minded the disorganization: I think of these threads as a good way
to see who's busy and learn about a few new companies and products.

Besides, considering the high quality of opportunities that are usually
offered here, time spent combing through these threads is more efficient than
sifting through the piles of trash on regular job sites.

~~~
thegoleffect
+1.

It's interesting to see it in this form; otherwise, you could miss interesting
opportunities that aren't in your local area. I referred one non-local (WRT to
me) person to an interesting post because of that.

------
rythie
Really, this would be neat, but would it help at all?

If you actually wanted a job, why not just read through them all and contact
the ones that are near and interesting? - it's really not that hard, I read
them all and I'm not even looking for a job.

HN could instead do with a proper job board. I'd suggest that a job board
should not be restricted to advertising just specific jobs like every other
board does. In a small startup roles will not be that well defined yet. You
should be able to post just a company and say they are looking for good
people, by stating:

    
    
      - What the Company does / the problem it solves
      - Capital raised and current situation
      - Technologies currently used
      - Location

~~~
JarekS2
Instead of the first point (what the company does) I suggest link to a Company
website. 3 other points are very good - maybe one more point with the
salary/equity info?

And all of those posts should be aggregated under
<http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs> link.

~~~
rythie
There should be link for further information, yes. Though I think you should
be a quick pitch inline - actually thinking about this a bit more, there
should be char limit on it too, say 500 chars.

Not sure about Salary/equity details, it brings up all sorts of issues,
whether they are in it for the money and lack of knowledge of the market rate.
Also it's specific to a job, rather than just a call out to people who want to
be involved which could be anyone from people straight out of college to
people with 20+ years experience doing technical or non-technical jobs.

------
moe
Or... people could just use one of the 278 existing job sites that have proper
search and are generally better suited to the task than a generic forum.

If you want to bring YC people together it might be easier to agree on a
"secret handshake", like the string "YCYC" somewhere in the description?

~~~
tom_ilsinszki
"[...]use one of the 278 existing job sites[...]"

I like to know what people in this community are working on.

I'm not, however, interested in job openings in general.

My points are: 1 ) a job site is not the same, unless it is tied to this
community. 2 ) even if a secret handshake existed, I wouldn't be likely to
start my day searching a job site for "YCYC"

------
gruseom
I understand where you're coming from, but don't agree. The unstructured
nature of "who's hiring" and the fact that it's so entangled with the general
conversations going on in this community are a key part of what makes it alive
and different. Occasionally people who don't have any roots here (strange to
put it that way, but it does seem to be how things work) try to make more
traditional job posts, and those (even before they get killed) stand out like
sore thumbs. There's something valuable about this ambience.

There are two classic rules to be respected. One, don't rush to systematize
things, especially human things. Two, when communities spontaneously create
new patterns, that's very valuable -- sometimes even beautiful -- and should
be attended to delicately, as if one were discovering a new and exotic
species.

Two companies that have done an amazing job of following spontaneous user
trends are Twitter (e.g. hashtags) and Reddit (e.g. IAMA). The trick seems to
be to wait a long time until the pattern is clear, then provide nonintrusive
support to enhance what is already happening. The obvious temptation is to
impose familiar structures (do it "right") that are foreign to the spotaneous
life and end up killing what was most interesting about it.

~~~
pyre
Really, the most important things are:

\- Where is the company located?

\- Is remote work a possibility?

\- Is remote work only available in-country (or a select list of countries --
e.g. USA and Canada only)?

\- A reminder to people to make sure they have contact info somewhere (there
are always a couple of posts that say 'email me' with no email address in the
post or profile).

These only seem to be loosely followed. If we could cement these as constant
reminders / rules to the people posting jobs in the threads it would go a long
way.

[ It could also help to have a standard format for location. It's annoying
when someone only says their company is in 'Canada' but you have to hunt down
the information (i.e. company site) to realize they are not in the part of
'Canada' that you are looking for. ]

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JarekS2
Maybe it is time to get <http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs> a little bit more
useful and turn it into a job posting board? Then it's just one step to create
a specialized submission form to make things more organized.

~~~
luckystrike
As far as I know, currently only YC backed companies can post on HN jobs.

To make it more broader (and perhaps more useful), anyone with more than a
certain karma threshold (e.g. 500) can also be allowed to post a job opening
on it. A certain number of karma points (e.g. 50) can be deducted for making
every job post. This strategy would keep it clean and free from recruiters,
and since the post is coming from a 'accredited' HN user, it would possibly
have a good chance being interesting and useful enough for most of us.

The additional problem this would solve is that it would allow job postings to
be visible for longer durations than what's possible with regular news
threads.

Just a thought.

~~~
patrickk
Or simply allow HN members to flag blatant recruiter postings, and after 3-4
flags (or whatever) the post gets removed and the person's account gets
blacklisted/deleted/warning sent depending on the number of offenses. It would
be easy to tell a recruiter's account as the account would be fairly new, with
few posts and low karma.

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dotBen
It's a status quo.

The reason people are posting jobs here is because of the community and the
select group of people participating.

But if you create a YC Job Board then you loose the community and you increase
the audience of the postings to be much much larger and outside of the
original target audience (eg: just think of all the job board aggregators, the
jobs would end up on, etc).

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psranga
Hmm, personally I'm ok with the free form posting + reply format the community
has evolved. No need to change anything. Keep bureaucracy at bay!

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tom_ilsinszki
Idea: since the comments are hierarchical there could be a thread for each
continent.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Add one for telecommuting.

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jqueryin
My personal suggestion would be for PG to loosen the restrictions on the
"Jobs" section to not be restricted to those that have gone through YC.

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Scriptor
Listing any relevant names for the position is a huge plus. I'm tired of first
cycling through all the matches for "NYC", then everything for "New York
City".

Another thing I'd like to see is differentiating full-time and part-
time/internship positions. Maybe a "type" field could be useful as well?

------
squirrel
Speaking as a startup CTO who would love to recruit HN hackers, I'd welcome
any additional structure that helps people find my jobs - a "microformat" as
suggested by the OP, or a proper job board, or anything in between.

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pook
This would actually be a good use for an HN wiki, as suggested here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330602>

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mrjbq7
Time for Hacker Jobs?

<http://jobs.ycombinator.com>

------
msy
If only this website had a section for potential employment opportunities...

~~~
apgwoz
That is for ycombinator funded startups only.

------
Tawheed
someone should create a job posting board platform and get every high profile
blogger to start their own job board for their audience.

