
Tell HN: Thank you whoishiring, a.k.a. Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh - dang
Back in 2011, an HN user volunteered to consolidate the scattered &quot;who is hiring&quot; posts that were popping up and post one automatically at the start of each month. This not only worked well, it became an HN institution.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2391828<p>Four years of yeoman service later, our mysterious benefactor has gotten a lot busier and arranged with us to take over the account. I asked if we could thank him publicly and he said sure. So thank you, Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh! You&#x27;ve helped a ton of people get jobs, and made Hacker News a better place. We&#x27;re all much obliged.<p>Any thoughts about &quot;Who is Hiring&quot; and related threads that any of you want to share? Fire away.<p>Edits, based on the discussion below:<p>I think we&#x27;ll change the time of these postings to 11 AM Eastern time. This balances east and west a bit better, and has the practical advantage that when something goes haywire with one of them, the problem won&#x27;t languish for hours before we fix it. (If anybody posts before 11 AM Eastern tomorrow morning wondering where the thread is, or tries to make one, please refer them here.)<p>We&#x27;ll also make the posts show up on the first weekday of each month, instead of each day—but that won&#x27;t make a difference until August.<p>Finally, we&#x27;ll make it more explicit that to post a job in the thread you need to personally be part of the hiring company, not a recruiter or third party.
======
tptacek
The ranking of stories on the hiring threads should be randomized.

It's one thing for my comments to be bolted to the tops of threads about
crypto, owing (in reality) mostly to name recognition.

It's another thing entirely for my _job posts_ to be bolted to the tops of
hiring threads, which they were, routinely. It felt like cheating, and it was
pretty valuable to us. It's perverse.

~~~
crdb
To be the devil's advocate: that the community recognizes you as high quality
(even in an unrelated field) IS in itself a signal that the job might be
higher quality than a random new user's. A kind of reference from a trusted
source.

~~~
krapp
I would disagree that karma is useful in this case. Given that there are no
real standards for voting up or down, what _quality_ , really, does karma
measure? Popularity and account age, and maybe little more. Does it mean the
same thing as having high karma on reddit, or having a popular youtube
comment?

I would argue that it does, and for that reason, it's useless outside the
context of sorting a comment thread. Certainly, it doesn't justify giving top
rank to a job post.

~~~
crdb
Giving extreme examples, wouldn't you agree that:

1\. "Andrew Ng forming brand new GPU machine learning team in Bay Area for
Baidu, apply at []"

would rank way higher than

2\. "I am a newly graduated MBA, I have a fantastic business idea but until
the funding is lined up, looking for a co-founder to build MVP, 5% equity
negotiable but we're taking a salary cut until Round A"?

I certainly upvote the better job ads and assumed everybody else did, and if
you want an Idris research job, you'll probably be searching for the keyword
rather than browsing top results.

It goes both way - I also enjoy reading the top posts because they indicate
what the community thinks are the best jobs at the moment (and thus what's
hot).

To be more meta, the "standard" for voting is the ranking algorithm, and
should be designed to generally allow better comments to filter through
_regardless of their subject_ \- including jobs. The specifics are left to the
HN team but based on my year and a bit on this site, they seem to be
optimizing for quality and be quite successful at it.

To answer your comparison above, I think (but never checked) that the key
implementation difference is that some voters have more power than others,
and/or the audience is more qualified on most subjects, than YouTube's
(although the Haskell subreddit, the only one I'm relatively familiar with,
has excellent upvoting and moderation habits imho). Nevertheless, in the one
subject I'm relatively familiar with (classical music) it seems that better
performances DO get ranked better on YouTube, so I'm not sure whether I am
right to criticize YouTube either.

Edit - just had a thought - the OP might be correct in the case where there
was just too much volume for anything past the first, say, 1/10th of job
postings to be read - even with floating new posts to the top. It's relatively
easy to check for this case by looking at the distribution of views, upvotes
and flags per post.

~~~
S4M
> I certainly upvote the better job ads and assumed everybody else did, and if
> you want an Idris research job, you'll probably be searching for the keyword
> rather than browsing top results.

I never upvote or downvote job offers, and I think it might actually go the
other way: people would downvote good job offers hoping that less people would
see them, which means less competition.

------
cperciva
_you need to personally be part of the hiring company — not a recruiter or
third party._

What about recruiters who are full-time employees of the hiring company?

I think a stronger restriction, namely "you should only post about positions
which you will be personally involved with" would make this more even useful
-- we don't need to be told every month that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and
Apple are hiring, but if tptacek (to take a local celebrity as a convenient
hypothetical) posted that Starfighter was looking to hire a sysadmin then
potential candidates would be able to ask questions and anticipate getting
useful answers.

~~~
dang
I personally agree with you. The best kind of job post, to my taste, is by
someone I'd be working with. But I fear it would be a step too far to impose
this on the whole thread.

~~~
dmacvicar
I don't think it makes sense. I am the hiring manager, but I only ~5 positions
available where I am the hiring manager. My company has ~50 positions open for
engineering.

Do you prefer to see 10 posts from my company, from each hiring manager with
open positions?

~~~
rifung
Actually I think I might if only because your team (and manager!) probably
affects your well being much more than what company it is.

But I can also see why it seems inconvenient to have many people from the same
company post as well.

------
shawnps
I hadn't thought about this very much until I read this post, but I got my
first job out of college through a "who is hiring" post back in 2011 (so I
guess it was one of the first posts!) and that job changed my life. I flew out
to California from the east coast, lived in SF, met a large number of
incredibly smart and passionate people, and to this day the network I grew out
there is hugely influential on my life and my career. So thanks from me as
well!

------
dstein64
> "Any thoughts..."

Existing HN hiring threads start with:

> "Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords
> INTERN, REMOTE, or VISA if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome."

Searching for "intern" matches postings with "internet", "international", etc.
I've seen comments suggesting that a search for "remote" matches "no remote".

Here's a quick fix that uses a prefix, for consideration:

> "Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords
> +INTERN, +REMOTE, or +VISA if..."

~~~
pash
Is the +VISA keyword meant to indicate that the hiring company will aid
candidates in obtaining a visa, or that the candidate must already have the
right to work locally?

~~~
yati
I always thought it was the former, since otherwise the location implies that
the company is looking for people located nearby them. Good point,
nevertheless.

------
phantom_oracle
I think you can probably fix the "REMOTE" issue, which makes it difficult for
the _hundreds_ of talented people looking for remote-only work and having to
deal with this:

\- "Sorry no remote"

\- "REMOTE - No"

\- "remote unavailable currently"

\- etc.

The phrasing should change to:

REMOTE _or_ ON-SITE

That way, from amongst even the coolest "Who is Hiring" sites, like this:

[http://hnhiring.me/](http://hnhiring.me/)

Folks can finally filter out the non-remote work properly.

~~~
dang
I'm happy to add ONSITE (probably best without a complicating hyphen?) but
can't say I share your optimism about it fixing the inevitable issues with
free-form text.

For the same reason, I think it's a lost cause trying to impose a machine-
readable format on text fields, as many have been suggesting. There would be
so many exceptions as to make the situation more complicated, not less.

~~~
phantom_oracle
Maybe a combination of timv and my suggestion together then?

Eg.

Hacker Job1, SF, ONSITE, $120k-$150k (here is an example of local only) ---
[short description]

Hacker Job2, NY, REMOTE(East Coast only), $100k-$130k (remote but within same
time-zone) --- [short description]

Hacker Job3, London, REMOTE(global), £70k-£90k (remote "anywhere") --- [short
description]

\-------------------------------------------------------

Also, I agree about the free-form text issue, it's not something easy to
overcome (especially when HN touts as "minimalist" \- which I incur to mean
"simple" too), so maybe you and the community should gently try to nudge
posters that "No remote" in their messages just makes peoples lives a bit more
difficult.

Lastly, I guess I'd just like to add that what made the "who is hiring" partly
successful (IMO) was that it was simple. Too many rules and too much detail
will turn posts into TL;DR .

------
zo1
One particular down-side I've noticed when browsing those sorts of threads:

I often "view" them before people have stopped posting to it. As such, I have
absolutely no idea which ones are new or which ones I've already read after
I've refreshed the page to get new items.

The only easy-to-implement solution I can think of is allowing us to sort the
posts in chronological order as opposed to the hybrid point/time system that's
currently in place.

~~~
dang
> I have absolutely no idea which ones are new or which ones I've already read
> after I've refreshed the page to get new items

After thinking about this for a bit I believe it's best addressed by solving
this problem for all threads, not just whoishiring threads. That is, make an
easy way to optionally limit a thread to just the comments that are new to
you. This is something we intend to do.

~~~
alxndr
That's great to hear. The "hckr news" extension for Chrome marks new comments,
but it means you need to be careful e.g. commenting midway through a thread.

------
danso
Great service, thanks Matt.

One suggestion for the posting text: maybe provide a more machine-readable
template for submitters to provide metadata? Just a minimal amount of metadata
to make it easier for those who write mini-apps to parse the submissions.

To refer back to the most recent hiring post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471287)

Seems like submitters try to do their own, e.g.

    
    
          Soostone | NYC or Remote Possible | Functional Programmer (Haskell) | Backend, Frontend, DevOps, UI/UX Engineering
    
    
          San Francisco - Full Time - iOS, Android, Design
    
    
          GoDaddy | Product Manager - Managed WordPress | Sunnyvale, CA or Phoenix, AZ | Local
    
    

How about this, for each job:

[Company name] | [Job title] | [location(s), semi-colon delimited] ["Remote",
if applicable] | [Full-time/Part-Time/Intern/Visa/Remote | [Optional list of
semi-colon delimited skills]

e.g.

Acme | Senior Database Engineer | San Francisco, CA; Las Vegas, NV (Remote
possible) | Full-time | MySQL

~~~
rakoo
We're on HN, right ?

{ "company_name": "Acme", "job_title": "Senior Database Engineer",
"locations": [ "San Francisco, CA", "Las Vegas, NV", "Remote" ], "full_time":
true, "skills": ["mysql"] }

~~~
burkaman
That's a little too far in the machine direction, it would be annoying for
humans to read.

~~~
reinhardt
Yaml then?

~~~
perspectivezoom
Yaml I think would take too much vertical space and make reading the normal
thread not as useful as it is right now.

------
tptacek
A lot of concerns on this thread about making job posts easier for machines to
read. I understand why, but as someone who used to write a lot of hiring
thread posts: I'm a little skeeved out by machines reading them, because
usually that implies that some other site on the Internet is going to host the
ad without my permission.

~~~
e12e
I agree, as someone who is considering applying for a new job (although I've
yet to apply... maybe this month :-).

Much of the value in hn in general and the who's hiring in particular has to
do with the community.

On the other hand, the postings have grown in number, and with the poor (non-
existent) tooling, it's getting harder to find a subset of "interesting" jobs.

I'd be happy to see changes that focused on making the ads better for the
"typical" target: make it easy to short-list interesting opportunities. The
classical problem here is browser text-search and "remote/no-remote/remote-
ok/remote: no" (my: suggestion: #remote).

The removal of paging is great for this. I only now figured out that the "time
since posted"-text is the new place for the "link-to-this-comment"-link.
That's also useful, as it allows one to "save" ads to new browser tabs.

------
kaolinite
My partner found his first job through Who Is Hiring working at an American
firm (we're based in the UK). He's on considerably more money than he would be
if he were working locally. I'm envious that his first job was so good - mine
was working for a pretty awful web dev firm, highly underpaid. Things have
gotten better since then (I run my own company now, for one), but I can't
thank Matthew enough for enabling him to not have to go through a bunch of
poor quality, poorly paid jobs before he found something he really enjoys.

Thanks Matthew.

------
rickhanlonii
If you're going to add some code to this, it may make sense to add an
additional rule around who is allowed to post that is related to karma and/or
account age.

If you compare top and bottom of the May 2015 thread it seems that the quality
drops with newer accounts or low karma accounts.

I think a rule like this would also ensure that it's this community posting to
the thread and not someone from the outside trying to post to yet another job
board--which is the spirit of the "no recruiters" rule.

~~~
dang
I like this idea. The threshold could be small.

Any objections?

~~~
tacos
I generally find the bias against recruiters here to be a bit narrow minded
and short sighted. Yes, they're a pain. Yes, most are idiots misrepresenting
themselves from the first second they talk to me.

But I'm all about increasing interactions. Not restricting them based on race,
gender, or having a unfortunate job title like "recruiter."

I'd rather let in 500 crappy posts than turn away a single valuable newcomer
to HN. Has upvote/downvote truly proven inadequate for moderating this
particular thread?

~~~
Akkuma
I'd rather not have 500 crappy posts for every single valuable post. The
former starts detracting from the site and ultimately decreases quality.
You'll eventually reach a breaking point where everything is being drowned in
the noise. Downvoting only works if you're an active enough participant,
especially when it comes to the who is hiring posts many probably have minimal
or zero participation.

------
vellum
Companies should be encouraged to share the salary range for the positions, as
well as their interview process (take home assignment, whiteboard, pair
programming, etc.)

------
jimjohn2323
Why not just include Who's Hiring as a top level navigation item. If it's that
popular perhaps it deserves it's own archive/timeline.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I agree, and while it's not the same, you can always look through the
submissions of the account.:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)

Now if it didn't become a feature of some sort, it could still become an
addition to a plugin for small convenience (or a Stylish script or something).

------
huhtenberg
> Any thoughts

1\. If it's not done yet, can you disable pagination for these posts to always
show all comments?

2\. Order top-level comments by submission time rather than with the regular
HN weighing algorithm. This would make it much easier to see what new was
posted since the last refresh.

~~~
dang
Re 1, We don't paginate comments any more. I had a fine time ripping out that
code.

Re 2, that seems worth considering. Presumably most recent at the top?

~~~
huhtenberg
> Presumably most recent at the top?

Seems fair, yes.

~~~
dang
Please see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636566).

------
Matachines
I just want to say that as a college student, HN Who's Hiring has been a great
resource in both applying for internships and finding out about new companies.

My university has little to no programming jobs in their career resources, so
I have to rely on my own research and HN has made it a lot easier.

Although I haven't gotten an offer yet (really just applied to a few out of
curiosity), every company I've interviewed from here has been excellent
interviewers and people in general. Way, way better than Angel List!

------
Killswitch
Always seen them, never used them. Due to recent events, I've been patiently
awaiting tomorrow for the last two weeks.

Thank you Matthew, and HN for continuing it on his behalf.

------
Akkuma
I'd like to see a way to "review" job postings that stick with companies. I've
had many applications on postings go completely ignored without a response
even when it is through email and mentions Hacker News. I've also seen what
appears to be many purposefully misleading remote labels for jobs.

------
peteretep

        > make it explicit that to post a job in the thread you
        > need to personally be part of the hiring company—not a
        > recruiter or third party.
    

I thought this was already the case, and have held off posting jobs I'm hiring
for.

It would be nice to be allowed to post a single "OH HAI I'M A RECRUITER WITH
THESE ROLES" comment on the Hiring Threads. Spamming the thread with 10 jobs,
or misrepresenting a recruitment role as the company hiring are obvious
losses, but if you're looking at a "Who is Hiring" thread, you're looking for
a job. I would like to be able to mention my recruitment speciality and my
recruiter email address on these threads, clearly labelled as such. If it gets
downvoted to all heck, then it gets downvoted, but it would be nice to give
this a go.

------
mountaineer
Thank you Matthew! As someone who found a job through who is hiring as well as
created a side-project built on it to learn new things and study trends, I
appreciate the idea and the work to keep it going.

@dang Will it be published by the "whoishiring" or "_whoishiring" account
going forward?

~~~
dang
Exercise to the reader. This site was built by a minimalist. :)

------
whbk
I got an incredible job last year through one of these threads. It's quite
likely altered the trajectory of my (still nascent) career in a way that none
of the other options I was considering at the time would have. Thanks,
Matthew.

------
mark_o
Why was the Who Is Hiring post from this morning flagged?

~~~
wazoox
Because it was posted by someone else than the "official" whoishiring account.

------
eruditely
I am extremely thankful for the "whoishiring" threads and the kind people who
post job offers asking for competence independent of degrees.

I worry that even though I work through the real analysis, linear algebra,
topology, probability, and convex optimization books that someone will not
hire me but I get a sigh of relief seeing people willing to look past not
having a degree.

------
jboggan
I moved to San Francisco at the end of July 2012 and started my first
programming job hunt with the August Who Is Hiring thread. I found a great
company to work for (what's up Factual!) and almost three years later I see
how my life has completely changed and improved. This community made a big
difference, so thank you all and Matthew in particular.

------
pbiggar
Thanks a million Matthew!! We (CircleCI) have made over a dozen hires sourced
from HN. It's been amazing, thanks for doing it!

------
wyclif
Are you guys also doing "Who wants to be hired?"?

If so, the quality of responses to recent threads has taken a nose dive
lately. I posted in the latest month's thread, and I'm starting to see a
couple of bad effects:

1\. Recruiters who send a canned response to every email in the thread (my
post very specifically outlined what technologies I have experience with,
mostly Python and Django, but now I'm getting offers for iOS jobs. The
recruiters responding aren't bothering to read the posts).

2\. Startups who respond trying to sell me their shiny 'get hired' app. These
people need to know that this isn't what "Who wants to be hired?" is for.

------
spicyj
Any chance we could move it a little later in the day? 6am Pacific is a little
early for people on the west coast.

(I know not everyone is in the US, but there's no denying that the SF Bay Area
contains a huge proportion of this site's audience.)

~~~
dang
Since I dread having to get up at 6 tomorrow to make sure that my code worked,
I kind of agree. But we don't want to make it west-coast centric either. So
perhaps 10 AM Eastern? Or 11 at the latest.

Edit: I updated the OP to say 11 AM. What swayed me was remembering all the
times that problems with a whoishiring post stuck around for hours before one
of us western types could fix it. This will make that less likely.

~~~
kruk
11 AM EST is a bit late for all the people on the Eastern Hemisphere,
especially in Asia. 10 AM would be much more preferable.

~~~
dang
I can't easily change it now for tomorrow, but if people still feel this way
next month, let us know and we'll shift it back an hour.

------
Yadi
I''ve never applied to through his posts, but I've to say it's pretty awesome
am sure lots of great candidates can come through those posts he have posted
in the past.

Kudos on volunteering my hard working internet friend.

------
lsiebert
My suggestion is simple. Don't require anything. Instead someone create a HN
hiring post linter, and/or a form you can fill out that can generate a
correctly formatted HN who's hiring post.

------
allenbrunson
i didn't see anybody else mention this, so i will ...

how about moving it back or forward if the first of the month happens to fall
on a weekend? seems to me like it should get moved to the nearest monday in
that case.

~~~
dang
Yes, we should do that. First weekday of the month.

------
ramanujam
I replied to a posting on the 'Who's hiring' thread back in Jan 2011 and
landed at my first real job out of college. I just left that company after 4+
wonderful years. I was an international student who wanted to work for a
startup and very few startups were willing to take the risk back then. I had
very little to prove and also came along with strict visa requirements. I am
so thankful to this thread, i was able to connect with a person who identified
my potential and eventually became a great mentor for me.

------
fsk
The best way to improve the "Who is Hiring" posts is to require searchable
metadata in posts:

Name: xxxx

Location: xxxx

Url/E-Mail to apply: xxxx

Remote: yes/no

Technologies Used: xxxx

Required experience:

Are candidates expected to already know your stack, or will you consider
people who are switching areas?

Do you have open offices? Cubicles?

Do you have daily meetings?

etc

For example, I'm only considering NYC, so I would like to easily search for:

NYC only

experience matching mine OR employers willing to let people switch

If anyone didn't have open offices, that would be a big ++ for me, so that
would be nice to know.

~~~
jaxhax
First, thank you Matthew and HN for a great resource. Re metadata, please
don't "require" it. I agree it would be nice if posters could find a more
search-friendly way of saying "no remote", but I think it would be a huge
mistake to impose any sort of format or content requirements, or any other
barriers that increase the hassle for posters. Even something innocuous like
"please read these simple guidelines before posting", and I would predict the
number of posts will go down significantly. Our goal as programmers should be
to write filters that can handle free form data, within reason, not to force
humans into rigid forms for the convenience of easy filtering. Please don't
surrender yet another valuable tool to the HR everything-must-fit-in-its-box
mindset.

~~~
paulvs
This is a Chrome plugin I wrote to search for jobs using multiple keywords on
Who is Hiring:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-whos-hiring-
job...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-whos-hiring-job-
finder/jbmfinkemdkmjkiffngecpkbnhocgpla)

------
nsedlet
We hired our first engineer through a "Who is Hiring" post. It's a fantastic
tool.

------
gadders
The words "rockstar" and "ninja" are not allowed in posts?

~~~
dang
That could be measured. I'd like to see a graph of how often those occur in
whoishiring threads. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I bet they've gone
down.

------
deriob
Position: iOS Mobile Developer

Details: www.satispay.com/careers/ios-mobile-developer/

Company: Satispay (www.satispay.com)

Location: Milan, Italy

Url/E-Mail to apply: jobs@satispay.com

Remote: no

~~~
dang
Wrong thread; you want
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9639001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9639001).

------
aagha
Why not weekly?

