Just a bit of feedback:
The first job I saw on the page proclaimed "48 tech stacks" which immediately horrified me. That is, until I clicked on it and realized it's 48 different pieces of tech used at the company; including Microsoft Excel, GitHub, Git (listed separately), Zoom, among others.
I feel like there's probably a simpler and less intimidating way to organize and represent this up-front.
Almost as bad as saying you are proficient in python and then naming all the packages you've used. If you were truly proficient, its implicit you know how to use some popular packages already and can trivially speed up to another one based on the python package paradigms you already understand.
Is a simple difference in one term or the other that useful?
The simple list of programs or utilities used is actually very descriptive. The world of software is vast. Not everyone uses the same tools the same way. But if you see mostly Microsoft products you probably have a good idea of the type of organization it is versus a mix of FOSS/almost no Microsoft products.
Kind of encapsulates which industry the company works within, whether they’ve got a newer tech stack or lots of legacy, etc.
Yep and we’re trying to cater to not just software engineering tools. Marketers tend to use a lot of different SaaS products and it’s useful to know if you’re a marketer looking for a new job.
Do they ever. And seem willing to adopt whatever might help, without thought to the long term integration consequences. The disaggregation of Salesforce is vast.
That’s an original sin. I worked for what was essentially a marketing firm with a set of large assets to mock up and sell aka a casino. They had stuff going back to 2000/2001 into 2018 still in production. Really the uniting characteristic was somebody was able to sell something with whatever piece of software.
At first I agreed. But then I realized I work in finance and it’d be nice to know they use Excel instead of Sheets. I can’t stand Sheets for any serious work.
I'm not sure of the method you're using to obtain this data, but the listing for the company I work for has a wildly inaccurate tech stack. It's also pretty out of date on the open careers, you show one opening (which we're not even hiring for) - we have 12 open positions at the moment.
Hey! That sucks! We're pulling information from job listings/publicly available information at the moment, so not every tech stack is as accurate as we would like it to be :) - Happy to update if you can point out the company and provide information or you can sign up (https://himalayas.app/signup) and change it yourself. You can also send us an email via hi@himalayas.app if it's easier!
As for the open jobs, we do our best to remove any openings that are no longer active but the way we do it isn't perfect + we don't automatically list every open position so that's why we haven't listened all 12 open positions.
Yep this is the hard part! If job listing contains heaps of technologies in similar categories we try our best not to include them, but it’s not perfect. Any employee can sign up and update the tech stack using their work email too :)
I see the "claim this profile", which I'd like to do but I want to ensure that anyone in the company can do this, it's not an "ownership" assertion, is it?
It would be extremely useful to be able to filter per country, as not all remote opportunities are available in all countries, but I guess a feature like this would have to involve data submission from the companies themselves.
On our (shameless plug) job boards, we structured the sites around countries and you also have mandatory salary brackets (provided by the companies)
We also require them to provide full tech stacks, benefits and info how mature they are in Software Engineering (what kind of tests they write, what methodologies they use, etc.)
Neat idea structuring the boards around countries with mandatory salary brackets. I haven't seen a job board use a map like you have, reminds me of Airbnb etc - makes a lot of sense!
This is the actual problem we are trying to solve with Remote Leaf[1](shameless plug). There are tons of remote job openings posted every day on the internet and job seekers do not need to scroll through these long feeds instead we filter them by country and skills and send it to their email. At this point, we manually curate the jobs and tag them to provide good quality service for job seekers.
Yep, I agree. You can currently filter jobs by location and time zone (https://himalayas.app/jobs) but we haven't extended the functionality to our company search yet. We will based on your feedback :)
Seems like a site that I would like to use, but it didn't solve my problems.
I wanted to be able to only see companies that were willing to hire people that live in the country that I live in.
Searching by tech was potentially useful, but didn't really work. I had a large list of companies returned, a sample of which said they used that technology, but didn't have any jobs using it. It needs to be a filter on jobs not on the company - and also a critical technology on that job.
Filtering by benefit seemed a bit pointless. Why would one particular benefit be make or break? What if another company was paying twice as much, but didn't have that benefit - would it still be interesting?
Hey there! Thanks for the feedback. You can't currently filter companies by country, but you can filter jobs by country or time zone requirements on https://himalayas.app/jobs :)
It would be useful to filter companies not in a certain industry. For instance Rust has a ton of jobs in crypto. A lot of people refuse to work in that space.
At first I read this and was really puzzled, thinking why would someone outright refuse a job working on cryptographic products? Like, say, the next Bitlocker, or a PKI implementation in web browsers, or something like that.
Then I remembered about cryptocurrency, and understood.
Even years on, this unfortunately replaced meaning of the term "crypto" still causes a double take!
Interesting - so basically you'd like to be able to search for companies using Rust that are NOT in crypto. I can see how that could be useful, just need to figure out how to support it without making filters too complicated.
Assuming that "crypto" was meant to refer only to cryptocurrency, there are a few companies working on non-blockchain/non-cryptocurrency crypto(graphic) tech which are paying as much as web dev jobs.
For example, I stumbled upon ockam.io during my last job search (no affiliation, and never interviewed with them as they weren't actively hiring when I wrote to them last year). I vaguely remember there being a few others, though I can't remember any names off the top of my head (it has definitely gotten harder searching for those kinds of companies as most job ads are drowned out by all the blockchain jobs). Old job posts on https://this-week-in-rust.org/ often contain a few interesting companies.
(Shameless plug: If anyone is interested in working at a non-profit focusing on non-blockchain cryptography in the field of multi-party computation, the company I'm working at is hiring at the moment and the salary ranges [for a 4-day work week] are listed: https://sinefoundation.notion.site/SINE-Job-Board-d28eda00c5...)
I work at Materialize (materialize.com) which is mostly Rust.
(We’re mostly remote, but not entirely — we do have a local contingent in New York, but it accounts for less than half of our people, with the rest scattered throughout the Americas and Europe).
One big point about remote companies is that most companies even if they are remote still want employees that are in a similar time zone. So if you're in Japan it's unlikely a European company will hire you as the times zones are so different you essentially never be able to communicate with each other in real time.
This means that you should have something on this job board to indicate where they want to hire people from otherwise it's completely useless.
Yes you're correct also local labour laws. One countries generous holiday package may be below the legal minimum for another.
Most companies I know that operate internationally have subcompanies in each company they have employees in. Any FTE is employed by the sub company for taxation and legal reasons. That's a high admin burden for a 10 person start-up easier just to employee people in the same country.
Couldn't agree more! It's clearly not obvious enough, but you can filter jobs by time zone or visa requirements if you head to https://himalayas.app/jobs - sounds like we'll need to add something similar to the /companies search eventually :)
Similar idea to my https://remoteindex.co/remote-companies (shameless plug). On RI I focus more on "remote work quality". I will need to research how they found tech stack, it's really interesting. Besides that, well executed idea. I like it, gives me a lot of inspiration.
I'm wondering if the opposite exists - I'm looking for a job board that will let me search for office-based companies (preferably hybrid 2-3 days in the office).
It seems like every senior role I've looked at offers 100% remote as an option, but spending the rest of my career on Zoom meetings is just wildly unappealing to me.
I started working on this about 6 months ago and was having success manually curating a list of hybrid startup engineering jobs in the US. But policies were hard to decipher at so many companies (some job descriptions are straightforward, but others are super vague) that I didn't feel my data was reliable enough.
When I was finally able to get past that noise and create a decent-sized list, Omicron hit and remote/office/hybrid policies blew up, yet again.
While it has improved, it's still in flux and I still can't get straight answers from many HR leaders.
I would love to provide this service when things stabilize a bit more.
Agree! And in senior roles, it is still much easier to make personal connections, grow networks, and build consensus with at least some personal face time.
Looks nice, one problem I have encountered is that I dont have much work experience so I am looking specifically for non-senior software engineering, but other than explicitly mentioning junior, I found no way to search specifically for non-senior entries and most entries I found so far are all for senior positions.
Yep, I agree that this is a problem with the current iteration of the site. We need to do a better job of differentiating between seniority for positions. Taking the time to provide this feedback :)
We're working on a reverse job board product where candidates will be able to list themselves and have companies approach them, so hopefully that will help a bit too!
Maybe I'm missing it, but it would be nice to be able to filter by job. I'm not particularly interested in Web Design or Sales roles, but I didn't see a way to filter those out.
Cool site, though. I'll definitely keep it in my bookmarks for when I'm ready to move on from my current company.
Hey there! You can filter by jobs, just not on the company search but it's something we could add in the future! Check out our job search via https://himalayas.app/jobs :)
I almost built a slightly similar website as a side project, but never found the time to actually do it. The idea was similar (to include the tech stack and benefits), but I was going to focus entirely on work culture and communication as the differentiator to other job boards.
I never could figure out how I'd get companies to be up front and honest about that information. The reason I wanted to build this was because I really wanted to find jobs that didn't have any scheduled internal meetings, no expectations of a set work schedule, no expectations of participating in work "social" events, and no expectations of commuting into an office. Basically an entirely (or 80% at least) async job.
In the end, I never built that job board, and I never found that job. So I ended up founding a company that works like that instead.
Thanks Ryan! There are a bunch of other things we'd like to include on our profiles, like work culture and communication as you said, but it'll take some time for us to add them :)
Yes, sourcing the information is tricky and we a lot of it by hand, which is why it isn't always perfect. Agree that it would be epic to be able to find primarily async jobs - something for us to think about.
Glad you were able to create the environment you wanted with Haekka!
jobs that didn't have any scheduled internal meetings
Does it even exist?
I've found workplaces without daily standups but inevitably after six months to a year either the founders or a new manager decides to implement them. I don't have anything against regular meetings but I found that having to report on my progress every day to be stressful the first 6 months in a new job.
I’m 2 years into starting my own company and we don’t do schedules meetings. We don’t do commutes. We’re fully remote. We’re fully async. We have a slackbot that asks for an update, but that’s mostly for anyone who needs help getting unblocked. Most days people just ignore it, which honestly works out since when someone does respond it means they truly do need some assistance.
- Order your dropdown alphabetically, it makes them easier to read and find information you care about.
- (On jobs page) Type of work has a select all button but all values are selected by default. Change Select All to Select None otherwise you have to click a bunch of times to get just the one you care about.
Actually, now that I look at it, make it like the other dropsdowns. Have a Clear button, have nothing selected (with selects everything).
- Searching for a tag in Job title or keyword (like C#) pulls up irrelevant jobs
- Searching companies by country would be great (I think someone else mentioned this)
- Also consider adding more filtering dropdowns for companies to help people determine available values for example: Primary Industry, Benefits, Job Type (ie list all companies with openings for DevOps)
Thanks for the feedback! I believe the dropdown is ordered by popularity but it would probably make sense to order it by alphabet once you search.
Makes sense to add a clear for the type of work too.
Yes, our search isn't perfect, we'll keep playing with it to try make it more accurate :) Appreciate you pointing out a specific keyword that has issues too!
Like the idea of filtering by job type too. You can already filter by benefit/market :)
OT, but can anyone recommend a similar service not directed at SE? A friend is trying to find a remote job, but likely in HR/BD, can anyone recommend a similar service?
This is already good, it lists non-software jobs, but it seems software is clearly, and understandably, the focus.
We often talk about this internally - how do we make sure we include jobs that aren't just SE. A lot of the problem for us is that engineering jobs are readily available and commonly support remote. From personal experience, I've seen companies that are willing to hire engineers remotely, but not other roles. With that said, it's definitely becoming more popular across all roles which is nice.
When the headline is "remote companies", but they typically have a list of countries you can work from, I would've expected the filter option to allow filtering by a subset of countries you're resident in.
What is the adoption of the django vs rails or whatever in the sample size?
Is there a difference between companies that reach Series A, B? etc?
Is there a difference in valuation? (On the theory that stack X helped the team iterate faster)
Does it matter what the vertical is? (For instance, are data science companies more successful if they use a pythonic stack?)
p.s. if you don't want to release the data to internet sleuths, you might consider putting out articles like this as content marketing. People will definitely criticize you for your weak study that ignores their favorite factor, but it would be for fun.
I always find this interesting! It takes digging to get the answers, but there are a few resources out there to explain some of it. I can't think of them off the top of my head, sorry :/
For example; yes, Rails or Django is common to rapidly whip things up at an early-stage startup.
Data Science and ML companies will lean towards Python because it's the main building block of their product. No hard and fast rules, of course; you'll often see Scala at these companies too, given it's relationship with Spark.
Anyways, I'm always trying to understand and seek out the answers to the exact questions you have.
Yes I agree! I'd love to create pages that show the popularity of stacks/benefits! Interesting idea about breaking it up by market/vertical too, this is likely something we'll do in the future!
But, like every tool smoothening transactions, it reduces comparisons to number crushing and reduces the margins of profit both ways. And in HR, those margins are the human perks, like working with a team we like, or liking the functional aspect of what we produce, or liking the management. If we reduce every job to a stack and HR advantages, then motivations get relegated to second place.
Obviously, there is also the dark aspect that HR margins are also (and mostly) when some becomes dad and is stuck in his job, location and skills. Then, the company unduly profits.
> If we reduce every job to a stack and HR advantages, then motivations get relegated to second place.
Simple collecting and displaying data does not force anyone to change their motivations. Price transparency does not reduce profit margin both ways. It helps allocate resources from overpaid to underpaid (this does not mean it makes all prices equal). The concept of price also factors in quality of life at work, but that is difficult to translate to a number. But workplaces known to have bad quality of life at work do have to pay more and/or accept lower quality labor.
> Obviously, there is also the dark aspect that HR margins are also (and mostly) when some becomes dad and is stuck in his job, location and skills. Then, the company unduly profits.
This has nothing to do with price transparency. It is a consequence of supply and demand.
Agree that there is more to a job than the number of perks (and perks don't often contribute a lot to how much you like your job!)
That's definitely not what we're trying to do - more so trying to give more power to job seekers into the inner workings of remote companies. In the future, we'd love to provide even more transparency beyond just tech stack/tools and go into things like what it's like to work there etc.
UX problem - order in tech stack dropdown looks like to be random. It will be more sane and much easier to search needed tech visually if it was ordered alphabetically.
On the linked subpage with tech stacks, I don't see a way to filter for country. This is relevant because even though it's 100% remote, there are different tax rules or even difficulties working in certain countries.
Also, cool to see CHICKEN Scheme mentioned under tech stacks. Too bad there are no matching jobs (yet) :(
Love the design and how easy it is to use. The site is also fast. Feels like job boards are a category of product that lends themselves to niche offerings (although arguably remote jobs is a pretty big niche). The biggest job board in Australia is seek.com.au and it still sucks, so more power to you guys.
Thanks! Yes, super glad that the site is staying fast under the HN hug... we consider speed a core component of our offering, it's good - but there is a long way to go still...
And yes, I think there's a big opportunity to create super targeted job boards where you can customize the experience for a particular audience, similar to how each component of Craigslist has been turned into a new company over time.
The web design is really good, that was the first thing I noticed. I then found that it's built by one of the co-founders and is called Untitled UI: https://www.untitledui.com
I came here to praise the wonderful component implementation and use of Tailwind CSS. The searchable dropdown is splendid with its implementation. I was not aware of Untitled UI so I went to search that and it looks like it is just a Figma kit without specific framework implementation? Are you just utilizing it's design language to guide the component design and implementation? Are you able to export components or styling to your framework with it?
This is fantastic. I’d love to chat with you about it. Super powerful to have intel on the tech stack. Might be a bigger opp for you in RevOps. I’m on Twitter @briansowards or your can find email in bio.
This doesn't seem to be useful for job seekers currently, or am I misunderstanding the UI? I can show companies that use a given tech stack (among dozens of others), but not jobs that use it?
Sorry for the confusion - the link from HN is our company search page :) If you want to search for jobs, it’s better to head to https://himalayas.app/jobs
What's the best place to get started looking for entry level web dev jobs? Even internships? Asking for my partner, who is transitioning from environmental science to software development.
Shameless plug, but I'm working on a job board[0] specifically for entry level developer jobs. I'm hoping to open source the job board code as well so it's taking a little longer but I'm close to making the repo public. I also publish a free weekly Substack newsletter geared toward entry level devs[1] and am close to finishing a book about soft-skills for entry level devs[2].
Why do I do all of this? Because I was also an entry level dev once.
What is your methodology to collect the tech stack data? Some things seem easy to identify, eg Google Analytics, and others much harder, eg back office like Microsoft Excel.
Hey there! We look at a mix of what we find from HTML, as well as job descriptions. Some companies even have pages/blogs dedicated to their tech stacks which makes it easy!
Yes sadly there are a lot of jobs that are limited to specific countries or time zones. It’s best to search for your country or time zone using the search on https://himalayas.app/jobs :)
It's not against the site, it's the companies fault advertising as remote. Or mine, understanding remote as something that shouldn't have to do with borders.
I think a big part of it is compliance with local employment laws. There are great companies like remote.com and letsdeel.com that are making it easier to hire people internationally though! :)
That totally depends on where you are in your career and what your needs are. Some people only work where they work, or only work at all for certain benefits.
Hey there! We use a mix of looking at their website, app, and reading through job descriptions. Some companies have blogs/pages dedicated to their tech stack as well :)
Yep, that's true! We do allow people to search by skills/tech stack in our job search but there's probably more we can do here to more tightly integrate our tech stack information with our skill information.
You can filter by salary range on the jobs page (https://himalayas.app/jobs) - we kept the initial search on the homepage simple but could add more things if it's what people want.
Nope not US only, but there are a lot of US only roles. You can search by country/time zone for jobs here: https://himalayas.app/jobs - need to add a similar thing for companies at some point.
Very cool. Any plan to expand to non-remote companies? It could also be cool to collaborate with levels.fyi to create a one stop shop. Although maybe that's more work than it's worth.
No plans to expand to non-remote companies at the moment. We want to focus on making Himalayas the best site for remote job seekers and as you can see from all the feedback, we still have a long way to go!
No salary information? I'm struggling to understand why someone would care at all about a "$1000 budget for your home office" when looking for six-figure and up jobs. It's work: the most important question to me is how much are you going to pay for my time? To me, everything else is secondary, bordering on irrelevant.
Please don't use the reply function to spam your own thing. It looks like about 90% of your recent comments are just linking to this (or the board directly).
They'll overvalue some little things, like the "free pizza in meetings", "childcare discount" or the "airport lounge access", while not paying anywhere as much attention proportionally to the $150k of salary.
That (and tax breaks) are the only reason for employment to give any benefits apart from raw salary anyway. In an economists world, the employee is always better placed to decide what to spend their compensation on, so it should all be money.
People like that stuff because it is like a part time job getting that stuff vetted and set up yourself. Time is money, many don't have time to vet all these health/dental/vision/etc packages on the public market place. Free pizza means you don't have to plan and prep a lunch. Childcare discount might even involve a known good childcare service in the area. Lounge access is great if you like to eat while travelling (and don't want to be saddled with a $15 airport double whopper or that $10 sad looking cesar wrap) or are a booze hound; the whole point of it is that its an infinite buffett of food and booze like a Vegas casino. People get smashed in lounges.
Agreed. Though I recently helped my partner sign up for a bunch of these types of benefits at a new Big Corp job: it took half a day entering the same information in different portals from different providers, plus figuring out if a perk was even something they wanted or could use.
Employers need to start offering a perk where they enrol you in all the relevant perks.
> For some of us work-life balance, interesting work, meaning and other non-monetary factors are worth considering and are very, very important.
I thought the same thing until a senior engineering role paid me >500k/year. I realized then how hilariously ripped off I was getting prior to this job (lured by "free" lunches, coffee, massages, &c). I could make my own meaning and exciting life outside of work with what essentially amounts to several combined disposable salaries. These companies extol benefits because they're tax-deductible and saves them money, not because they are meaningful to individual employees. I can appreciate their business dilemma because high paid employees are more difficult to retain, but that should be encouraged and celebrated by us laborers.
I feel like there's probably a simpler and less intimidating way to organize and represent this up-front.