I think job market discussions are a staple of Hacker News and I like it that way. In fact, it seems the site is mostly monetized with job offers… Hackers gotta eat too.
In the beginning, that was the main point of Hacker News. How to build stuff yourself, in a better, more efficient way than the old school "work for the man" approach. Roll up your sleeves, leave the beaten track and achieve higher efficiency than the mainstream.
It was called "Startup News" back then. Then PG renamed it to "Hacker News" because he wanted it to be more focussed on amazing things than just building startups.
Looking for a job in a big company seems to be 180° into the other direction to me.
The intellectually stimulating part is in the comments (which is typical really).
Any discussion about PHP is actually, since the language occupies the most tragic of niches: "very productive and with a low barrier to entry, but badly paid".
A while ago I did a side gig in PHP - it was surprisingly easy to get back to it after more than a 10 year break and I made it worth for me, but my client was not used to such rates.
Are there other readers here, like me, who would love to see a HN that is way less mainstream?