HN Explorer

Suggest HN: Stricter Char Limits on Who's Hiring?

35 points by mattm ↗ HN
The Who's Hiring threads were great when they started because it was mainly limited to people on HN. But now it's obvious word has gotten out and for people looking through the threads it becomes such a chore. Companies are just copying and pasting their standard job descriptions which take up a full screen for each one.

For example, this comment I need to page down 4 times to get through it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8681941

Would it be possible to have even stricter character limits specifically for the Who's Hiring threads? I think it would help make the postings more focused and geared towards HN rather than just blindly copying and pasting what they have posted elsewhere.

11 comments

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dang
That sounds like a good idea. What should the limit be?
logn
Proportional to karma?
dang
I expect many people would object to that and that if there's a limit it should be the same for everyone.
JacobAldridge
The OP in this thread is 116 words and includes a link - I imagine 150 words would be plenty to get the point across for any job posting.

100 may be sufficient - the purpose isn't to replicate a job board advertisement, rather to give the headlines and enough information so the relevant people get in touch (or go read the longer piece elsewhere, if necessary).

mattm
I agree with this. It's enough for a small blurb about the companies, the technologies and link/email for more info.

If it's possible, it might even be better to limit by number of lines. The example I posted uses only 470 words but over 100 lines! I think around 15 lines should be plenty.

dang
I think you guys are on to something good here. A reasonable constraint will make the job posts better by requiring a bit of creativity to keep within the limit. And there's no question it will make the thread more readable overall.

And yes, the limit should be on both newlines and total size. We'll try to have this ready for next month's whoishiring threads.

codegeek
Also, if possible, restrict using characters like ----- just by themselves in a line to unnecessary add underlines etc for formatting. they don't add anything to the content anyway.
avalaunch
I think you should also consider requiring a standardized form for the posts. For example, line 1 = Title, line 2 = city, line 3 = remote/no remote, ect... It would make searching through the posts easier and developers like myself could create more accurate browser extensions for filtering posts to match users' requirements.
ellego
I like this idea. What other info would we want included. I think environment/stack and an email contact would also be good.
brudgers
Gamify it a bit.

One Twit of words [140].

First link counts as one word. Each after that counts as ten.

Five free new lines. Each one after that counts as ten words.

'!' counts as ten, just because nothing is that exciting about job ad.

jerrythompson
I'm guilty of this and have edited down as much as possible with 6 positions that opened up.