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Tell HN: Thank you whoishiring, a.k.a. Matthew Walsh-Cloonagh

553 points by dang ↗ HN
Back in 2011, an HN user volunteered to consolidate the scattered "who is hiring" 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391828

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've helped a ton of people get jobs, and made Hacker News a better place. We're all much obliged.

Any thoughts about "Who is Hiring" and related threads that any of you want to share? Fire away.

Edits, based on the discussion below:

I think we'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'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.)

We'll also make the posts show up on the first weekday of each month, instead of each day—but that won't make a difference until August.

Finally, we'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.

137 comments

[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] thread
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. :)
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.

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.

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?

bjelkeman-again
1. Good work. 2. Yes that would be best.

We get about as many good candidates from these posts as we get from the other recruitment channels together. Invaluable for us. Thanks!

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.
seanp2k2
Ah, this is a good point too; I hadn't considered that. The rule could be "hiring managers only", but as you said, that may be too strict.
spicyj
This would certainly cut down a bit on the volume of posts, but I would be happy to see this rule added; I think it would improve the quality of the thread significantly.
columbo
I'm not a fan of thread-splitting but that'd be one option (Ask HN: Who's hiring directly). Otherwise what about people add tags like [Direct] or [Hiring Manager] to their posts:?
angersock
I think it's perfectly reasonable--after all, it's the HN community posting to/for the HN community. That level of personal interaction is really what adds value here.
mst
Various mailing lists I've run have done well with "if you're not somebody technical or somebody with the authority to hire for this post, hush"
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.

seanp2k2
Then they'd personally be part of the hiring company, no? I think the intent here is to not have "middle persons" posting jobs trying for the interstitial profits, and in the case of a recruiter for FooBar Inc on the FooBar Inc payroll, there doesn't seem to be an issue IMO.
timv
I think Colin's argument is that an HR employee of FooBar, who isn't going to be directly involved in the role, offers no more value to the community than a "middle person" would and we don't want/need either of them.
timv
I agree, but for a slightly different reason.

Only large(ish) companies have recruiters that are also employees. Most small startups have no one in that role, and medium sized startups would be more likely to have a freelance consultant than an employee. (Our startup has used a consultant for more specialised or senior roles).

Its seems strange that we'd want to let the Google/FB/Apple etc HR folk post, but not "Sally Smith, consultant to UltraSecretLabs.io"

It seems the easiest rule is what you suggest, ban them all - you can only post roles that you're personally involved in.

durin42
I dunno. I've had some people be shocked that GOOG is hiring in Chicago and Pittsburgh and ask me if my post was for real. I don't do it often, but almost every time I post in one of the hiring threads someone is interested to at least know if it's for real.

Just my 2¢.

brlewis
If you interact with most people in the Chicago and Pittsburgh offices, then I would think those positions qualify as ones you're personally involved with.
binxbolling
I would personally prefer this stay fairly loose and only exclude recruiters/middlemen who have no relationship to the hiring company. These are the people blowing up my phone and inbox based on one random keyword from a resume or profile.

On the other hand, an in-house recruiter, an outside recruiter contracted by the company, the actual hiring manager, just a peer or colleague, the company's receptionist... I think all these should be allowed.

If we're going to cut one more cohort from the above paragraph, cut the 3rd party recruiters. However, excluding all talent acquisition teams and/or other co-workers within the company seems unnecessarily restrictive.

jeromegv
I agree. And it's easy to rule out people that are 3rd party recruiter (they normally don't want to name the company). But for someone inside the company, how would you know the difference between an in-house recruiter and an engineer? That seems silly to impose those rules.
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.
NhanH
Normally it's both, the post will have to specify which case it is for them.
superuser2
INTERNSHIP would be a nice fix for the "intern" problem. However I suspect that requiring willingness to schlep or dig into regex might be considered by employers to be a feature rather than a bug :).
Hello71
I think the point of "who is hiring" posts is to make it easier for people to find your job opening, not harder.
superuser2
I think the point is to get it in front of the HN-reading demographic, which is larger than the people who read your website and (arguably) higher-quality than your average job board.
simi_
Or, just have a nice interface on top. Something like http://hnhiring.me/, but with actual features - sorting and filtering, for starters. Maybe even embed that functionality into HN for "who's hiring" posts, instead of relying on a 3rd party website.
dang
Would INTERNS do? INTERNSHIP is a bit long, and I don't like +INTERN; we like HN threads to consist of plain, good English. It's moot anyway because half the posts would ignore it.
perspectivezoom
I was thinking about spec compliance. I think the best thing would be to provide these guidelines in the whoishiring post, and then ask that those who follow the guidelines put a unique string, like "metafriendly" or "whoshiringspec" at the end of the post. Then those of us who write mini-apps would know that the post conforms to the format.
markdown
> It's moot anyway because half the posts would ignore it.

Clamp down on those. Moderators should moderate.

Half the posters already ignore and won't even mention if they allow (or not) REMOTE. These should be removed by the mods and downvoted by everyone else. You'd only have to do this a few times before people wised up and started putting effort into their posting rather than just copypasting their job posting from all the other job sites out there.

dang
> Clamp down on those. Moderators should moderate.

Our cycles are limited. If we spend time doing that, we won't be able to do other, more valuable things for the community. Plus we'd be miserable, and also you vastly overestimate our power to induce compliance.

I agree, though, that copy/pasting job posts from other places goes against the spirit of these threads.

markdown
We all appreciate the work that you do :)
dang
Thanks! I hope I didn't sound too testy there.
geofft
We don't need actual moderators. Just say that posts must contain this info (and VISA must be used in this way, or whatever) or the whoishiring thread rules specifically encourage downvotes. Poorly-formatted posts will get to -3 quickly enough.
Hello71
[INTERN] [REMOTE] [VISA]
dools
Just search the word intern with a space after it. Remote matching no remote is harder but if we have a remote indicator why would anyone say no remote? If they did it would be a sign you don't want to work for them ...
mehrzad
>Just search the word intern with a space after it.

This isn't a solution because posts say "interns welcome" or stuff like that.

lukasm
Whenever there is a new hn whoishiring I'm trying to add remote companies to a "persistent" list. The problem is filtering. Please use REMOTE, LOCAL, {COUNTRY, CONTINENT, TIMEZONE}-ONLY

Shameless plug: Please send me PRs. https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

petercooper
There are things the kids are using nowadays called hashtags that might be more familiar to people? :-) #intern #remote etc.
raverbashing
Just search for 'intern ' using Ctrl-F

Now, I'm not sure how search engines deal with +A, google considers +A to search on G+ (used to mean "mandatory", now quotes mean that)

So the prefix idea might work but it may need to change

tarblog
They're talking about using Ctrl-F.

The problem is that when you do that every instance of the word internet also shows up in the search.

davidddavidson
The following regular expression can be used when searching to match "intern" and "internship" (singular and plural):

    \bintern(ship)?(s)?\b
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.

cgearhart
I wrote a plugin that hides replies and allows you to permanently hide jobs. [1] I'd like to update it so that hidden posts carry over between months, and perhaps to re-sort the posts based on post date.

I have since found that with over 800 posts each month positive sorting is not efficient enough. Around the same time I found a search plugin from another user, but I haven't used it. [2]

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/modwh/hefjlchphbeb... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-whos-hiring-job...

paulvs
The second plugin I wrote, please feel free to test it out/give feedback.
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 the comments you haven't seen before (edit: or highlight them). 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

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.
danso
Yeah, the balance has to be between ease of reading and ease of typing into the browser's plaintext input box. It just has to be easier to parse than what is now...which, to be honest, isn't terribly hard to parse, but it's enough of a barrier to make it more than an afternoon hack project.
perspectivezoom
Yes. Please add a way to reliably determine metadata on hiring posts. I wrote https://github.com/perspectivezoom/curated-hn-hiring but abandoned it after a couple months because it took way too much time to tag all posts.

By far the most important information seemed to be location and/or remote filtering. Gaganpreet stepped up and is doing a pretty good job with https://github.com/gaganpreet/hn-hiring-mapped, but it's still not 100%.

I would really love for whoshiring to provide this pipe-delimited template, and then optionally allow posters to conform to it. I also agree with danso's order of importance, but would also like to add that the location string(s) should be something geocodable by Maps APIs (ie, feed the string in and get an unambiguous LatLng).

e12e
See also:

"Proposed Who Is Hiring Spec"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636104

I don't actually like that proposal[1] very much as it stands -- but perhaps moving discussion/pull-requests there would be useful? (I've not yet added my own comments there, but now with two threads on the subject on hn, I'm seeing the need to consolidate, if we want to get a wide range of contributions, and try to gravitate to the "best" solution...).

[ed: ah, I see I'm replying to the author here... I was a bit quick. Anyway -- the point of discussing a spec with a tool that support pull-requests/diffs etc still stands -- and I think it might be a good idea.]

[1] https://github.com/perspectivezoom/who-is-hiring-spec/

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?

smeyer
>I'd rather let in 500 crappy posts than turn away a single valuable newcomer to HN

I'm not sure exactly what ratio I'd tolerate, but I think that's a bit extreme.

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.
ugh123
I would object. This creates exclusivity that somebody well-intentioned, but without an account (you don't need an account to browse HN everyday), wouldn't be able to overcome.

If you want to prevent recruiters then the principle-company's email address should be in the job description and/or a link to that company's job description (maybe this could be required if the threshold wasn't overcome). Also, most recruiters don't want to reveal the name of the company hiring, so requiring real company names (I guess you would have to ban 'stealth' startups) would be necessary too.

dang
> This creates exclusivity that somebody well-intentioned, but without an account [...] wouldn't be able to overcome.

Right, which is why we're generally opposed to restrictions on posting despite the headaches of being a public optionally-anonymous forum. We don't want to miss the chance of having, say, Alan Kay show up to comment on PARC, or someone who did a Ph.D. on a topic make an account to comment on it.

But posting to a monthly Who Is Hiring thread isn't really a serendipity thing. You have to know a bit about the community to do it—and if you do know a bit about the community, getting to 5 or 10 karma is easy. Even if it took a while, you wouldn't likely miss a thread, because they stay open for 2 weeks.

We've been getting a lot of emails from people asking how to post jobs in these threads, and although we always answer them, I sometimes do so with a sinking feeling that these are probably not quite the sort of posts the community wants to see more of. A very small karma threshold—just enough to be a speed bump—would probably take care of most of that. However I'm not attached to the idea.

Edit: I should add that we wouldn't do this without looking at the data first. "Looking at the data" in this case means looking at all the comments posted to those threads by accounts below a certain karma and/or age. If there were lots of high-quality posts in there, we wouldn't do it.

rickhanlonii
> I should add that we wouldn't do this without looking at the data first.

+1 and I'd be interested in seeing this data summarized. I looked through the May 2011-2015 posts and a cursory inspection led to my suggestion. I saw a few posts from new or low karma users which were fine, so there will be some casualties with a speed bump and the data should justify the benefits before implementing.

corford
If the threshold is low enough (e.g. 50) I'd be all for it. The internet is awash with mediocre, recruiter posted tech jobs. Raising the bar ever so slightly for posting to HN doesn't seem like a negative to me.
dang
I wasn't thinking anywhere near 50. Perhaps 10 at most. More likely 5 would be enough.
corford
I happily yield to your better judgement on this :)
go1979
There are quite a few lurkers on HN who don't post or who have multiple accounts with varying karma. Having some kind of arbitrary karma threshold would be a turnoff IMHO.
new1234567
Please don't do this. There are a number of reasons why legitimate users would need to use new / separate accounts just for job listings.

For example, some companies don't encourage participation in public discussion boards such as HN, but posting jobs on HN is fine.

dang
This is the kind of subtlety we need people to tell us about. Thanks.

I don't think we'll impose a karma threshold. Browsing through this morning's thread, most of the posts are clearly legit. Punishing innocent posts (as would inevitably happen with a threshold) isn't justified unless the problem becomes critical, and it's not.

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.
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/

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

sarciszewski
Yes, this would be completely Ctrl+F friendly too.
e12e
As I mentioned on a related thread [ed:1], I'm partial to changing "plain text"-tags to "hash"-tags. #remote is easy to search for, and doesn't conflict with #no-remote. It doesn't require regexp/word-boundary checks etc. Also works with #remote-ok -- and I think you'd have to be very creative to mess it up (#remote-no?).

"Proposed Who Is Hiring Spec"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636104

timv
Can I propose something like

- REMOTE(global)

- REMOTE(continental US)

- REMOTE(UK work hours)

A number of employers consider "Remote" to mean come in to the office once a month, but many job seekers think of remote as live on the other side of the world.

Encouraging some disambiguation would help.

bigiain
Seconded. I'm about to start looking for people for a project that won't require them to be in our office, but which will require them to be physically present to attend client meetings with a week or two's notice. I'd probably be able to accept an intercity trip a coupe of times a month for that - I doubt I'd be able to get traction for a remote employee who'd need to arrange international travel to attend meetings.
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 .

lmm
Maybe it's just worth explicitly giving as a guideline in the post: "Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or VISA if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Please do NOT include any of the words "intern", "remote", or "visa" in your post if you are not interested in these candidates, e.g. rather than "no remote", say "local only"".
bengali3
> I think it's a lost cause trying to impose a machine-readable format on text fields, as many have been suggesting

I agree and personally I think HN hiring posts should avoid machine friendly formats anyways. I like to think this group is niche enough to allow the hiring individual to write a post and have it read by interested candidates. meaning no middle men/machines required. I', just a single user, but I don't find threads too large that a ctrl-f doesn't suffice for my needs.

dang, thank you for all you've done thus far.

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.
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.
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!

[dead] pauly
Thanks, have found a couple of applicants to http://join.holidayextras.co.uk/vacancies/ this way Holiday Extras is looking for the best Software Engineers to join our team. We pride ourselves on being able to offer exciting challenges in the world of tech, whilst providing a fantastic environment in which to work, in the heart of the Kent countryside, 5 minutes from the beach. I am an SE, in this role already, in Kent, UK. If you mention me (@pauly) they may pay me they may cut me in. Or they may not. Feel free to ask me for details, or email me, pauly@clarkeology.com. Good luck!
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.

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.

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.)
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.

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

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.

sjackso
Great idea. Potentially more useful alternative: rank the posts strictly by the time they were posted, so that it's easy to see what's new since you last looked. (Perhaps allow posts to be downvoted but not upvoted?)

I was reading the hiring threads regularly for a number of months, and I picked up the habit of scrolling past the first N postings each time: they were highly-ranked HN users posting jobs for their companies, often repeated month to month. Good jobs, no doubt, and good people, but I didn't need a monthly reminder that (e.g.) Matasano is hiring in cities far away from me. :)

tptacek
I'd like that too, but I'm constraining my suggestion to things I think team-HN might actually implement. They can randomize thread order (or make upvotes on job threads not count, or something like that) very, very easily. It's low hanging fruit, and they should pick it!
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.
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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.

krapp
I do think the first job deserves to rank higher, but not because of the karma of the account doing the posting. An interesting job would likely bubble up by its own merit. And arguably, fewer people would be qualified for that job than the latter, so there's more value in terms of hiring potential to not have the better jobs at the top of the list.
comrh
I like this idea but the thing that makes the threads tough is I can scan 400+ posts then come back to 100+ more posted but I can't sort to the new ones.