I got hired to be an analyst for a MLB baseball team off of a HN post like 7 years ago. Because of HN I have 2 world series rings! Life is very strange but I'll forever be grateful for that Who's Hiring post.
It's really up to the front office as to who gets rings and who doesn't. Not to mention, there are usually a couple of tiers of rings.
Naturally, all of the players and coaches get rings. But after that, there are various executives, owners, player personnel, etc. The "team" is more than the people on the field.
Honestly that's pretty awesome (and a genuinely amazing story); every time I've seen a championship ring, it spurred deep conversation. Admittedly it only happened three times, all for Nationals staff, but everyone was passionate about what they did.
"The Houston Astros are seeking an Analyst for the team's Baseball Research and Development group. The Analyst will work closely with the Director of R&D and the analytics team to conduct research and develop methods that encourage the effective understanding and application of information throughout Baseball Operations.
The role will include, but not be limited to, online video analysis and developing robust code that can be transmitted by various means including percussive impact of waste recepticles."
I met the CEO of a startup a local Hacker News meetup.
I joined his company as employee #8 in a (non-technical) role I wasn't qualified for, in an industry I didn't know existed, leveraging a technology I knew nothing about. I didn't have any accomplishments but a few failed startups, but he thought the hustle I demonstrated was all I needed to be successful in the role he was hiring for.
Fortunately he was right.
1. We scaled to 200 employees in 4 years bootstrapped.
2. I got to work on problems you only get access to 15 - 20 years into your career
3. Very cross functional role working on sales, biz dev, product, legal, support.
4. Raised a few rounds and got acquired for a lot of $.
5. The company was acquired 6 years after I left, but I had 10 year options that had less than 6 months left before the expiration date.
The company experienced a lot of growing pains around year 3/4 that caused me to leave (along with some mistakes I made along the way), but I only look back at the experience with fondness.
What's a problem you get only after 15 years? Lower back pain? I've never heard of interesting problems being gate-kept by years of experience. PhDs have the best share of current interesting problems.
Full lifecycle integration of our technology into F500 companies to deliver cloud services to their end-customers. Think Rackspace, GoDaddy, Sprint, Comcast, AT&T and two dozen of their peers across the EU and APAC.
The average sales cycle was 9-18 months, and the average GTM was ~9 months. Technically I was in a partnerships role and I was supposed to work with our dept heads to align with our partner's dept heads for sales, support, product, legal, etc.
But because I joined earlier than all of our department heads and worked with the CEO to develop the program, was closer to the requirements, and they weren't KPI'd on these partnerships / had their own problems, they were happy to let me do most of the work.
I was 26 when I joined and the folks I worked with were 10 - 25 years older. I pitched SVPs, negotiated legal agreements, wrote API integration specs, did on-sites, repped us at industry conferences, product managed packages, trained sales and support teams, etc.
They aren't hacker news branded, but you can find them where everyone is tech literate and follows hacker news. To your point, and perhaps op, I've never seen a Hacker News™ meetup.
I got hired from a "Who's Hiring" post back in 2012 to a very famous, then pre-IPO company that absolutely changed my career trajectory. It prompted a move to SF, followed by NYC. I got to be a part of a "big tech IPO". I got exposed to incredibly smart people and cutting edge tech. And made some money to boot. It put a giant "stamp of approval" on my resume and opened up doors I could only dream of previously.
HN is a wonderful place full of opportunity.
I've also hired ~3 people from those threads, now that I'm in a position to do so. They've all been excellent hires (though be prepared for some resume spam in your inbox if you have a post that catches people's eye)
I also met the guy who ended up building my custom dream home (from which I sit as I type this) via HN.
1) I was sitting on a house that I thought was a fixer upper, that turned out needed to be torn down. Feeling very discouraged about it, and ready to walk away and eat a loss.
2) I (thought I) was in the market for a new job.
There is a YC company called BuildZoom. You may recognize them from their job postings here on HN. At the time, they posted a job for a Principal Engineer...which is roughly the title I was aiming for at the time. So I clicked it to check it out having no idea what BuildZoom was. I discovered that the job wasn't for me, but I also discovered that their product was basically helping people do real estate development.
So I signed up. Got the whole pitch from them. Agreed to pay extra $$ for their "premium tier" which they never delivered on and refunded entirely after acknowledging this. But what they did do was set up 3 interviews with builders to come see my dilapidated old house. Two of them were obvious no gos, and I almost cancelled with the 3rd because of that. But it turned out he was our goldilocks, and built us a beautiful house that we absolutely love on time and on budget during the height of Covid. It also turned out he had no idea who or what BuildZoom was, they had just found him on some builder directory and added him to their list and basically started marketing for him.
TLDR followed a link to a YC company looking for a job, ended up getting paired up with a homebuilder.
In 2018 I was hired as full-timer number 13 from an HN thread. I stayed there for 4 years.
The company was 90-some people when I left. We posted in the HN threads every month, but as far as I know, I was the only one hired from HN. One time I asked someone from HR about it, and they told me that we only got a very small number of responses from the HN threads, but that they were generally high-quality candidates, and that it just never worked out. In at least one of the cases we tried to hire the person, but he ended up ghosting us (I remember that one because I interviewed him... and now often notice his username in the comments).
I joined a YC startup from an HN post, which was in some ways a great experience, and in other ways was terrible. A real mixed bag.
I still keep in touch with some of the people I worked with there and it was honestly some of the best quality people I've ever been on a team with, unfortunately the founder decided to shark everyone technical at the company after we hit a major milestone early letting go the CTO and everyone on my team, including me, and at the time I was traveling (with the company's encouragement). They stranded me in a foreign country with no severance and no working technology (no phone/laptop). I eventually sorted things out with them, and I hope they continue to succeed as I have no hard feelings, but it was definitely one of my wilder startup experiences. Just to clarify, it was definitely an issue of incompetence, not of being malicious, they had no formal HR function and just really handled things badly out of ignorance rather than a desire to cause me harm.
The experience was actually key to why I decided to stop being an engineer and become a product manager instead, so in that way it was a massively necessary moment in my career to get to where I am today. That said, I'm not sure if I'd repeat the entire experience.
I'm glad you survived, but I'm having trouble imagining how this was only "incompetence".
Could the company not make another payroll, no option other than to spin it down? So the incompetence was first in getting that close, and second in executing the spindown?
Or did the business keep going, or did some people walk away more comfortably?
> I'm glad you survived, but I'm having trouble imagining how this was only "incompetence".
The business kept going and is still operating. Why it was incompetence is because they had no formal HR function or Legal function at the company at that time, and so just mishandled things because they didn't know what they were doing from an HR/Legal perspective. I believe this has since been resolved. I don't want to go into more details, but as one of the harmed parties, I am satisfied it was not malicious and merely an oversight due to ignorance.
I'm not comfortable with a startup laying off people at all. Startup compensation is almost always structured with equity as a part.
And the details are usually crappy, like even a very early critical engineering hire offereed only 1% ISOs, vesting over 4+ years, and a 90-day window to exercise upon severing employment.
When the company structures terms like that, for people who you'd think the company would want aligned with the success of the company, a company that's enjoyed the work towards equity of employees should make layoffs a last resort, including after having the founders take the hit (e.g., trading some of their much larger equity for funds to retain their team).
Had someone reach out to me from a very cool company and ask if I might be interested in joining them. Interviewed... Found out the guy who hired me was really looking for his new boss... now I run the Platform and Data Engineering groups at this company, and he's one of my directs, and we are having an immense amount of fun. Landed in a company with an incredible mission (Software for Youth Sports), and couldn't be happier.
Nee. LeagueApps (http://www.leagueapps.com). Ik hou van onze missie en onze SPORTSDOG-waarden (kijk op onze website). Het feit dat we jeugdsport financieren en voetbalvelden in het hele land aanleggen, maakt het alleen maar beter.
De meesten van ons hier geloven dat een van de manieren waarop we kinderen vaardigheden zoals leiderschap en teamwerk kunnen bijbrengen, is door middel van teamsporten.
(in english below for those interested in following)
De financiering van sportvelden is meestal het domein van de gemeenten en deelstaten. De sportteams worden vaak gefinancierd door fondsenwerving, donaties/sponsoring en/of lidmaatschapsgelden. Dat gezegd hebbende, heeft een groot percentage van de bevolking (vooral de kansarme jeugd) geen toegang tot speelplekken of de middelen om een team te runnen (uniformen, sportuitrusting), vooral in de grotere gemeenten. De kosten van bijvoorbeeld grond in New York of Seattle om toe te wijzen aan een voetbalveld zijn astronomisch. Als gevolg daarvan zijn de meeste sportvelden/-arena's (bijv. hockeypistes) dag en nacht volgeboekt.
Helaas - in de VS worden veel sporten pay-to-play en alleen beschikbaar voor de welgestelden. Dit is vooral duidelijk bij sporten zoals skiën - waar een dagpas van ongeveer $ 80 per dag ging tot dichter bij $ 150 / dag op sommige heuvels.
---
Financing sports fields is usually the domain of the municipalities and state governments. The sports teams are often funded by fundraising, donations/sponsorship, and/or membership fees. With that said, a large percentage of the population (in particular the underserved youth) don't have access to places to play or the funds to run a team (uniforms, sports equipment), especially in the larger municipalities. For example, the cost of land in New York or Seattle to allocate to a soccer field is astronomical. As an effect, most sports fields/arenas (e.g. hockey rinks) are just fully booked up at all hours of the day and night.
Sadly - in the US, many sports are becoming pay-to-play and only available to the well-to-do. This is especially evident in sports like skiing - where a day pass went from around $80 a day to closer to $150/day at some hills.
I got hired from a Who's Hiring post last year. I doubt my experience is the standard but I landed at a really terrible company. Used outdated tech in really unprofessional ways. The culture was extremely toxic as well. I have since moved on to a nice new company I found through my network.
I had a very similar experience with a company that advertises on HN quite a bit. It turns out the company had actually split in two, and all the competent managers left to join the new company. It was amazing how much the VP and CEO would constantly contradict each other, sabotage projects, and even insult their own staff members (at one point I recommended they promote a senior eng to a higher position, but the VPE went on a rant about how the last person she promoted, who still worked there, didn't live up to the title so she didn't want to promote anyone else).
Anyways if you see a company that is constantly using their free job listing every month on this site you should probably assume there's a reason they are constantly looking, and it isn't always good.
I mean that they used versions of frameworks that were no longer supported, and they did not use best practices which resulted in lots of security concerns (and messy code).
Sample size of one, obviously, but back when I was in a position to hire I absolutely checked those threads each month and reached out to people that seemed like good matches. Never got any responses that I can recall, though…
I'll double the sample size. I've both posted a few times and replied to ads.
The people were mostly nice, but they tended to want very specific niche skillets, had a fair amount of hoops to jump through for sucky comp and no equity.
There was one exception but they hit me with several "2 hour" take home tests and I tapped out because there's easier money even in this market.
I suspect the story is a bit better for the US cohort, but comp wise if you can get into FAANG you probably should.
( I turned down FAANG for CTO of a UK startup in 2020, and despite stellar performance, I became much poorer whilst the owner became a paper billionaire, so part of the problem might be I'm just not interested in wooly promises that can be revised )
For a variety of reasons job seeking via HN is a decent fit for me: I prefer to work for smallish companies, I have modest ambitions but a pretty strong resume, and remote work suits me.
I’ve posted a a few times on “who wants to be hired?” and despite explicitly ruling out full time work, I’ve gotten some decent offers. The last time I posted a little over a year ago, things worked out and I was hired.
I'm asking because salaries here in Mexico are not exactly something to get super excited about compared those from some other places.
As a non-mexican living in Mexico, I don't bother applying for jobs here. With 20+ years of experience in development I just can't justify even spending time looking for them knowing the salary ranges.
I did, I applied to a start-up with 2 people in 2018. I was hired as engineer number 1. Worked there for 2 years and left right before the series A investment and the team had grown to 35 people.
I did. I was looking for jobs in the US while living half way across the world. My then boss posted on HN without HRs approval. When they found out they made a big issue about unauthorized job postings on a website they've never heard of. But I was able to reach out before they made him remove it
Skipped most of the HR process thanks to speaking directly with the HM. Had a Skype interview which was pretty awkward, they left a single laptop in an empty interview room and people came in an out to speak with me as if it was a physical interview. It worked out great
I love HN. For me, this is the best online space to be. Among reading interesting content and amazing comments, HN helped me to make my career international.
In the last two years, I worked for 3 companies outside of Brazil. These were the first professional and international experiences of my life.
The first experience (Nyxt browser) is simply the best team I have ever worked with. The last experience is the current one which I am also very grateful to have. I particularly enjoy interacting with folks from the Bay Area, a place I have never visited but I dream about going one day.
In the middle, there was also a short project for a British company that I also got from the “Who is hiring thread”.
These experiences dramatically improved my family savings and exposed me to people that would be very hard to meet in my daily life.
Also, the first and last experiences are on the lisp family - which is a niche. It would be hard to have found them without the thread.
Thus, thank you very much, HN! My gratitude goes to those that run the website and to the community :)
I chatted to a Facebook engineer at one of the early HN London events back in 2013, got talked into sending through a CV and I've been with ... Meta ever since.
Very grateful to this community as it had genuinely never occurred to me to apply to work for big tech. Which is obviously dumb, I've been obsessed with the industry since the early 90s, a good reminder that goals and sense of possibilities can be surprisingly blinkered by our environment/culture.
A lot more today than in 2013, afaik. I know quite a few people who got hired at Fb back then who can’t get hired there now.
I’d say at least 200 problems, if no leetcode experience prior. Maybe 100 if you’re just refreshing. In both cases, I’d say there’s still a ton of luck involved. You can get interviewers who just won’t hire you no matter how well you do on the problem. I think 100/200 is still low for how the industry is today, to ensure at least one reasonable offer.
In 2012, I joined a YC startup, which we sold to Instagram, and then stayed there for a year, left to start my own thing, joined YC with that, and have been doing my thing thanks to the YC network ever since.
HN is my favorite place to hire engineers for ipinfo.io - we’ve hired at least 10, although most of those have applied to jobs that I’ve posted on who’s hiring. I do browse who wants to be hired and ask people to apply who look like a fit too though.
It looks like ipinfo works in a fascinating problem space. I see that you had a few “Who is Hiring” posts earlier this year, but none in the May or June threads. Do you have a sense of whether you’ll be looking for more engineers in the near future?
I wanted to be a DE, but I got interviewed for a success engineer post for one company. So, in a random thread, I described what my plans would be if I got hired in a success role.
So, Coderholic saw that comment, he sent me an email and asked me to apply to be their first DevRel. He was extremely patient with me and was kind enough to give me a shot.
That's how I made it IPinfo. I really love my job, and I feel privileged to be a part of the team.
I just integrated your service into a back-end system for a company building some VR stuff. I switched to your service because an issue in another IP lookup service was causing a bug in our server back-end. I think, over the years and various projects, I've had to integrate ipinfo.io at least a half-dozen times in a variety of projects, usually a server written in C or C++.
Thanks for the free database! I run several non-public services and It's and geo restricting it got rid all vuln scanning and exploit testing overnight.
I had 0 intentions of using an API to query every single incoming address for privacy reasons.
The database is super nice. Try out ASN based restrictions as well, you can block suspicious data centers as well.
Let me know if you have suggestions or feedback about it. Also if you are found a neat trick please share it as well. Because it is a data product there are infinite ways to use it, so, documenting everything is very hard.
Oh hey Ben, it's fun to see someone I interacted with professionally out in the wild! I remember I guessed your email once and you responded immediately.
I think your actual complaint is that coderholic's posts mostly (if not entirely) are about his company. It's true that good community members post about things that interest them generally, rather than using HN just for promotion (this is in the site guidelines: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity"). But it's also true that people sometimes end up posting like that because their startup is the main thing they have something to say about, and it's not some sort of nefarious intentional plan. Either way, the best way to get your point across is to be gentle and respectful. If you come out with guns blazing, not many people are going to react well to that!
I’m not sure why you think I’m lying, or why it’s so unbelievable that we’ve hired at least 10 engineers from HN? It’s true, and fairly easy to verify too.
I'm an independent contractor and I tried for a few years to apply to the announcements on HN.
It was generally a bad experience (no reply or bad interview process).
BUT... a few years ago I randomly applied for a very niche job I would have liked and spent 1 year doing some pretty amazing stuff. The company got a nice exit too (alas, I had no stock).
So, I don't think HN ads are pointless, but they are pretty random just like any other recruiting platform, etc.
Oddly, I found the next job on LinkedIn at a big corporation! Lower pay, of course, but interesting (to me) domain.
For me, looking back, the best funnel was publishing articles and doing work in the open in a mid-sized niche. People noticed me and offered contracts.
I'm not entirely certain this will work so well, since it seems everybody is an expert at personal branding with GitHub contributions and all that nowadays.
A "hyper connector" I knew also provided some leads but smaller in scope and pay.
HN job announcements were pretty bad as an experience. With the one exception.
I'm in corporate now, but I'm also wondering how to find the next leads. Curious what your experience is?
I got hired ~1 month ago as a software engineer by a startup based in Switzerland in one of the “Who wants to be hired?” post. I was unemployed for 6 months before that, couldn’t even imagine that I could get a decent offer on here to be honest.
Also curious about that! A few years ago I was thinking about freelancing (as a developer) for a Swiss company. I heard it is quite hard to do that.
Im still interested in doing work for a swiss company, remote mostly though. Which might make it harder. I am based in NL. Also not strictly a developer, also like product ownership or product management.
It's hybrid actually, I'm not really that much into remote working and I enjoy the office but I am still in the process of relocating so I do wfh for half the week.
I responded to one post on here 6 years ago and was hired as the second employee of a startup. There are about 50 of us now. We post every month or so, but don't get much traction. I believe I am the only person hired from HN.
I got hired ~3 years ago by a small Clojure startup. Both the CEO and the CTO reached out to me and said: hey, we use one of your OSS libraries, would you like to talk maybe?
I got hired from a "Who's Hiring" post about 5 years ago and it's been an amazing experience. I've been able to work on interesting problems without having to deal with a bunch red tape as I had become accustom to in previous roles. I also got to go through a successful IPO which has been incredibly gratifying.
I later found out that the company doesn't regular post to those threads and someone did it on a whim which made me feel even luckier for having happened to come across it.
Then, early in the pandemic when lots of companies were laying people off there was a thread for companies still hiring. I posted something and we got a ton of applications but sadly none of them panned out. Later I was talking with some coworkers about how we all found the company and someone mentioned they found it via HN. Turns out it was actually my post and I just didn't realize someone had gotten hired from it which was pretty cool.
I got hired in 2019 from a "Who wants to be hired" post. After looking around via recruiters and not finding anything I liked I clicked with the company that found me on HN almost immediately.
Not only have I enjoyed working for them up till now but they have been by far the best company I have worked for in my career. There have been multiple times when they could have done nothing or said nothing where they went out of their way to do the right/good thing. Some of those things wouldn't have made me angry, they would have just been neutral but instead they went out of their way to do right by me. I'm very thankful for that.
I've also been reached out to at least 3 times based on comments I've made (not from hiring threads). They were all interesting offers but I turned them down as I was happy where I was and more interested in my current job.
I searched job listings from HN “Who’s hiring” posts with some third-party tools, filtering to only show me jobs where they were looking for people with experience in my favourite programming language.
I read through the job listings and contacted the ones that seemed interesting.
Among them was a company of whom I am a customer, and who I like.
That company ended up hiring me and I’ve been working for them as a contractor for 11 months now.
I hope that I can stay with them for several years :)
I got hired from HN years ago from just chatting to people here – I believe this was before the monthly who's hiring thread even existed.
Since then I've had less luck on here. I've put my details into the "who wants to be hired" threads several times without a single email. I'd genuinely be shocked if any employers regularly go through those posts to be honest.
The "who's hiring" threads have been better... I've applied for a few jobs through those over the last decade and had 2 or 3 interviews, but those roles never quite worked out for one reason or another. I don't see a huge amount of value in them anymore though – I tend to find more interesting stuff to apply for from just browsing Linkedin and job boards.
Been posting in the "who wants to be hired?" and the freelancing posts for more than a year. Just have got three mails - one asking for a price for a project, and they bailed when I asked for details and mentioned a standard freelancing rate; other wanting me to do a project and asking me to wait for them to complete information to begin, but it's been months; and the latest, someone (a scammer?) offering to get me a position in a startup but by receiving a 10-15% cut (or something like that) of the salary.
But I still have to try, maybe someday I can get lucky.
I got my first real tech job back in 2012 this way (thanks, mek and stephen). When that company went under I got my second real tech job this way, too (thanks marek and marc and rene).
If I ever want to find a job outside my network my first stop will be the whoishiring post. Thanks, HN.
While I was in school, I once got an internship through an HN monthly hiring thread. (Though this was a couple years ago, when the job market was probably a bit better.)
I got a few good freelancing clients off the “seeking freelancer” thread back when I was contracting. The last one ended up being $100 / hour for a long term gig lasting over a year, which was great money for me at the time.
I got hired a few years ago by emailing a contact in a "who's hiring" post. Still working there, and it's a great job! A big step up from my previous role.
I did! Back in 2020, I found a job after 6 months of job search thanks to that thread. A very well paid job as a PM for a remote-first startup after PMF.
yes, see prev comment. The training set data from this thread will be really fascinating as it has huge sample of writing from all the handles involved, with an indicator of landing some pretty serious roles. Classing out my ML talent hunter script now...
I did about a month ago from last month’s post. I was in finance before and had a few offers from finance companies, but I had an offer that stemmed from last month’s post in a totally different field that seemed better. Very happy with it.
Indirectly, in a way. A few months ago, I built a small site [1] that parses and structures the "Who is hiring" posts using GPT. It was/is just a personal project to deepen my actual experience in building things with LLMs [2]. After the launch [3], I was actually contacted a few times for LLM-related projects. I am not looking for a full-time job at the moment, but it led to a small consulting/contracting engagement.
PS: The site is still up. Some people think it's a nice alternative interface for quickly skimming the "Who is hiring" posts.
I got hired off of a HN thread a few years back. Worked on an open source message queue in Go for a year or so before lay offs hit. Overall, I’d do it again, HN is a solid culture fit litmus test apparently.
Wow, I can't believe a startup would willingly take that risk. Violating US sanctions law is no joke for a US company!
Did you intentionally not tell them you were in Iran and instead just said you wanted to be paid in bitcoin without explanation? I'm extremely curious.
They knew I was in Iran. None of us knew it's illegal to hire contractors we just thought it's some banking access issue. Also it was a small amount and not a systemic thing I was the only one.
Yes - 5 years ago I had my own small startup building Shopify apps. The business wasn’t growing as fast as I’d have liked and so I was taking on part time contract work on the side. I responded to a job post here on HN from a YC company, and ended up doing a little contract work for them. They liked it and they came back a few months later to see if I’d join them full time to lead the product eng team. I considered my options, and what I liked about the opportunity at the startup was that they were building in a similar space as I was with my business, except better capitalized and further along. I took the job and have been with the company 5 years now. As with any startup, it’s had its ups and downs, but overall it was a good decision for me and I have no regrets. And I owe it all to HN. Thank you HN!
I used to post every month for my previous company. The candidates we would get were always junior and low quality: this was likely due to our description and target market. I don’t recall hiring from one of those posts. We did however hire quite a few terrific engineers from workatastartup.
I was offered a job in Munich I think in 2014. Unfortunately, the Cost of Living increase to be expected from living in Munich didn't stack up against the increase in salary.
A pity maybe, it would have allowed working with Clojure.
I have a dumb question. Do advertised salaries in EU include tax or are tax deducted. Because I'm the US you get paid $100k but there are taxes and healthcare costs that need to be deducted.
It doesn't sound too bad for that time if it was an entry level position. I started with a similar salary as a DevOps engineer in Munich at the end of 2019. Munich isn't cheap though, I pay 1,5k € in rent for a 54 sqm 2,5 room apartment in a good neighbourhood.
In 2017 I was hired through HN (although it was through "Who's hiring"). It was for an internship at a startup in a different country. Later that startup got acquired, and then the acquiring company went through its IPO.
I'm not sure if I would have been invited to interview without it (no MIT or Oxford on my CV), so I am glad it existed.
Now that I am posting on "Who is Hiring" for the company I founded: we see high quality applicants for engineering roles.
I met a co-founder on HN in January 2014. I saw his post about a product that was right in my wheelhouse. While technically it wasn't a hiring post, I ended up joining the company (which was just him at that point).
4.5 years later we had an exit. Not a massive one because it was a seven-person company with a rather niche product for professionals, but a good outcome for everyone. Thanks HN for enabling this interesting trip!
I got hired 3 times thanks to HN, all in very different ways! But they add up to most of my career:
- In 2014~2015 I released a CSS library (Picnic CSS), which was fairly rare back then, and reached the front-page of HN. Through that post I got contacted by a US dev offering me very interesting freelancing work! That also made me realize I could make in 1 month of international work what would take 3-4 months of a local job through the degree I was studying. We collaborated in multiple projects.
- In 2019 I joined Standard AI through their announcement in the monthly "Who is Hiring?" in HN. TBH it was amazing work, we had a great small dev team in our location and I learned and grew a lot. I've done some of my most challenging (in a tech level) dev work there.
- In 2023 I joined Keeper through HN's "Work at a Startup" program where I had created a profile. It was the only time I've been contacted from a company through the program, but magically it was just when I was looking for a new job so it was a pretty good match. So far it's been pretty good!
I got hired at Modest from this HN post[1] in 2014 at 115k salary. Made my career. I had been working at McMaster-Carr as my first job for almost two years and was ready to go some place where I could learn a ton. It worked out pretty well.
I posted as a bit of an outlier on a few “who wants to be hired” threads. Haven’t been looking for a full time job but to “meet new people” via part time contracts if possible. Posted like … 4 times … across the years … got contacted twice by interesting people but it went nowhere.
Can’t complain considering that I’m not looking for a full time job, I guess.
I was hired this past January off of a Who's Hiring post! After 6 months of unemployment no less. Also, 3 of my current teammates were also hired the same way. At least from what my manager has said, apparently the people applying via HN seem to be higher quality. Of course that's anecdotal, but do with that what you will.
I was hired from my post a year ago. In a stark contrast to sites like LinkedIn or Indeed, it was almost exclusively company owners, or engineers on the team responding to my post. Whereas LinkedIn was mostly recruiters who sent generic spammy messages.
The company is great, my colleagues are great, and I owe it all to HN. Thank you HN!
I got hired after reaching out to a company (the known as Dopamine Labs) that hit the top page, but it wasn’t one of the monthly threads - one of the founders popped into the discussion with “AMA” so I asked if they were hiring. Took a couple months (December, you know how it goes) but that was a great gig.
Have my absolute favourite job from a cold response to a cryptic HN "who's hiring" post.
They used HN because they wanted hackers, and they did a lot of hiring from FOSS projects, creative endeavours, anything demonstrably self-driven. Working for peers whose skills, intelligence, and ethic I respect means I take a fully moralized approach to my daily work. The mission is pretty standard other than being super high performance, but the people make it an absolute privilege to be here.
If I ever had to explain this handle it would be that the creative urge is an engine that needs an exhaust stroke to keep going, and so I write, but nobody asks. We just all know we read posts here. Hey co-workers, I'd never say it in chat because being meta wrecks flow and vibes, but you're all pretty cool.
Years ago I was relocating to the Bay Area for personal reasons and asked someone I knew if he had any recruiter recommendations. He didn’t, but he was a YC founder, so he posted my details in a corner of HN reserved for them. I woke up to quite a few emails in my inbox, and one of them ended up being a match. Learned a ton from being employee #3, after the two founders.
I think I generally have a more skeptical view of HN than most others posting in this thread, but the value and uniqueness of parts of this community isn’t lost on me, especially with that personal experience.
After moving to the UK in 2016, I found my first job in London via Who's hiring. I formed deeply meaningful, very strong relationships with some of the amazing people I was fortunate enough to meet there.
My last job hunt I interviewed at around 10 places, and I think 5 or so came from HN posts. I ended up taking a job from a non-HN post, but found basically all of the HN hiring posts to be more transparent in the initial contact to interview phase.
Getting interviews at other companies involved more networking, i.e. finding an actual person to contact or reference me first, before getting the interview. On the HN posts I more or less just emailed the person listed on the HN submission and had an interview shortly after
(Had about 8 YOE at the time in full stack dev, for context)
I was pretty skeptical that I'd get any traction, but I ended up connecting with a co-founder of Flat (flat.app), and within a few weeks I was on the team!
I am really grateful that I ended up giving it a shot as it's been a great experience so far - I have sharp coworkers who are eager to share their knowledge and generous with their time, I get exposure to all aspects of the product, and the impact of my work is visible and immediate. Best of all, we use our product to make our product, so I get to directly enjoy the fruits of my labour :)
I was pretty skeptical that I'd get any traction, but I ended up connecting with a co-founder of Flat (flat.app), and within a few weeks I was on the team!
I am really grateful that I ended up giving it a shot as it's been a great experience so far - I have sharp coworkers who are eager to share their knowledge and generous with their time, I get exposure to all aspects of the product, and the impact of my work is visible and immediate. Best of all, we use our product to make our product, so I get to directly enjoy the fruits of my labor :)
I got hired last 3 times from HN posts in 2012, 2017, 2018. Still with the last company, it has been an amazing opportunity. I fully expect next time to be through HN again. Thanks HN!
I did, more than once. I’ve also hired many from those threads. I find it’s still my best source of quality candidates. LinkedIn stands out as particularly terrible.
So looks like 30 people got hired from a decade of posting both threads every month ;)
As someone said here still a better Signal to Noise ratio than elsewhere
I did. Just beginning of 2023. I saw the post on Who is hiring thread, then I contacted the head of engineer (my current boss). After some rounds of interview, I accepted their offer. Good decision so far. The company is great.
I emailed a startup from a "Who's Hiring?" post 2 years ago to see if they would hire Canadians, since the job post was interesting to me. It was fairly early stage, and I ended up accepting their offer. They made a great effort to accommodate hiring outside the USA. Still with them 2 years later, and it's been a great experience so far.
Submitted title was "Ask HN: Who got hired?" and the submitted text referenced just the "who wants to be hired posts".
I added "from HN" to the title because people are responding about lots more than just ""who wants to be hired" and I think the more general question makes the thread more interesting.
Almost did. I posted on Who wants to be hired, a company reached out, we did a few interviews. I think they were happy with me and might have hired me, but I eventually decided against joining them because I wanted to stay where I currently leave and work on free software instead. And I found such an opportunity at this time.
Not from a specific thread, but an HN user mailed some of the leaders list in 2014 asking if they wouldn’t mind spending a little time to review their new jobs board. Of course, they’d pre-filled it with scraped jobs, one of which was for GOV.UK. Applying for that specific role was the best career decision I ever made.
I responded to a post [1] by Skydio's head of autonomy and ended up going through their interview process and joining - have been at Skydio for almost 2 years now. Thanks HN!
I got hired at my current employer, FullStory, via a comment that I posted to a "Who wants to be hired?" thread
Additionally, I know of two people at my current and maybe three at previous employers who found us via comments I've written on "Who is hiring?" threads and were subsequently hired.
I found my first startup job out of school on HN in the 2010s. I moved on to another role within a year though. The work I did is still visible online—an ode to Tufte :)
I also used to post job posts here for another company and I think we may have hired or at least interviewed someone, but I can't quite remember
I also got hired/contracted a couple of times from HN (I'm usually posting to the Freelancer thread as well). I have good experiences from HN. It's also good for networking. I got to know ppl who wasn't a good fit but after talking they referred to to someone who needed my help.
I got hired at two separate a small PHP web dev shops from "who is hiring" posts. I worked at each for about a year. I've had a few other job interviews from those posts too. In fact it's been the single most successful method of applying and getting jobs I've ever had.
I used HN to find an internship that helped launch my career eight years ago. In my most recent round of job searching, I've used it to find a few great companies as well.
The quality and response rate of the postings on here tends to be quite high, which is a refreshing deviation from the norm.
I was able to join a great company with an incredible tech team and get a pay raise. When I interviewed with the CTO, they seemed happy that I heard about the roll on HN. I later found out they post on the who's hiring posts monthly.
My previous role was from a posting I read here. I was searching for a few keywords (remote, Python), saw a short post that outlined briefly about the role and the projects. A few calls later, I was part of the team and stayed there for a couple of years.
I got an internship a few years ago off a Hacker News who's hiring post. It was pretty cool because I was a sophomore international student so I wasn't having much luck anywhere else. I now recommend it to anyone else I see looking for a job.
A year ago, I wrote a long reply to someone's post, sharing my thoughts about hiring design agency vs. freelancing designer (such as myself). I got two long-term customers who found this post and contacted me after that. Thanks HN!
I found an excellent job during the pandemic in fall 2020. A handful of interesting folks reached out after my "Who Wants To Be Hired" post. One of them clicked especially well. It became the best matching job I ever had.
I did, as my first job out of college back in 2020. I was there for a little bit and set up some of their early infrastructure before moving on. The company shows up every once in a while here so it seems like they’re doing well :)
not specifically from a hiring post, but i was hired in 2020. however, it was about a year after a prototype project of mine made it to the front page here.
had some other legit/promising inquiries and interviews prior and after this as well.
I did! It was glorious! I was a bored out of my mind DBA in Oregon and shot my shot at a logistics startup who was posting here on HN located in Hamburg and I got the job! This was 5 years ago.
I saw a tweet about a job from somebody I followed because I knew them from HN, and got a great job because we already knew each other from what we'd both written and discussed on HN.
I regularly engage in freelance assignments through HN. I have found most of these clients to be serious and committed professionals / businesses who value my work, and pay on time.
I did back in 2010 by a local startup. Saw a post here, attended a local user group to meet the hiring manager who posted it. Had a job offer about a week later after an interview.
I got hired here for my very first job as a software engineer last year and I'm still working at the company. I'm going a year plus now and it's been awesome.
I've found maybe 3 or 4 jobs from HN, including some well paying consulting work. It continues to be one of the highest signal to noise ratio places out there.
So I guess HN is on a death spiral too, when submissions like this get 100+ upvotes in 4 hours. There's a lot of people that want to know how to signal properly to get a job here. That never bodes well.
Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Dang should delete this submission.
Also, I've expressed this before, but in case Dang is reading this: HN needs to ice new users for much longer. A week or two until they can submit a post, a month or more before they can upvote.
I’m not sure asking Dang to arbitrarily censor posts that reflect existential feelings about where HN is heading is the best idea. That’s what not pressing the upvote button is for.
Agree on submission icing for new accounts I guess, as it would help people get a better idea of the guidelines and community first.
I think when submissions like this stay up, it encourages other people in the future. If you search for "hired" and sort by time you'll get this submission along with other "Who wants to be hired" posts.
"Who wants to be hired (June 2023)" : 140 points, 17 hours
This submission: 121 points, 4 hours
There's a certain kind of user / member that really craves being a part of the group and yet never really tries, he'll just try and ape what the "successful" people do. As communities get larger, these people increase in number. Submissions like this are basically crack for them. You'll get a couple of these threads every single week, and in the end you'll have to moderate the problem away anyway, because they won't just stop at "Who got hired", they'll start with "How to get hired on HN" and then try to game the entire thing. It'll tank people's confidence in getting good talent off HN. After all, there's only so much you can do to filter candidates, you can't conclusively claim "fraud" if someone has 7/10 "good" indicators.
I speak from some experience, I moderate a small niche community that doesn't require any physical capital to initiate the "hobby". There's a lot of people that just want an exclusive "community" but don't care if they're genuine about it. Some people get it, it invites countersignalling (not always direct, in-your-face stuff) and then the community degrades rapidly unless you can silo the good users away.
Isn't this overreacting a little bit over a single Ask HN? Are you surprised people look for jobs on a news board from a startup incubator, of all places?
