Show HN: I visualized "Who's Hiring?" vs. "Who wants to be hired?" over time
A developer created a visualization comparing comment counts on Hacker News monthly "Who's Hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?" posts to offer insights into the tech job market. The quick project is not presented as rigorous data science but as a tool to spark discussion.
Background
- "Who's Hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?" are two monthly threads on Hacker News (HN), a Y Combinator–run tech news and discussion site. The first is where companies post job openings; the second is where job seekers post their profiles and availability.
- The ratio of "want to be hired" comments to "hiring" comments is often used informally as a rough barometer of the tech labor market: more seekers relative to openings suggests a tighter job market for candidates; fewer suggests a stronger hiring environment.
- The post is by nik. digital (Nikita Prokopov, aka tonsky), a well-known developer and open-source contributor (Fira Code font, Clojure tools). He scraped and plotted comment counts from past HN threads to visualize how that ratio has changed over time.
- This kind of quick data viz resonates because the HN hiring threads are a rare public, longitudinal dataset of tech hiring activity — no official statistics capture this niche with comparable granularity.