I received some messages when I last posted in a 2014 thread, including one from who would eventually become my first manager trying to grow her team. It wasn’t even a good pitch (relative to what I wrote) but I needed a job so talked to pretty much everyone, and as I learned more I convinced myself to continue and readily accepted the offer. Though I thought I might only spend a year in bigco, here we are just about 5 years later…
My last job before that was found by getting contacted after uploading my resume to craigslist in 2010, so I consider myself 2/2 on the post-and-wait strategy.
I get lots of recruiter spam (mostly via linkedin) but I don’t really want to ever think of it in complaint. It’s kind of nice to know if I need a new job fast I have a lot of contact entry points to try before playing the submit-application-here lottery or post-and-wait game. And occasionally I’ve been very tempted to reply to some anyway. It’s “spam” in the sense that I’ve listed not being interested in jumping ship except for having a few rare details that would at least make me consider, but we all know most everyone’s technically on the market regardless given the right offer even if it lacks certain ‘requirements’. Recruiters just have a job that depends on believing they always have the right offer.
I started the “Who wants to be hired?” threads over 5 years ago [1] after dang giving his blessing on it [2], and was super excited that it led to the job [3] that I still happily hold today.
I really wish these threads were more active — and received more upvotes — relative to the “Who’s hiring” threads, as it seems like the signal to noise is so much better, and also seems like the success rate would be quite a bit higher.
I’m not sure if a) people aren’t aware of the threads, or b) people don’t have confidence in their success rate.
But as someone whose career — and as a result, life — got a big boost from it, I highly recommend anyone considering a move to try posting there. Seems like it could only help!
Yes! I posted in the threads on Jan 1 and Feb 1 of this year. I was contacted by a cumulative total of 14 companies, of which 2 were actually interesting to me. I’m a mechanical engineer working in robotics hardware, so that’s a little different to the typical opportunities listed here. For both companies I was interested in, the process started with 2-3 phone interviews, then I was invited to fly out for on-site interviews (very important when working on hardware!). I was offered the position at both places, and ultimately accepted one. I joined a couple of months ago, and I’m loving it so far!! Feel free to ask me any questions
Absolutely. I posted a message on a ‘Who wants to be Hired’ thread and was contacted about a month later by a lead developer who was hiring for a fully remote front-end developer position. After a few video chats and a 2-hour take-home coding exercise they extended an offer that I accepted.
I’ve been there for about 10 months and it’s been a wonderful experience. Working remotely has literally changed my life, and the team members I work with are all fantastic people.
There are great companies out there and it’s definitely worth posting. Good luck!
Not related to the original topic, but shout-out to working remote. It’s been a game-changer for me, too. There are too many benefits to list, but the biggest one for me has been physical; after trying for years to stick with working out, it finally clicked for me with remote work + a gym in my garage.
I have been working out since 2011, and I have been working 90% remotely since 2016, I even edited my linked in to say Work From Home so anybody who intends to write to me knows in advance,
I still visit the office rarely – when some big manager comes over, or to collect some documents.
Greatly depends on the drivers around you. Here it’ll definitely shorten your life expectancy if you’re lucky, and will leave you with a nice whole-body paralysis, if you’re not.
You know how motorists sarcastically refer to cyclists over here? “Crunchies”, or something like that.
Also depends on the type of infrastructure available. I lived in the city until about 5 years ago and cycled everywhere. Out in the bush where I am now, with only narrow windy unshouldered roads (& many stoned drivers), I’d be dead in a week.
This idea always appealed to me in theory but I sweat so easily that it never made sense unless I want to show up covered in sweat and feel sticky all day. Maybe if there’s a locker/shower I can use and go directly to work and shower there it could work for me.
I sympathize. My solution is a bit “much” but if you’re looking for things to try:
I wear my gym shirt while bicycling which I sweat into profusely. I get to work and lock myself in the family bathroom, where I take my gym shirt off. Then, I take out a linen towel I bought that packs super tiny, get it wet, and wipe down. I stand and cool and dry off for a bit, then put on the shirt I packed. The linen towel gets a soapy wash in the sink and then wronged out. Then, towel and gym shirt get hanged on hooks in the office near a window (as far as I can tell there’s no bad smell and I have explicitly asked others in the office) and both are dry within a couple hours.
Change into gym shirt after work and bike home, take a shower.
It’s a process but it’s worth it, I’ve lost 7 pounds without much else lifestyle change.
The linen towel is fairly critical – packs small, light, dries quick and is odorless (allegedly linen is anti bacterial). They’re also great for travel in general.
I would still sweat. I sweat just getting out of the shower or standing in a warm kitchen too long with the oven on.
Really depends on the climate – I commuted to my last job via bike, and it never would have worked in the summer without a shower at the job.
Out of interest, could you give us a rough idea of the scope of a 2-hour take home exercise for a front end position?
Not the OP but I’ve given these so I’ll answer.
Given a provided mockup of a react component implement it to the best of your ability. In my case it was a stopwatch (which has non-obvious edge cases in javascript) with some curvy UI that’s tricky to do in CSS.
I decided to put myself back out there after a few years of freelancing and, among other avenues, posted in a “Who wants to be hired”. I had psychologically prepared myself for a long and frustrating search as I wasn’t in a particular hurry and promised myself to be selective about where I landed, making sure it was a genuinely good fit.
I got three responses through HN, one from a company in the city I live in, one from a fully distributed team, and one from a holy s__t SV company I had fantasized about in years past.
All three were amazing opportunities and the people I spoke with were so awesome–genuine, authentic, enthusiastic, and of an altogether different caliber than what I had been anticipating.
I interviewed for a few weeks with all three and was honestly agonizing about what I’d do if I got an offer from more than one. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting, but what I was not expecting was to feel so much like I was in the driver’s seat of my job search experience. It was almost like I was interviewing them for the job, or more accurately, it was as if we were on an equal footing (I don’t delude myself that that was actually the case, but it’s how it felt dealing with such awesome point’s of contact).
I wound up accepting a completely different offer from a co. in my city that I connected with through a different channel and that really ticked all the boxes for me–I mean–I feel really lucky, I truly love my job. It would have been an insane opportunity to take the role at the SV unicorn (had they extended me an offer, I’ll never know) but at the end of the day I just wasn’t ready to pick up my whole life and move cross country in my 30’s.
Wow did I ever get derailed. The moral of the story is, while I didn’t technically get hired through a “Who wants to be hired” thread, I did have an altogether highly positive experience, and I imagine, if anyone else’s experience is like mine, that lot’s of people get hooked up with awesome opportunities through that channel.
I tried out the last thread not expecting much to come from it and some surprisingly well-matched opportunities came my way. In fact, someone contacted me just yesterday from the same thread and that was over a month ago now!
What seems to happen with hiring is good companies very quickly get overwhelmed by bad applicants. Consequently, they have to instate barriers to try filter out the hundreds of unqualified people who apply. Unfortunately, the same filters also affect the people you want to hire and make it less likely you’ll be introduced to a good engineer.
If you’ve already been in the industry a while you’ll probably suffer from the same problem: A hell of a lot of low quality recruiter spam; Bad companies wasting your time with sub-minimum wage offers, and so on. Sometimes you just need 10 minutes to speak to a real person and you can both tell straight away if it’s a good fit or not.
Good luck to people looking for their next opportunity. There are some great companies out there.
Edit: I find it amusing hacker news works so well for this compared to traditional career websites. It probably works so well precisely because it doesn’t market itself as such, and on a dice roll the signal to noise ratio is far higher. Hopefully this doesn’t change any time soon as having a high-quality service like this is very, very useful for people!
>If you’ve already been in the industry a while you’ll probably suffer from the same problem: A hell of a lot of low quality recruiter spam; Bad companies wasting your time with sub-minimum wage offers, and so on. Sometimes you just need 10 minutes to speak to a real person and you can both tell straight away if it’s a good fit or not.
As a noob I would just like to say…it isn’t limited to experienced professionals.
As soon as I landed my first job my email and linkedin caught fire. Non stop spam, bad matches, and etc.
“I was looking at your resume…”
No way you were looking at my resume and came up with this job… kinda stuff.
I think another thing to take into account is geography. My impression is that there are many international readers that would not consider jobs inside the US. I know there are international job postings as well, but (and I may be wrong) I don’t see people moving jobs across countries unless they were approached more personally (or vice versa: they would not necessarily approach a country switching job posting based on a HN thread).
My 2c: I like the idea, but if I were searching I would not post because I know people in my current job browse hacker news and my profile is quite specific.
You might be able to anonymously describe your skillset, work experience, and achievements and have folks contact you and then provide identifying information. I certainly appreciate the sentiment you’re suggesting here: it’s bad optics to participate in one of these threads, and have someone from your company notice. That being said, I doubt your concern is much less likely to occur than you might think.
Yup, I posted for the first time a month ago, and got hired by someone looking for exactly my skills. I liked them enough that I took a chance, dropping other opportunities that were in the pipeline.
Meanwhile, I’m STILL getting rejection notices from companies where my application has been sitting in their queue for over a month.
I hired someone from one of these threads a few months ago. I chose them over other candidates based on a strong “portfolio” web site, showing me the person understood their code existed to serve business values (not the other way around).
So the HN candidate had a website that a business was based on? Or the candidate just had a good “fake” website that has a lot of good business code in it?
No, rather they had a good “I’m a freelance developer” web site that showed two things:
1) Some amount of professional experience in the technology we were looking for a contractor in.
2) An attitude that boiled down to “I write software to fulfill business objectives.” (The opposite attitude is what I characterize as the “hipster coder,” who says “I couldn’t possibly work on your legacy system unless you agree to rewrite it from scratch in $hot_new_stack.” Yes, I have literally had a contractor tell me that before, about a webapp based on a 5 year old front-end framework.)
It is a funny old world when the one fact that they are willing to be managed as a technical contributor sets a candidate apart.
I got my first professional contract on a “Who wants to be hired?” over 5 years ago! I didn’t have any professional experience and was a junior dev at the time. I met my current employer because of/during that contract as well.
I find these threads a good way to be aware of interesting tech stacks being used and companies I might not otherwise have read about.
I once talked to a CTO of a local company without the primary intention of working there purely out of curiosity. I did end up working there as the other company I was accepted at had a hiring freeze for a month or more. I turned out to be a great place to be. New (to me) Rails stack, Go microservices when it wasn’t so common and scaling challenges.
I reached out to a company from a Who’s Hiring post and got hired. Great job, got to move with relocation.
Echoing this. I ran across my current employer in a Who’s Hiring post, bookmarked it for later, and then ran across them again an Angel List and applied. Been here for a few months now.
I had a similar experience — I found my current job on the “Who’s Hiring” and it’s by far the best job I’ve ever had.
I posted here and was contacted by the founder of a startup the same day. Got invited for an interview and received an offer a week later. I don’t recall getting much spam from that post.
I had a company that wanted me to put in several hours of using their DevOps simulator before they would even talk about salary or the position.
They just wanted to get people to test a product from an unrelated company.
Yes. I made a post 3 months ago with my resume, and was contacted if I was interested in a position. I just started at the job last week.
I’ve had several great connections and solid job interviews, as well as my current role at the USDS.
I am currently* a “Senior/Lead SWE” that’s flirted a lot with SRE.
Earlier in my career it was a lot harder to get responses, but still managed to get an interview or three out of it.
I had a couple of phone conversations based on posting in the “Who wants to be hired”. Nothing led to work but enjoyed speaking to people who reached out. I’m in a less popular niche with manufacturing applications so I think it’s good for spreading a wide net.
About to start in 2 weeks! This was the first job I contacted through HN, and they were very responsive. No recruiter, no spam.
I posted twice in the past. Only received one email from a recruiter at Cryptokitties. The message was a complete mismatch with my profile. Stopped posting.
Yes. Was a lot simpler/faster than the usual process. Instead of stereotypical questions, just start to actually do something
(analyse, code) so a lot less stress and more the the point.
“If you were to meet a very rich man *?”
“-Does not matter: you are not rich anyway and once we are married….”
Yes! Last time I was interviewing I got multiple offers from my post. I did get some recruiter spam but it was mostly founders or early engineers that did the reaching out.
I’ve been posting in the “Who wants to be hired” threads occasionally since they started (somewhere in 2014 if I recall correctly) and have been doing so monthly recently. I’m also including a basic Q&A in my posts. I’ve varied the tone and content a bit over time. It’s not an A/B test, just an attempt to keep things entertaining.
What each month brings is very diverse. Companies are of all shapes and sizes, from different locations and different lines of businesses. It’s fairly interesting by itself. I’ve gone through multiple interview hoops through the years and those tend to also be very diverse. I’ve done HR chats and tech chats, phone screens with code and phone screens without. I’ve done take-homes and I was twice flown to on-sites. There is also a fair amount of spam, canned recruiting emails and the automated “CTO bait-n-switch”, but the overall positive far outweighs the negative in my mind. If you are considering to post – just do it.
I’ve learnt a lot from those postings. Reaching out is not easy and I’m thankful to whoever does. My main take-a-way is this: by reaching out, a person shows that they are the proactive kind who cares for their organization and tasks. That fact by itself is a very positive signal to me. I’m thus always trying to put best effort into whatever organizational recruiting process follows.
I have yet to be hired as a result of those posts.
P.S – … but that one from last month that is still in process would be perfect for me. Especially if it goes south… 😉
I found my current job on the “Who is Hiring” thread, and I have had two gigs plus a couple of near misses from the “Seeking Freelancer” thread. All of this occurred in 2019.
Sure did. If I recall correctly (this was about 5 years ago), I probably had 3-4 phone interviews / tech screens out of it, and got hired at a really great place (Mavenlink).
I’ve tried to find people that way, but usually there is nobody. Let’s see, searching for “assembly” and “assembler” and “embedded”…
1. I already asked. He wants Rust and probably won’t leave Albuquerque. Bummer. He’d be perfect.
2. Argentina… nope.
3. Barcelona… nope.
4. One might work. I probably already asked, but don’t remember.
5. Remote only… nope.
6. Lisbon… nope.
7. Paris… nope.
8. I already asked. He won’t leave southwest Florida, even for Tampa or Melbourne. Bummer.
9. Bay Area and won’t relocate… nope.
10. He’s hesitant to relocate. Hmmm, I could try.
11. Paris… nope.
So that is the situation as of now, with 155 comments 7 hours after the post. I can email a couple of them.
Seems to me like the actual problem is staring you right in the face, though: you are not in a tech cluster and you don’t want to countenance remote working. That instantaneously removes 90% of the pool – or rather 99%, since no city on Earth has 75m people in commuting distance. No wonder you struggle to find people, particularly for a hard skill like assembler.
Somewhat yes. It depends on where you draw the line for “tech cluster”, both for the size and for the industry.
Austin and the DC area sort of count. No, they aren’t the Bay Area, but nothing else is.
Specifically for low-level security work, there are a number of competitors both large and small in Melbourne, FL. There is also embedded work related mainly to aerospace.
It’s a shame you’re not open to remote. I didn’t post in that thread, but matching on “assembly”, “assembler”, and “embedded” is right up my alley. Unless you happen to be anywhere near Regina, SK 🙂
Let’s avoid judging — remote is awesome if it works, but a lot of people aren’t open to remote precisely because they’re in a field or industry where it’s incredibly logistically difficult. For example if you’re a hardware company it’s often pretty hard to do work without the actual hardware in front of you.
100% agree, which is why I’d want hardware delivered :). Not as easy for e.g. an electric vehicle, but pretty straightforward for smaller electronics. I come pre-equipped with a decently stocked lab: nice ‘scope/logic analyzer, ok spectrum analyzer, nice soldering setup for SMD, hordes of JTAG adapters and dev boards, 3D printer, etc. I’ve been doing remote hardware work for a while now; there are definitely a few challenges, but it’s generally worked just fine.
Edit: I looked at their profile and saw the citizenship requirement, and more of a description of the kinds of stuff they work on. I get why remote might not be encouraged for it :). The point still stands generally though; remote hardware work is possible and not a huge burden for most situations.
You’re not wrong, but for an awful lot of combinations of hardware and remote locations, it’s reasonable to ship gear as needed. I do firmware work remotely, and think of occasional fast shipping (or more rarely, work trips) as a cost of doing business.
I’ve done remote embedded (and instrument control) work. It’s not impossible. I mean, who is really into electronics and doesn’t have a bench setup already? Also most test equipment these days has network connectivity, so you can even work with that remotely in some cases.
Why aren’t you open to remote work? I’ve been at NodeSource for the last four years. We are all remote. I honestly don’t understand why anyone would go to an office to write code in 2019.
It’s mainly about security. We keep our stuff off of computers that can reach the internet. I get two computers at my desk, one for random internet junk and one for real work.
I happen to like the side-effect on work-life balance. Nobody will ever expect me to do a bit more work at home. When I go home, I’m totally off work. I also get paid overtime, so I’m not getting cheated at the office either.
It’s also somewhat about physical hardware. Remote use of screw drivers and soldering irons is difficult.
> I happen to like the side-effect on work-life balance.
There’s no problem with work-life balance while working remote. You can even have better work-life balance as you don’t need to take half a day off from work to attend to a 10-minute chore that can’t be rescheduled. It needs maturity and trust on the part of the employers and the employees. You’re almost boasting about calling a bug a feature.
I think I see the problem: “half a day”
Depending on what you mean by “a day”, each commute direction is 2 to 3 hours. (or I suppose 6) You have a very long distance, or severe traffic, or something else unusual. It sounds like you would be driving over the mountains to reach a place like LA or SF.
I’ve been a software developer at 5 different work locations in 2 different states, but I have never commuted more than 20 minutes. Currently it is almost that if I walk, or 3 minutes if I drive.
This is because I choose small cities with affordable housing and low traffic. Big urban tech hubs are popular, but they mean you probably won’t get a large property right near work.
I have no commute as I’ve been fully remote for the last 8 years.
But traffic is insanely bad in places like Bangalore and people just can’t choose to live in smaller places because 99% of the jobs in India are in places like Bangalore. The half-a-day case is much more the norm than the living-closer-to-work case in my experience.
Depends on the industry. I work in robotics and remote work is difficult. Almost every engineer needs to work with actual physical things that move and break. Motor controllers dying, cameras lenses getting smacked out of alignment, wires getting pulled, test circuits going up in smoke, these aren’t things that are easy to deal with from a distance.
In general, it’s also embedded systems that are (a) most difficult to remotely flash and test and (b) most easy to irreversibly damage if you’re not in front of them during the testing process.
It’s funny, because people who code assembly and embedded systems are exactly the type of people well-suited for remote work.
Huh, why do you say that? I’d assume not because of the hardware constraint, etc. I’d imagine web devs are best suited to remote. Usually low sensitivity to the code or data and no hardware and the product itself is accessible everywhere.
> but usually there is nobody.
Yet you list 11 people with 1 “ideal”. There seems to be lots of people.
I get that. But it’s not that there’s nobody. (Available / with the right skills) There are no people matching your non-technical requirements, which is very different.
Several interviews with very few solid (or high quality) experiences. It’s becoming a bit of a dumping ground for recruiters running out of ideas. Especially frustrating are the folks that don’t seem to understand what “remote” means.
“Remote” means the job is 100 mi away, and you will be given the opportunity to work from home 1 day a week after a year on the job. Oh yes, and we will pressure you to interview with this client because we really need the commission money.
Yes. I was hired by a university on a temporary position from HN after I finished college. It was my first job post-graduation.
Yep, am currently working remotely for a company that found me in one of those threads 🙂
Somewhat related, I reached out to a few people on the “Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?” threads and had several responses, one of which I just started on.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people had similar luck on all such threads.
> Were you hired after someone contacted you?
I got 2 interviews + 1 follow-up not leading to an interview out of emails sent to 6 companies. Didn’t convert either of the interviews but I think I was very close with one of them. I think talks broke down over salary expectations when speaking with the VP of Eng.
> Did you receive responses that weren’t recruiter-spam from your posts there?
Yes. 3-4, of which about half were promising, in response to 1 post. They didn’t work out for other reasons.
Yup. I joined a company in SF in November 2015 (thanks @jlisam13). Now neither of us are there, but I met the people with whom I co-founded my current company.
Definitely changed my life!
I have definitely gotten interviews over this. I am not sure if my job was through who’s hiring but I do know I did at least 2 onsites from it.
I was hired ~5 years ago from a post on one, and we have since hired a couple other people as well from those posts.
I was just going to post a similar thread from the hiring manager’s side. Genuinely curious how many responses y’all receive. I’m in Chicago, not SF but the responses almost never come.
It’s almost always at least 1 response. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten more than 10 responses. Something like 4 is typical.
On average I think I find one that is good and one that is minimally acceptable. Several have been hired, but at least one of those was redundantly discovered elsewhere.
Thank you! I felt like my description wasn’t far off so I’m going to adjust a little. I’m not opposed to juniors but that’s all I have received thus far after 6/7 months of using the thread.
I always have this overwhelming desire to comment on people’s posts in those threads. I wish they had a peanut gallery.
I’ve actually done this (in who’s hiring). There was a startup that was going to rate people or something and I thought “wow that’s super weird and not good.” A few years later, and I think they’re pretty big. I generally feel like a lot of the posts sound goofy and pointless.
You’re allowed to comment on posts in that thread. It’s nice to read different perspectives about the hiring process and what it’s like to work for these companies (like we are getting in this thread). You can also ask and receive answers to clarifying questions.
>> I always have this overwhelming desire to comment on people’s posts in those threads. I wish they had a peanut gallery.
Which would be rude and off-topic. But by all means, make a fresh post where the goal is to learn by commenting on excerpts of peoples posts. Not sure if that will work but why not try?
Recruiter spam seems inevitable when responding to such posts, but the way I avoid long term recruiter spam is by creating an email addresses for each time I seek employment.
I own a domain so I create an email address such as career2019@example.com where example.com takes place for my actual domain. I recommend this. I also use this temporary email to sign up for linkedin for the duration of my employment seeking.
After having secured employment, I delete the linkedin and then never use the email again, nor look at whatever may arrive into its inbox.
This approach doesn’t prevent your email address from being clogged with recruiter spam, unless you want to maintain filters forever, and as another says, the real email is still there. I don’t even use the same domain as my real email. Jumping in exposes one to a subset of misbehaving recruiters, those making a bad name for the rest, an experience comparable to taking a bath in shit and I don’t want to taint my daily life with its rank smell once I’m done prospecting.
A throwaway GMAIL address and using +XYZ would be a reasonable solution. You could set up a rule to forward everything to your main email, but then as you get spam on certain addresses, adapt the rule to not forward email sent to those.
True, but then it’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer what your actual email address is for later.
I’ve found that its actually better to use my own email address. Oh you added me to a mailing list with thousands of other people. And you addressed me as “Dear Trusted Associate”. Well thanks for the information! Now I know to redirect any and all future emails directly to my trash. If you do it enough with gmail after about a month you’ll find you get maybe one or two a week.
