This is awesome. Seriously. I never go through the regular "Who is Hiring?" thread because I don't have time to comb through a humongous list of unfiltered text posts, 90% of which aren't relevant to me. There have been other attempts to format the thing, but this is the best I've seen so far.
One minor bug: I'm seeing a listing titled "---" that starts with "I am a Junior Front End Developer. I eventually want to go into...". Seems to have picked up a comment by accident and interpreted it as a job posting.
It's easy enough to just Ctrl+f for your location name, my biggest complaint is all the entries that don't say what their company does.
It's all well and good that you're in my city and I'm familiar with the tools you use, but if you can't be arsed to include a single sentence description of why your company exists, I'm much less likely to care. Bonus points if your description isn't buzzword laden nonsense.
Descriptions would be great, but without regex support and a list of every town in your area, Ctrl+F doesn't really help.
A map is a much nicer alternative to trying "San Francisco", "Bay Area", "SF", "Oakland", "Berkeley", "Silicon Valley", "Palo Alto", "Menlo Park" etc..
This has become far more annoying now that many descriptions include something like "We have offices in xxx, xxx, xxx, xxx" etc. but are only offering a position in one location.
I've never understood why a single-page list of unfiltered, free-form text is the go-to method of doing hiring threads on HN. A Google Form with defined fields would at least keep things ordered more instead of the hundred different varieties of the same info we have now.
You mentioned filtering attempts, one that someone posted earlier I've found works well, even if I only browse out of curiousity: http://whereis-whoishiring-hiring.me/
Depending on your locality you can use some simple keyword searches to find stuff. E.g. I can search for things like: "CA", "Canada", "Toronto", etc and get most of the relevant results. It might not work as well if you're in the Bay Area / Valley though.
This is pretty cool. I'd advise not changing the URL with every map movement and instead let the user generate a linkable URL upon demand. This created quite the enormous history list after only using a few minutes.
If you zoom in further, it is actually placed Slubice, Poland, just across the border from Frankfurt an der Oder ;) Still no idea how it got there, though.
Ah, now it makes sense -- the one in your link is parsed as "Santa Monica, LA" (LA for Louisiana) and the one I found as "L.A., onsite" which Google Maps maps (heh!) to a company called "MTU Onsite" in Lechhausen, Augsburg :)
3. There is no visual cue that you can now scroll down further to see the expansion. The first item in the list that I click on was the final list item, and I thought that nothing had happened (Note: This could just be an issue with OSX's hidden scrollbars. I can't see if you've disabled it on all platforms, but lots of devs are on OSX).
{edit} I guess I should mention my suggestion. If you're already scrolled to the bottom of the scroll area, and then you take an action that expands the scroll area further down, your position in the scroll area should move to the "new" bottom. There are obviously caveats to this though (e.g. if scrolling to the new bottom would scroll your old position off-screen, this may be disorienting to the user depending on the content and other visual cues). {/edit}
Bug Report #2:
I tried to click the "mail@whoishiring.it" at the bottom (as it's a clickable link), and was taken to a CloudFlare page about how it's hiding the email address for "protection." The issue here is that the link text itself is the email address, so nothing is really hidden (except maybe from poorly written bots crawling the web).
NOTE: This is not meant to be negative or down on your work. It's really great, I just like to take the time for some constructive criticism when there the authors' attention is on the threads (and it's not a e.g. Github project -- that I can see -- so I can't really just open an issue in the bug tracker).
ad 1. Yes, I think you right about the this being a bit confusing. Although I'm not sure if scrolling to bottom, would be ideal as well. Although I will try to test your suggestion. Maybe will feel right.
ad. 2. Fixed. This was default for CloudFare (they are awesome)
ad. NOTE. No worries, all the feedback here was great and supper useful.
Might as well keep all the bug reports in the same thread.
I noticed one more thing on the job posting text: the word-breaking is a little off. Here's a image with one example: http://i.imgur.com/Zuv1Zjc.png CSS's word-wrap: break-word is probably not want you want to be using for that container.
One other thing I noticed but that isn't a simple fix is postings like this one from HubSpot[1] list two locations Cambridge MA and Dublin Ireland but the ad only shows up in Dublin. I thought I'd point it out if you're looking for some more work :D
That's £25k for someone with both front-end and PHP back-end skills. Less than 10% of these jobs reach $54K - according to that, if you're earning $54K in the UK you're in the top 10% of developers.
That £25k median isn't all that much more valuable than, I don't know, a secretary, the median of whom earns £19k (i.e. only 20% less) and normally requires no skills other than the ability to type and be organized. http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Secretary/Salary
whereas a front-end engineer with php literally programmed Facebook (talking about Zuck), or can program the next one. It's kind of sad, really.
a front-end engineer with php literally programmed Facebook (talking about Zuck), or can program the next one
That's a pretty glaring logic failure. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg was a PHP developer does not mean that every PHP developer could be Mark Zuckerberg.
"The average salary for a Front End Developer / Engineer with PHP skills is £25,246 per year. Most people move on to other jobs if they have more than 20 years' experience in this field."
The 2nd sentence is golden. How many people can claim to have programmed as a front-ender or PHP programmer (which launched 20 years ago) and then moved on to something else? And also suggest they were paid, at a maximum, £35k?! According to this fine piece of information, 'most people'.
When I told my mum my salary she dropped the phone. It's roughly double what she was earning at the end of her career as a senior subject teacher, and more than what the headteacher at her large school earned.
In don't work in the City, but they also get bonuses (in return for long hours?). They also get 25-28 days holiday, as is standard, unlimited sick leave etc, which should be taken into account when comparing with the States.
Anecdotally those figures are a load of BS. Devs in the UK are badly underpaid in comparison to the US but not that badly. Well I think that's the case anyway.
Didn't expect dev salaries to be that low in the UK. Just out of curiosity: what's the median take-home after-tax income for a developer in the UK in general, and in London in particular?
And how do devs compare to the general population? Are they just slightly better off?
( Why do you ask, are you thinking of going into software development? )
People in the UK hate to talk about salary, so I can only give my perspective (Not London, but close enough to have a pint cost £4). I can't be more detailed because there's probably something in my contract about not disclosing salary:
It really depends, but starting salaries for developers are just not great from my experience, but it can get better as you skill up.
I'm now just outside London and I'm a senior[1] developer and earning probably less than I previously might have thought a senior developer should be paid, but this is still much better than a junior. My first (non-developer, skilled in maths) job started at 18k, although quickly rose to 24k. My first developer job was 30k, although I had shown in the previous job a skill for programming so this wasn't really a junior role, junior developer roles are typically closer to the £25k mark I think.
Developers do better than average (the UK median fulltime wage is £26,500) but they're nowhere near the top of the salaried employees list, they earn less than a lot of other professional roles, they don't come close to chartered accountants, lawyers, or many tradespeople.
But it's an easy job, the hours aren't long, there's little to no overtime culture and the job itself is intellectually rewarding. There's few health risks and almost no chance of dying on the job. Yes, RSI & eye-strain risk are elevated, a sedentary lifestyle isn't wonderful, but overall developers have it good.
People don't necessarily understand what coders do. This is worth getting used to, most programming jobs aren't in software houses but as part of small software teams inside larger businesses. People often see programming as as kind of magic, but a little bit of education (just talking to people) and a bit of just accepting that's how it is and it's a job that has good exposure much of the wider business so you get a good chance to see inside a lot of industry niches while still having a huge amount of transferable skill. You won't ever think "I can't possibly accept that Java job, it's in the Mining industry, I only have Telecomms Java experience!", whereas other job roles can find themselves too narrowly specialised in an industry.
I think if I were more of a risk taker I'd try to eventually go freelance, since there can be more money there, but my networking skills aren't great, and my appetite for risk is low.
I've only been doing software development professionally for a few years: I did other maths based work before that which was worse paid and far more difficult, I used to write programs to do the job which is how I realised I was in the wrong profession. I sometimes think I might get bored with software eventually at which point I'll likely transition into penetration testing, it seems to be what I like to do and I generally end up doing a lot of that kind of stuff at any company I'm at, since it seems to be way off the radar of most developers. They hate to consider "Can user input end up here" and "If user input were malicious what problems could it cause". I think it's important to always have some kind of long-term aim to get out of "just" software development.
I have no doubt that spending a whole life at a "developer / senior developer" level in the UK probably isn't healthy as far as salary goes. While there probably are some industries where a senior developer will be paid an end-salary similar to other professions, from what I've seen at most SMEs[2] it pays more to transition to senior management or giving up on a salary and moving into consultancy. I think development is also a career which demands keeping up with a very rapidly changing landscape which is fine for young people but learning at pace becomes more difficult as people get older. This isn't ageist, I am not saying that old people can't learn and I'm certainly not saying they are not valuable, their experience is extremely valuable and many will have learnt all the skills they require, just that the pace of extreme rapid shifts in learning is slower. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you switched every time a new js framework was announced you'd never get anything done, but there is a cost if you actually do decide it's time to migrate.
As an aside, spending too long reading HN about Silicon Valley wages makes me a bit jealous sometimes but then again I think about the overtime, which could lead to stress and then perhaps lead to losing the job and then the last place I'd want to be both unemployed and ill is the United States of America.
tldr; Don't go into software development for the money, but if it's a job you find easy and enjoy doing, then it pays well compared to many similar jobs. If you're chasing money but want to remain salaried look to become a chartered accountant.
[1] Although I'll admit I have a little less responsibility than some senior developer roles at other companies, as we have another developer role above senior developer.
[2] Small to Medium enterprises, in case that's a term not familiar.
I can confirm UK developer salaries are MUCH lower than Californian salaries - even Google pays their employees significantly less in the UK than the US for similar roles.
Contracting in the UK and London especially is much more lucrative.
With the sheer volume of posts in WiH it's serious work to Ctrl+F your way through each post and find something based on your criteria. Wish there was a way to normalize that data somehow.
I wonder if whoishiring would consider asking future job posters to format jobs specifically -- maybe JSONify the key details -- so it's easier for tools like this map to scrape.
The job-description text on the right hand side isn't wrapping for me, meaning I can't read most of it unless I double click to select all and then copy/paste it into a text editor.
I'm using Firefox 39 on Debian.
EDIT: If I change your "white-space: pre" to "pre-wrap" or "pre-line" that fixes it.
It looks like the biggest issue is guessing locations. I have few ideas how to improve it, although fixing it may be hard. Number of possible formats is huge, and event then the same format could be two different things eg. multiple locations (London, Berlin) vs location with state (San Francisco, CA)
I was trying fix most of the places posted in comments here.
For those asking how I map locations. I'm using text tagging with named entity recognition approach.
Ok It looks like this is the biggest issue, I mean guessing locations. This might be hard, I'm using named entity recognition approach, although even with this is not that perfect. Also Is really common to put more than one location, in different formants.
I'm planning to add UI widged to flag post as misplaced.
Here the first location appears as Australia and isn't followed by any city, also the next entity is not location. So we are done. Australia is the location.
First, nice work - this is the kind of user interface
and lookup tool that could serve as an great example.
Next, great job of taking the comments constructively.
Last, lest anyone think that the next Silicon Valley
is on the King River east of Fresno, I think that
cluster of 8 is centered in the location "California".
It may correct itself as you zoom in. It seems to group geographic areas together in somewhat centralized locations to avoid having too many bubbles at a particular zoom level.
If you zoom in on the east coast of the US, for instance, jobs are grouped between NYC and Boston and the location of the bubble doesn't make much sense until you zoom in further and see them separated.
At a glance, there doesn't seem to be that much of a correlation in the respective sites' data sets, but that's probably partially explained by the fact that we filter out all recruiters and certain large companies, outsourcers, and consultants (which gives the startups a heavier weight in influencing the rankings).
Ha! There's a small town in southern Ontario called Ajax and it seems to have placed a job there with AJAX in the description. This is a reasonable error though I think. Very cool overall :)
Pretty neat! Along with the better location accuracy / being able to modify them that people are suggesting it would be nice to improve the combination circles so that they're over their respective areas. For instance if I zoom in at just the right distance over Washington D.C. it'll show a circle above the city with a number in it and you can clearly see Baltimore as well but Baltimore has no circles until you zoom one more level at which point it then separates the circles.
The fist issues sums as the clustering algorithm, which currently is not prefect. Current clustering works on a grid. So it's possible to have two close dots not being clustered, because are leaving in the different cells of the map grid. Although I have alternative one which will try soon.
I'm basically building this the other way round by listing programmers worldwide. Currently, you can view the top 15 programmers of specific cities along with projects and language statistics, but I plan on adding a worldmap for the most influential programmers worldwide. To see a city, you can check San Francisco for example http://programmermap.com/area/san-francisco-ca-usa/
Really awesome tool - I'm not sure how (or if) it handles multiple locations, but the listing for TrueCar gets plotted at "Santa Monica Way, SF" rather than Santa Monica and SF.
I doesn't, I don't think I know how to handle them right now. The number of possible formats for locations that people use is already huge. Trying to figure how to split them may be hard to solve.
You beat me to it. I was working on this and downloaded all the items using firebase API. Great job. How did you parse the location? I thought that would be the hardest part.
I would love it if you can add a "Reset" function which would zoom out the map to default state. After digging in deep enough its a pain to get back to zero state.
You've got a few problems with map placement. A firm in Grand Rapids and another in Traverse City are both listed in the Michigan woods between the two cities.
It's not only LA, everything but USA, UK and a couple of other Europe countries is empty, I think that's because the kind of start-up mentality fits better in those areas, there are plenty of opportunities in other parts of the world, not to mention that many of job offers listed here allow remote applicants =). This is a better HN job listing though.
This is great. I've posted about this before, but my biggest pet peeve with /jobs is a lack of location in the title. Presently there are 18 jobs posted there, only 1 (GoCardless - London) mentions a location in the title.
I live in NY and the difference in an office in Brooklyn / Midtown would be the difference in me applying to the job. I imagine East Bay vs. Palo Alto is a similar story.
I'm in the South Bronx and looking to move northward, so anything that's in Brooklyn is a no-go for me - it'd be quicker for me to get to some places in New Jersey. So I definitely feel ya on this one. I think rent is cheaper and a lot of devs are living in Brooklyn these days, so I'm seeing more dev shops opening up down that way, so location is a big deal even when you're in a big metro - emphasis on _big_. Getting from one end of NYC to the other can cost you 2+ hours (each way) depending on trains and whatnot, so it's no little quibble.
This is great. It's crazy how huge the Who is Hiring thread has become since it began on HN. Browsing it has gone from a quick scan through to a time consuming process, even using Ctrl + F and other shortcuts.
I've been looking forward to a tool that would make going through the posts easier, so very happy to see this!
This is a great presentation tool of YC jobs. I really like how the text search is based on mapview. Would be nice to have the jobs distributed by zip code. SFO and London seem very clustered. Great work.
It gets Vancouver, BC and Vancouver, WA mixed up. It should assume Vancouver means BC. Otherwise, nicely done! Have you thought about how to do REMOTE/location independent jobs? And for freelancers?
Edit to add: with the caveat that it is going back through the maps, per meritt's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9839060). I don't find the map history problematic.
I'm curious as to how you're placing these. 21 jobs in downtown Seattle, but 2 specifically in Ballard (neighborhood), but I didn't see mention of Ballard in their job posts.
I'm floored by the wide geographic range of listings. Sure, the gross majority are in SF, NY, & London (all English-speaking cities to boot!) but Zurich? Belgrade? Maui? Wow.
Yes, it is quite the variation. I know I have recommended posting on this thread to anyone looking for tech talent. I haven't seen a demographic survey of the HN population, but from my anecdotal experience it is far wider than the SF/NYC tech scene.
The Maui opportunity is, unfortunately, just an unpaid internship (they are upfront about it in the listing at least). I wonder what kind of uptake they got...
What interests me the most is how some states seem to almost repel the kinds of startups that would post on HN. The northern midwest looks particularly bad on this map.
This is great. I noticed a lot more exposure based on the emails coming in. Also awesome to see other companies in my city who are hiring and on HN as well.
One minor bug: I'm seeing a listing titled "---" that starts with "I am a Junior Front End Developer. I eventually want to go into...". Seems to have picked up a comment by accident and interpreted it as a job posting.