19 comments

  • h1fra2 周前
    Nice to see the trend confirming my suspicion, the market has been complicated for the last year and it's not really improving (whether you are hiring or looking for a job)
  • andersa2 周前
    This is a rather depressing graph, what happened in 2022-2024?
    • lubujackson2 周前
      The tax change that causes companies to have to weirdly treat developer salaries as some sort of asset such that they can only write off 20% of it per year. Outcome of this is killer for startups and causing a huge issue everywhere.

      Bottom line: If a company makes $1MM in revenue and pays $1MM in salary, they owe taxes on $800k profit. Yes, this is actually the law now.

      • awongh2 周前
        Has anyone heard opinions from the incoming administration on getting this changed?

        I guess the one area this tax law particularly affects are bootstrapped revenue-generating (non-VC funded) startups with high dev costs? i.e., actual running businesses not playing with monopoly money.... which maybe Elon doesn't care about....

        • _djo_2 周前
          The change was introduced in Trump's tax cuts, so I doubt he will reverse it.
          • jrs2352 周前
            Did the change take effect during his administration or after the tax cuts expired or rather after the income brackets also increased? That change was intentional so that the following administration if it wasn't the GOP would feel the heat of and get the blame fortaxes going up.
            • _djo_2 周前
              It took place during the administration.

              Another poster had a good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379288

              • jrs2352 周前
                I think this is the more important comment in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380764

                "Note: these changes were signed into law in 2017 but came into effect in 2022"

                Like I thought, changes were meant to be a time bomb if the GOP wasn't in control.

                • _djo_2 周前
                  Thank you, I missed that and it’s important context. I’ve upvoted your comment for more visibility.
              • 2 周前
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          • dgfitz2 周前
            Do you have a reference where I can read more about this, specifically the timelines?
      • dragonwriter2 周前
        > The tax change that causes companies to have to weirdly treat developer salaries as some sort of asset

        The salaries are not an asset, they are the cost of creating the asset. They are capitalizable similar to (but on a different schedule than) costs of acquiring software that is not developed in house.

      • ryandrake2 周前
        The "Section 174" tax change always gets brought up, but wouldn't that be kind of a "tail wagging the dog" explanation? Surely, if it's worth it for a business to hire talent, then it's still worth it regardless of some esoteric tax rule. Are there actually companies sitting there in their Hiring meetings saying "Gee, we really need to expand our business and hire some engineers--if it wasn't for this tax law, we'd be hiring!"
        • sixhobbits2 周前
          Cashflow problems regularly kill business. Now you need a much higher cash buffer than before (in parent example where is that 800k coming from?). Combine with much tighter VC market and there are definitely many startups closing up shop because of this.
        • Jarwain2 周前
          If it becomes meaningfully more expensive to hire talent, it needs to be meaningfully more worth it to hire.

          It's more like if before the law was passed they'd hire 5 new devs, now they can only afford 3 and have to make do until more revenue comes in

      • neilv2 周前
        How do non-developer salaries affect those taxes?

        (In 2024, if a company paid salaries for a software developer, a novel writer, and a cook, does each of those 3 positions affect taxes in the same way?)

        • daemonologist2 周前
          They're unaffected - the law specifically applies to software development:

              (c) Special rules.
    (3) Software development. For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure.
          (c.1 and c.2 are the opposite - carveouts for land acquisition and fossil fuel and mining exploration)
        • jvanderbot2 周前
          No, just software devs. Thanks so called "Tax Cuts and Jobs" act.
      • seeking_re_msw2 周前
        do you have a link to the tax change?

        surely tax changes come in the form of congressional+presidential bills and amendments

        • freeone30002 周前
          Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 moved domestic R&E expenditures (including salaries) under IRS Sec 174 from a same-year credit to a five-year amortized expense (similar to capital expenditures). It also amended 174(c)(3) to ensure that software dev is unequivocally an R&E expense[^1].

          1: https://irc.bloombergtax.com/public/uscode/doc/irc/section_1...

          • andersa2 周前
            What the hell? This seems almost purposefully written to destroy the one industry where ordinary people could get good salaries. It doesn't even make any sense whatsoever, just a straight "fuck you" regulation?
            • jvanderbot2 周前
              It almost surely was either a slap at large tech companies or was meant to generate short term revenue to cover some other cut.

              Same thing happened when they restructured tax code to interpret withholdings differently. Everyone saw more on their paycheck temporarily (and they gave speeches about it!) but owed more later if they didn't change their withholdings.

              • freeone30002 周前
                Big tech, ie, large companies who are expected to exist for 5 years with about the same workforce, actually will go back to having the about same benefit in 2027. (They claim 20% of 2022 in 2022, then 20% of 2022 and 20% of 2023 in 2023…) It also covers only development expenses, so sales and legal (a large part of big tech!) are still taken as wage expenses.

                So it’s likely the second — and was likely used in part to pay for those very same withholding changes! Or the then-new tax-exemption for lobbying expenses.

          • freeone30002 周前
            Note: these changes were signed into law in 2017 but came into effect in 2022
    • myth_drannon2 周前
      And to put a more depressing angle to the graph, HN and Who's hiring were not that popular pre-2017, and now 2024 numbers are lower than the pre-2017 data
      • tredre32 周前
        > HN [...] were not that popular pre-2017

        Is that true? What happened to change that in 2017?

        I've been around longer than that and I admit I haven't seen that much of a difference in engagement around here. But over such a long period it could easily have gone unnoticed by me!

        The only thing I've noticed is the increase in activity during the recent Reddit shenanigans (which resulted in a drop of quality of the conversation on HN, but it seems back to normal now).

    • BerislavLopac2 周前
      Interest rates were raised from nearly zero, where they were for a number of years. When the interest rates are that low, high-risk investments like VC are more attractive then alternative (having a low chance of high returns is better than guaranteed no returns at all).
    • robbie-c2 周前
      end of ZIRP
    • nemanja_codes2 周前
      Collapse, unfortunately.
    • seeking_re_msw2 周前
      Interest rates
  • OccamsMirror2 周前
    Location / remote / hybrid would be interesting to visualize.
    • nemanja_codes2 周前
      True, I thought about it, technologies too, and other filters. Currently website has clear focus new/repeated job ads. I will see how much public interest is there for the website and if it is worth adding more features.
  • jcuenod2 周前
    This looks lovely! Good work.

    On my wishlist are some fuzzier categories:

      1. Tech trends (rust, docker, postgres...)
  2. Role trends ("ml engineer", "full-stack developer" ...)
    • nemanja_codes2 周前
      Thank you, I highly appreciate it. As is website has clear and strong focus, it's "fresh" vs "repeated" job ads. Naturally, you would always prefer to give a shot with company that just posted a fresh ad, then to apply for a role that is repeated in 10 months of previous 12 but company still hasn't found a candidate that satisfies criteria.

      For the additional filters, by technologies and role types it would be of great help if I could find some high level indexing and fuzzy search tools/libraries. I would probably need to migrate from SQLite to Postgres and when I am already there probably use ORM too.

      Certainly, I would need to do serious research, if there is enough public interest in the current website and I manage to find some contributors with data science and information retrieval experience maybe we can add many interesting filters like tech, roles, location, visas, remote, etc.

  • ryandrake2 周前
    This is great! I had long ago started a similar project to parse HN job ads month after month looking for the ones that just stay the same each month, which might suggest the company is probably "fishing" instead of "hiring". But it never really got off the ground. This platform seems more than capable of doing that kind of analysis and more. Great work.
    • nemanja_codes2 周前
      Thank you very much, very much appreciated. I was curious to see how much people would be interested in such website.
  • mdaniel2 周前
    It would appear you have a non-trivial "company" parse problem, based on eyeballing the "First Time Companies" section. I do appreciate the problem of trying to do semantic analysis on HN comment text, but several of them follow the "X@Y" nomenclature and a few others are "X-Y" so it doesn't seem to be insurmountable to try and fix
  • thih92 周前
    Possible bug report, I noticed a company that posts regularly but I didn’t see it listed: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=spark_CM
  • BerislavLopac2 周前
    This is nice, but I find this one more detailed: https://hnhiring.com/trends
  • welder2 周前
    This is awesome! But it's missing at least one company from 2024-08. Maybe a parsing error? Or does it exclude hiring freelance/contract posts?
  • Ancalagon2 周前
    I can maybe make a PR later - but would love to see the companies sorted alphabetically so I could just glance for specific ones!
    • 2 周前
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  • rco87861 周前
    Really shows the hiring slowdown over the last 2 years.
  • vfulco22 周前
    Really terrific contribution.
  • shermantanktop2 周前
    Me: hmm what’s the big dip in the middle?

    Spouse: uh, COVID?

    Me: ohhhh

    • nemanja_codes2 周前
      "HN Who's hiring" thread is just a random sample that pretty accurately describes trends in the entire industry.
  • xnx2 周前
    I don't know who's to thank for it, but someone set up a constantly updated ClickHouse database of all data from the Hacker News API at https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0a...

    It gets you 80% of the way there on any HN data project.

    • nemanja_codes2 周前
      This very is useful, thank you. Algolia API is also pretty generous, it made my work a lot easier. It returns even 1k comments in a single response. I started with low level Axios parser but I soon discovered that HackerNews webserver has very strict rate limiting. Good to know that there are already available data sources so you can focus on querying logic and data presentation.
    • adhamsalama2 周前
      This is very useful, thank you!
    • 2 周前
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  • artemkornilov2 周前
    [dead]
  • helloleo20242 周前
    [dead]
  • ofcrpls2 周前
    Nice work for Central Defender /s.
    • nemanja_codes2 周前
      Thank you very much. He is Chelsea legend that messes up my SEO.
  • EricaOrnelas922 周前
    [dead]
  • Jackosas2 周前
    [flagged]