Methodology and data sources

Source

Every datapoint comes from the public Hacker News monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” series. Our analysis covers the standard monthly threads from March 2011 onward and the known 2008 thread. Hiring metrics use top-level employer posts. Replies do not count toward the results.

What we analyze

We identify the company, role, advertised pay, currency, remote policy, seniority, location, and technologies stated in each hiring post. We count posts, companies, and explicit openings as separate units. This avoids treating one company with several openings as several independent employers.

Normalization

Salaries are read in the currency as written (USD, EUR, GBP, and others) and converted to USD using a quarterly reference rate for cross-comparison and medians. The native currency is always shown on the listing. Hourly rates are annualized. We normalize tech tags to canonical names and drop generic phrases.

Deduplication

Companies re-post the same role across months. We collapse duplicates with a content fingerprint (normalized company + role + salary) and keep the freshest version, so a repeat posting is counted once.

Demand and trend definitions

Technology demand is the share of top-level hiring posts in a month that explicitly mention a normalized technology. It is not a count of hires. Company counts show how broad a signal is. Role-opening counts use only roles stated in the post and never infer headcount. Salary transparency is the share of employer posts with an explicit numeric pay range.

We show counts beside rates and omit findings when there is not enough data to support a useful comparison. The latest two months are provisional because late posts and edits can change the totals.

Limitations (read this)

• These are advertised ranges from job posts, not verified paid compensation or accepted offers.
• Hacker News skews senior, US-heavy, and toward certain stacks. Treat it as "startups that hire on HN", not "all startups".
• Small cuts (a single tech in one region) have small sample sizes; we show the count and avoid headline claims below ~30 listings.

License & citation

Aggregated figures are free to cite under CC BY 4.0. Please attribute: “Source: Hacker News Who is Hiring, aggregated by StartupJobList” with a link. StartupJobList is not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator.

Corrections

If you find a factual error, contact us with the page and figure. We will check the source, correct the analysis, and update the published result.