HN "Who is hiring?" in 2026: a third fewer companies, and 2+ job seekers for every one

arthur_taken — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:03:51 +0000

Every month, Hacker News runs two threads side by side: "Who is hiring?" (companies post jobs) and "Who wants to be hired?" (people post themselves). They're one of the few public, unfiltered snapshots of the developer job market — but they're free text, so nobody really measures them.

So I parsed them. Every top-level comment from 13 "Who is hiring?" threads (Oct 2025 – Oct 2026, 9,194 roles from 3,909 company posts) and 7 "Who wants to be hired?" threads (Apr – Oct 2026, 3,586 candidates) went through an LLM into a fixed schema: role, seniority, remote/onsite, salary range, visa, tech stack. Here's what the numbers say.

TL;DR

Companies posting fell by a third. ~361 company posts per month in Q4 2025 → ~240 in Q3 2026 (−33%). Roles fell about the same (850 → 577 per month).
Job seekers went the other way. "Who wants to be hired?" grew from 384 posts in April to 553 in September (+44%). There are now 2.2 candidates for every hiring company (September), up from 1.2 in April — and 2.6 in the first week of October.
More people want remote than there are remote jobs. About half of candidates want remote-only; only 33–42% of roles are remote-only.
Salary transparency jumped. Roles listing a salary went from ~23% (Oct 2025 – Jul 2026) to ~32% (Aug – Sep 2026).
Pay didn't move. Median US software-engineering salary (range midpoint) stayed in a $177k – $195k band all year.
Juniors and visas are rare. 2–5% of roles are junior/intern; 2–4% explicitly offer visa sponsorship.

1. Fewer companies, fewer roles

Month	Company posts	Roles
Oct 2025	333	790
Nov 2025	385	891
Dec 2025	365	869
Jan 2026	248	558
Feb 2026	390	877
Mar 2026	313	718
Apr 2026	324	734
May 2026	307	751
Jun 2026	302	719
Jul 2026	250	620
Aug 2026	220	519
Sep 2026	251	593
Oct 2026*	221	555

*October is the first week only (data pulled Oct 7). HN threads get most of their comments in the first few days, but expect it to grow a bit.

January dips every year (holidays), but the summer of 2026 is clearly lower than last autumn: Q3 2026 averaged 240 company posts a month vs 361 in Q4 2025. Each company still lists ~2.3 roles per post, so it's fewer companies, not smaller posts.

2. More people looking

Month	"Who wants to be hired?" posts	Hiring companies	Candidates per company
Apr 2026	384	324	1.19
May 2026	508	307	1.65
Jun 2026	542	302	1.79
Jul 2026	486	250	1.94
Aug 2026	547	220	2.49
Sep 2026	553	251	2.20
Oct 2026*	566	221	2.56

Both threads open on the same day, so the first-week October ratio is a fair comparison even though both counts will still grow.

Who's posting? Mostly experienced people: 57–63% describe themselves as senior or above (median 10 years of experience when stated), 24–35% are in the US, and 38–45% are open to relocating.

3. Remote: demand > supply

	Remote-only	Remote or onsite	Onsite	Hybrid
Roles (Sep 2026)	42.0%	9.9%	27.7%	17.9%
Candidates wanting remote-only (Sep 2026)	50.3%

Remote roles held steady all year — roughly half of roles allow remote in some form — but remote-only roles bounced between 33% and 42%, while 50–55% of candidates every month say they only want remote.

4. Salary: more transparency, flat pay

Share of roles with a salary range: 21.5–25.0% from Oct 2025 to Jul 2026, then 32.9% in August and 30.4% in September.
Median salary for US-dollar software-engineering roles with a stated range (midpoint, annualized; ~70–110 roles per month): between $176,750 and $195,000 every month, with no trend.

So companies are more willing to put a number in the post, but the number itself hasn't changed.

5. Seniority and visas

Senior/staff/principal/lead: 35–46% of roles. Junior + intern: 2–5%. If you're early-career, HN hiring threads are a tough channel.
Explicit visa sponsorship: 1.8–3.8% of roles. Most posts don't mention it at all, so "unspecified" is the norm.

6. Tech stack

Share of roles mentioning a technology, Q4 2025 vs Q3 2026:

Tech	Q4 2025	Q3 2026
Python	15.9%	15.5%
TypeScript	16.6%	14.7%
React	13.2%	11.8%
PostgreSQL	10.1%	11.1%
AWS	8.6%	7.6%
Kubernetes	5.6%	6.7%
Node.js	6.0%	5.4%
Rust	5.1%	4.3%
Go	4.6%	3.9%

Python overtook TypeScript as the most-mentioned language; PostgreSQL and Kubernetes gained a point each. On the candidate side the top stack is the same every month: Python, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, React, Docker, AWS.

How the data was built

Source: the official Hacker News API (threads by whoishiring), top-level comments only.
Each comment → one structured record with Claude (company + one row per role; candidates → one row each). Fields the post doesn't state stay null/unspecified — nothing is guessed.
"Remote" = the post says the role can be done remotely; "salary" = an explicit range in the post.
Caveats: one company post can list many roles; a few companies repost monthly; LLM parsing isn't perfect; HN is a skewed slice of the market (startups, US/EU, senior engineers).

Get the data yourself

I packaged the pipelines as Apify Actors, so you can pull the same rows (or filter them — remote only, salary ≥ X, Rust, visa…) as JSON/CSV:

HN Who is Hiring — AI Structured Jobs — 12+ months of roles with salary, remote regions, visa, tech stack.
HN Who wants to be hired — AI Structured Candidates — candidates with seniority, location, remote/relocation, stack.
If you want the companies' own job boards instead of HN posts: ATS Jobs Scraper pulls live jobs from Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Recruitee, SmartRecruiters and Personio, with ready-made company lists (AI labs, fintech, devtools…) and per-company hiring signals.

If there's a cut of the data you'd like to see (by country, by stack, by company stage), tell me in the comments.

DEV Community: arthur_taken