November 2023 Hacker News Hiring Trends
November's Ask HN: Who is hiring? thread showed continued growth with 375 postings, up 20% from the near all-time low in September, and up 10% over October's thread. This is a positive sign after months of declines. However, on a year-over-year basis, we're still way off of the 2022 numbers (down 30%) and the 2021 numbers dwarf where we are today (down 61% since November, 2021).
Technology-wise, everything remains relatively stable in November. Let's take a look at some areas of note.
Python, TypeScript, and Go remain in the Top 3 spots. One notable change in November is C++, jumping into the fourth spot. Not bad for the nearly 40 year old language.
While not a big jump from month-to-month in November, AI still shows its strength as a big mover this year. AI edged closer to being mentioned in 20% of postings. AI has nearly doubled in the past 12 months.
Remote positions accounded for 61% of postings in November, getting back over 60% after a slight dip in October to 57%. Remote positions are still in the general area of where they've been for the past 6 months. Onsite and Hybrid have remained relatively steady.
Specicalization keywords track the growth of different areas of engineering focus including Full-Stack, Front-end, and Back-end developers. Front-end in particular has been seeing steady drops over the past couple years. It peaked at just over 25% in January, 2022, but has dropped to 13% in November, 2023, a drop of 12%. Back-end has also been trending down over the last year with its own 10% drop from 28% to 18%. This could be a result of the industry broadening into more types of development. AI/ML and Data management come to mind as growing areas of focus and specialization.
While the title of Senior Software Engineer has been a consistent level across the industry for more than a decade, the titles of Staff Software Engineer and Principal Software Engineer (often referred to as Staff+ in many books and articles) have emerged over the last few years. From the data, we can see the growth in Staff level positions has really picked up over the last year, reaching 10% in October and falling back slightly to abouto 8% in November.
Tech | Rank | Last Month | Change | Last Year | Change |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Remote | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
Senior | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
Full Stack | 3 | 4 | +1 | 3 | 0 |
Onsite | 4 | 3 | -1 | 9 | +5 |
AI | 5 | 5 | 0 | 14 | +9 |
React | 6 | 8 | +2 | 5 | -1 |
Back End | 7 | 7 | 0 | 4 | -3 |
Python | 8 | 6 | -2 | 6 | -2 |
TypeScript | 9 | 10 | +1 | 7 | -2 |
Hybrid | 10 | 11 | +1 | 16 | +6 |
Front End | 11 | 12 | +1 | 8 | -3 |
Machine Learning | 12 | 9 | -3 | 13 | +1 |
Postgresql | 13 | 16 | +3 | 11 | -2 |
Cloud | 14 | 13 | -1 | 12 | -2 |
AWS | 15 | 15 | 0 | 10 | -5 |
Security | 16 | 17 | +1 | 17 | +1 |
Open Source | 17 | 18 | +1 | 19 | +2 |
Staff | 18 | 14 | -4 | 30 | +12 |
golang | 19 | 21 | +2 | 15 | -4 |
GitHub | 20 | 29 | +9 | 28 | +8 |
Tech | Mentions | Rank | Last Year Mentions | Last Year Rank | Change |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Snowflake | 7 | 56 | 2 | 149 | +93 |
Tailwind | 6 | 64 | 2 | 151 | +87 |
OpenAI | 6 | 60 | 2 | 144 | +84 |
Observability | 9 | 47 | 4 | 103 | +56 |
Agile | 6 | 62 | 4 | 104 | +42 |
WebGL | 7 | 57 | 4 | 91 | +34 |
FastAPI | 6 | 65 | 5 | 86 | +21 |
ClickHouse | 5 | 67 | 5 | 88 | +21 |
Principal | 14 | 31 | 15 | 48 | +17 |
API | 19 | 25 | 21 | 41 | +16 |
Tech | Mentions | Rank | Last Year Mentions | Last Year Rank | Change |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
iOS | 10 | 40 | 31 | 27 | -13 |
Rust | 13 | 35 | 43 | 22 | -13 |
Android | 10 | 42 | 28 | 29 | -13 |
Computer Vision | 6 | 61 | 15 | 49 | -12 |
React Native | 9 | 49 | 23 | 39 | -10 |
C# | 8 | 53 | 20 | 43 | -10 |
Kafka | 5 | 70 | 12 | 60 | -10 |
Mongodb | 6 | 63 | 13 | 53 | -10 |
Robotics | 6 | 59 | 14 | 50 | -9 |
Redis | 10 | 43 | 24 | 35 | -8 |