A decade
of hiring.
Every Who's Hiring thread on Hacker News, parsed and counted - from the launch of the index in October 2015 through the latest publication. The longest continuously-measured record of technology hiring on the open web.
Three eras, one curve.
Monthly job-posting volume across the full 182-month record. Eras reflect macro hiring conditions - not editorial choices.
Steady seasonal cadence; January troughs and mid-year highs. Median month 1,395.
ZIRP-fueled hiring blitz. Volume cleared 2,500/mo for the first and only time. Records: many.
Layoff cycle, AI consolidation, slow re-acceleration. Volume now sits ~71% below the 2021 peak.
2021 stands alone. Everything else lives in its shadow.
Annual totals. Hatched columns mark partial years (the index began Oct 2015; 2026 is in progress).
February is reliably the year's peak.
Averaged across all 16 calendar years, the month-of-year shape is unmistakable: a deep January trough, a shoulder rise into spring, the summer bulge, and a long quiet November-December.
Each square is one Who's Hiring thread. Brighter cells held more jobs.
Python & JavaScript - the decade's two anchors.
Cumulative mentions across 222,992 postings. Counted once per post; many posts list multiple skills.
Python
First ML tooling. Then GenAI.
The live AI/ML bucket shows two distinct waves: an earlier ML tooling rise, then a sharper GenAI acceleration after Nov 2022. The line uses a six-month average so the shape is legible without inventing data.
Post-ChatGPT growth: AI / ML bucket 2.4×, React 0.7×.
The middle held. The top stretched away.
Of the 19,677 postings that disclosed compensation, the all-time monthly median sits at $150k. The latest P75 marker is $230k, showing how the upper band has moved against the middle.
Unknown to Junior spans 0 dollars in the latest 12-month average.
Executive leads the function breakdown in the latest 12-month compensation series.
Onsite is the highest location/work-arrangement median in the latest 12-month series.
Engineering swallowed it. Data is the only one growing.
The composition of postings by job function, drawn from the category time series through May 2026. 73.0% of all function tags land in engineering.
54.8% of postings carry no explicit seniority signal. Levels are non-exclusive.
Among postings that name a level, the senior share tracks how much of the market is explicitly asking for experienced hires.
Oct '15 next to May '26.
The first issue and the latest issue of the index, set side by side as a single page of the ledger. What survived. What disappeared. What the median posting asked for then, and asks for now.
"The first thread asked for JavaScript and people who could ship. The latest asks for Python, more seniority, and a smaller market to do it in."
The extremes.
"If you want to see the venture cycle in one chart, look at the second era - the one in orange. It is where everything got hired, and where everything was about to be unhired."