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

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

*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

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 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:

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.