Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2025)

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall Hiring Landscape

  • Very large, diverse set of companies hiring: early-stage startups, mid-size SaaS, and large established firms.
  • Heavy concentration of roles in:
    • AI/LLM/agentic systems (infra, evaluation, security, MLE, applied research).
    • Infra/devtools (cloud, observability, CI/CD, databases, workflow engines).
    • Fintech/insurtech and healthcare (especially AI scribe, billing, FP&A, clinical/biotech tooling).
    • Robotics, climate/energy, manufacturing, and defense/national security.
  • Predominant demand is for senior/staff-level engineers (backend, full-stack, infra, ML), with fewer but notable openings for juniors, product, design, and sales/GT roles.

Remote vs Onsite, Geography & Visas

  • Many roles are remote-first, but often constrained to:
    • US/Canada or specific regions (EU-only, UK-only, LATAM, etc.).
  • Several companies emphasize onsite or hybrid (SF Bay Area, NYC, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, etc.) as a “competitive advantage” or cultural priority.
  • Multiple questions about visa sponsorship and non-local work; some companies explicitly do not sponsor or restrict to certain citizenship/regions due to regulatory or security constraints.

Perceptions of Job Posts & Processes

  • Sudowrite’s designer posting drew repeated praise for clarity, tone, and transparency (including why the current designer is leaving); a minority found it overly saccharine.
  • Better Stack’s process criticized as long, automated, and trivia-heavy; at least one candidate dropped out over an async browser-based interview and take-home.
  • SerpApi’s long-running junior role led some to suspect the listing’s seriousness; the company replied that they do have many junior openings and are reviewing applications.
  • A few companies were flagged for “bad experiences” or ghosting (e.g., Frequenz, HomeVision, Versafeed), but complaints were moderated out of the main subthreads.

Meta: HN Hiring-Thread Norms & Frictions

  • Moderators repeatedly reminded that Who Is Hiring threads disallow complaint threads about specific employers, citing lack of capacity to adjudicate fairness and the risk of derailing the posts.
  • Some users argued this leaves companies with “carte blanche” while applicants face rules; moderators acknowledged the underlying problem but maintained the policy.
  • Several applicants reported long waits or unclear communication; some hiring teams responded, promising to check on applications or attributing delays to high bot/spam volume.