Hacker News Who wants to be hired posts are accelerating

Every month on Hacker News, a niche entrepreneur/hacker community, there are two posts that a lot of people quietly look forward to: “Who is hiring?” and “Who wants to be hired?”.

The first one is basically a no-bullshit job board: companies post directly their open roles with very concise information: location, remote policy, tech stack, how to apply, etc. At some point, the companion thread “Who wants to be hired?” was added too, where people looking for work can post their profile, skills, and what they’re looking for.

You can think of “Who is hiring?” as the demand side and “Who wants to be hired?” as the supply side.

A few months back, I started noticing something interesting: the “Who wants to be hired?” threads seemed to be getting bigger. In In the past, I always remembered the “Who’s hiring” posts getting more comments than “Who wants to be hired?” (demand > supply), but lately I was observing some change in that trend.

So I downloaded the historical data using the Hacker News API and put together a quick analysis to compare the two threads over time. If this would be true, we could be observing the beginning of a “recession” in the tech sector.

The data is is pretty strong: the trend has inverted and “Who wants to be hired?” is greatly outpacing “Who is hiring?”.

But I don’t want to draw any conclusions yet. There’s a lot of noise in these datasets and there might be many confounding variables. It could be that recruiters just stopped using HN altogether 🤷‍♂️.

If I’d have to draft some hypothesis, I’d definitively blame AI. But I’d do it in two different categories:

• AI is bad: AI’s bubble is starting to burst, companies are reducing spend both by firing devs and slowing the hiring of new ones.
• AI is good: AI has caused devs to be more efficient and reduce the need of people contracting the demand. This could be paired with “AI is giving people the skills to enter the job market and position themselves as a dev”

But I don’t have an answer, I’m just presenting the data, you can draw your own conclusions:

You can access the source code and the analysis in the repo: https://github.com/santiagobasulto/hn-who-is-hiring-analysis

Analysis

Total count of comments per post

Overall, the growth of comments on “Who wants to be hired?” is evident, and is also paired by a decline in the “Who’s hiring” posts. This doesn’t say much, is just an intro.

Ratio of “Who wants to be hired?” over “Who’s hiring”

This is the same data as above, but as a “ratio” of supply / demand. It’s evident that the trend has inverted and we’re getting A LOT more “Who wants to be hired” comments now, and the numbers are pretty strong: almost 2X supply over demand as of July 2026 (vs 0.25 in 2022).

Linear regression

Fitting a Linear Regression to the ratio shows a strong positive slope and a 0.58 R-squared. There’s not much to add here. It’s just a confirmation of the data we’re observing.

Account Age of posters

My first thought when I noticed this growth of “Who wants to be hired” posts was: “The vibe coders are flooding the market”. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The mean/median account age seems to be pretty stable.