Ask HN: Do you get good applications from “Who is hiring?”?

I feel that there is a grain of truth here in pknerd's words. I don't have a citation, and sure, my story is just another anecdotal data point; but I'd like to add it here anyway and I suspect that there are many others like me.

I've been in software engineering for many many years and have worked for a number of employers in different parts of the world. The upshot of all that experience is that I know, with great clarity, what I want and what I do not want. I _have_ in the past, moved 17,000 km to take up a role but those days are behind me - there are only so many times you can pull off an enormous undertaking like that!

I've worked remotely (on and off) for years and have settled on preferring to stay remote for the remainder of my career. Whilst my life is pretty flexible and _could_ move pretty much anywhere, I have no desire to move near to the location of an employer for on-site work just because they happen to be in a particular location. However, I'm more than happy to put in the effort to visit occasionally, especially when starting a new project or a new team is being assembled.

I'm also practising Geographic Arbitrage which goes hand in hand with remote work and is a significant contributor to my financial survival strategy. Having lived in major world cities with grossly inflated asset bubbles (real estate), I know now that I will never do that again, and continue to actively move in the opposite direction.

The counter risk, of course, is that there are little or no employers situated away from "power house" cities, and that I'd be pooched if the remote work dries up. Fortunately, I've managed to get by so far.

What I genuinely find odd though, is the thought process of companies that are absolutely dead set against remote roles, but happily base their businesses upon large, successful and significant software projects like Linux or Rails or Node.js which are developed by huge distributed teams of remote software engineers living all over the world.

I have had really good experiences with "Who is hiring" – from meeting interesting independent contractors that have heavily influenced projects to making my best technical hire ever.

When hiring I've used a mix of approaches – job boards, recruiters, HN. HN doesn't produce a lot of volume, but anecdotally, the candidates often get through initial screenings because they are generally both technically proficient and well rounded (from a stack standpoint). With other channels I find a lot of spam and/or mismatches on stacks.

I wouldn't move to Berlin, so that's an issue. For such locations only option is to have occasional travel like once a month or two and work remotely.

Yes, but a tiny percentage. A lot of spam. (_A lot of spam._) Tons of recruiting services. 80% of people obviously didn't read the post.

That said, I have hired a few amazing people, including some great technical leaders, that would have cost 15-20% salary to use a recruiter to find & snipe (this was before I had internal recruiters to help).

I use a separate email alias for it, and have a few canned responses (1/ you didn't read the job post 2/ I said we cannot do visas or major relocations, but you're in Greenland 3/ too junior, but please keep an eye on future posts) to keep things efficient.

There are also high taxes in Europe so you must account for that. Then Europe salaries look even less attractive...