Show HN: 8 years of "Who's Hiring?" in charts (hiring boom, bust, and AI trends)

After seeing Andrej's HackerTube post (and given my sons are both junior-mid developers) I decided to point Codex at 8 years of "Who's hiring?" posts and rip through some tokens on semantic analysis of all that content. I started pre-COVID, thru October 2026, and the data was retrieved via HN API data.

5 things that stand out:

1. AI is now in half the posts. AI or machine learning appeared in 50% of 2026 posts, up from 17% in 2019.

2. Most employers posted in only one month. Across all 94 monthly threads, 53% of the employers we identified appeared in just one month.

3. Frontend roles fell from 16% to 3% of posts. That’s a substantial shift in the kinds of developers companies explicitly say they’re looking for.

4. Staff-level posts grew 3.6×. Posts naming staff-level roles rose from 77 in 2019 to 277 in 2026, even as the hiring board got smaller.

5. Only 41 posts explicitly named junior roles in 2026. Out of 2,932 posts. In 2019, there were 163.

... plus 20 other trends.

It feels like there's plenty to consider and discuss. Hope it's useful.