My initial unfounded reaction is I’d rather not see such threads here if only because it has the potential to attract attention from tech recruitment circles.

I don’t feel that this kind of content makes sense here. Tech recruitment has a negative connotation associated with it for a good reason and I would hate to see recruiters show up and pollute what is generally an interesting discussion forum. I also feel like hosting this would open us up to more “fire and forget blogspam” by companies who are only here to use this as a recruiting medium and who won’t participate in a discussion about their submission.

Maybe it would be better the other way around, like a “Who’s Looking for Work?” thread. Job postings tend to get pretty spammy, and an open policy would encourage recruiters to join and pollute the threads, as others have mentioned. If it were the other way around, where the high quality users of this board looking for work posted their own requirements, it might be a nice value-add to the community.

Just an idea. I’m not sure even that is a great idea, but I’d like to hear what others think.

Perhaps there could be an “Interesting Projects” thread that isn’t about companies but specific technical projects and efforts (including open source) that could use attention and more people. There’d need to be strong ground rules to prevent it from becoming a Hacker News “Who’s Hiring?” thread.

One ground rule would be no listing of required qualifications. That makes it a job ad. Another would be to disallow non-technical cultural discussions. For example, “We’re rolling out Haskell at a bank” is OK; “We have free doughnuts on Fridays” is not. Listing an HR email address would be a banned practice.

The culture we want is one where the assumption is that we have hyper-competent professionals and that the onus is on the poster to prove that a project (or company) is interesting, and not that we have thousands of commodity Scrum programmers (think HN) who are just looking for a job.

I am not keen on this. You can’t mute/hide subthreads, so that would make it impossible to opt in to discussion of only some jobs. Further, as someone who has posted a few job ads here, I don’t want to feel compelled to sit on a role for two weeks until the thread comes around again–perhaps only to find out that nobody bothered to do it this month.

We already have the “job” tag for job postings. There’s no “for hire” tag, and I’m not entirly sure I think it’s a good idea to add it either. Perhaps that would be better as a flag on your profile, hooked into the search functionality? e.g. “Search for people for hire that have made insightful posts on this topic”. Does that make sense?

I get this enough from other sites, like reddit and HN. I don’t think it would be of use to me on lobste.rs.

I think this is covered by https://lobste.rs/t/job. I don’t see anything wrong with a perhaps monthly (weekly is too often IMO) “Who is hiring?” thread if it is tagged with job because then it could be filtered out by individuals based on preferences.

I’d personally be interested (despite being nigh unhirable), but I get the vague impression that such threads would be less-than-popular on lobste.rs. Not sure why.

Aside from not fitting the site, acceptance at decent jobs is a numbers game. You need a lot of them for it to be worthwhile to more than a few people. Best to leave it on job sites or forums attracting large numbers of people on both sides of the equation. Hacker News is a good example outside job sites because it was designed to promote startups, has a ton of people representing companies, has readers interested in that, and so a good pile of jobs show up.

Whereas on Lobsters it would be four to five postings in a thread that takes up a spot for interesting tech that most of us come here for. Wouldn’t be good on quantity or culture fit.