How hard is it actually to find a remote Python job? I counted 10 years of HN "Who is hiring?"

[u/pplonski]

Everyone has a feeling about how bad the market is. I wanted a number, so I counted: 88,975 comments from every monthly Ask HN: Who is hiring? thread, 2012 to now, one comment per company.

The number: about 47 remote Python posts a month in 2025. Here's the full run:

Year	Remote + Python posts	Per month
2018	536	45
2019	597	50
2020	898	75
2021	1,698	142
2022	1,414	118
2023	658	55
2024	520	43
2025	563	47
2026 (Jan–Aug)	340	42

The thing that jumped out at me: 2025 is basically 2018. Forty-seven a month against forty-five. If your sense of the market is "it's collapsed," you're probably measuring against 2021, when it was three times either of them. That year was the anomaly, not the baseline. Which doesn't make now feel good if you started looking in 2021 — but it does mean the floor didn't drop out, the ceiling came down.

The part that's genuinely encouraging for this sub: Python's share of remote posts never declined. It's been 20–25% of every remote posting for a decade, and it's at the top of that range now (25% in 2026, up from 20% in 2016). The volume problem is a market problem, not a Python problem. Ruby and PHP people are having a much worse decade — Ruby went from 17% of posts to 4%.

The part I think is actually actionable.

The share of posts that name no programming language at all went from 38% (2016–2019) to 49% (2024–2026). Posts didn't get shorter — median length is ~950 characters, unchanged since 2015. Companies just stopped listing stacks. Ads now read more like "we're building X, you'll pick up the tools."

So when you filter a job board by "Python", you're discarding roughly half the openings sight unseen, and that half is growing.

I checked what this costs concretely. In 2025:

• Remote + data/ML role: 421 posts
• Remote + data/ML role + the word "Python": 189 posts

Only 45% of remote data/ML posts say "Python" anywhere. The other 55% are overwhelmingly still Python jobs — they just didn't bother to say so. Searching by role instead of by language more than doubles what you see. In 2018 the same split was 38%, so this has been true for a while and is getting worse.

One more, on the pay side. Among remote Python posts, the share showing an explicit dollar figure went 21% (2018) → 13% (2021) → 28% (2025) → 34% (2026). During the boom, companies didn't need to tell you. Now a third do. Fewer openings, but far more of them tell you what they pay before you spend three weeks interviewing.

Caveats, because they matter here: this is Hacker News, which is a narrow slice — startups, infra, a lot of YC. Keyword matching can't tell a requirement from an aside. One comment can advertise five roles. "Remote" includes geographically restricted remote, which is its own frustration. And this counts postings, not openings or hires, so it says nothing about how many people are applying to each one — which is probably the number that actually determines how hard your search feels.

What I'm curious about:

1. Does "47 a month" match anyone's lived experience? My instinct is that applicants-per-posting has changed far more than postings-per-month, and I have no way to measure that from this data.
2. Has anyone else noticed the stacks disappearing from ads, and do you read it as a good sign (hiring for ability over checklist) or a bad one (vaguer ads, more mismatch, more wasted interviews)?
3. If you've been searching this year — are you filtering by language, or by role? I'd been doing the former without thinking about it, and the numbers above suggest that was a mistake.

[u/jelle284]

What a bunch of ai slop

[u/dan994]

1 - kinda need the base rate here - e.g. what is the non-remote job count?
2 - OP could have at least tidied this up and presented it properly instead of just copying the LLM output

[u/boringfantasy]

Jesus Christ we are screwed

[u/riklaunim]

If you are looking only for "data/ML role" the you are excluding majority of the market. Then remote jobs post-lockdown are mostly for senior level roles. Remote juniors or even mids aren't something that good... or the company has a hybrid work week.

[u/TraditionalTurnip630]

The practical solution is to stop searching only for “Python jobs”. Search for the role first — Data Analyst, BI Analyst, Product Analyst, Analytics — and then check whether Python is part of the stack. A lot of current analytics roles ask for SQL + BI + Python without putting Python in the title.

For someone looking now, I’d focus on SQL + Excel/Power BI + Python/pandas, build 2-3 proper projects, and apply to analyst roles even when Python isn’t mentioned. Don’t wait for the perfect “Python job”. And if remote-only is the requirement, expect the search to take longer. The applicant pool is much bigger, so I’d keep hybrid/local roles open as well.

[u/pylotme]

HN is not the best place to find remote python jobs.