The German job market in 2026 is, roughly speaking, hell. So in addition to the usual venues I've been sending my profile to HackerNews' "Who wants to be hired" thread.

The rules of the thread are fairly simple:

Please only post if you are personally looking for work. Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here.

Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.

As expected, all but one (arguably two) of the replies I got are spam:

• AI Cover letter writing service: let me be clear: cover letters are, with very few exceptions, bullshit. But it takes a certain type of personality to think that the solution to "every 'AI cover letter' tool churning slop" is... to make a new AI cover letter tool to churn slop.
• AI Resume Tech: I don't understand what this letter wants to say or what they do. Apparently my CV is a "portfolio-only read", which is surprising because I don't have a portfolio in there.
• Be a face for a foreign developer (received twice): I knew this was going on, but I was nonetheless surprised that it was offered to me. If you're not up to date, the trick is that you act as the face of a foreign spy developer -- you show up in meetings, they do the technical work, and you both split the salary 40/60. What happens to the company whose infrastructure is open to some unkown foreign developer is left as an exercise to the reader. Here's a hint.
• Weird spam with no link
• Buy a home spam
• Join our API Hackathon and win $35k: apparently it is no longer enough to pass an interview - if you want to be hired you need to join a hackathon, build someone else's API, and only then you may be considered for a role.
• Job recommendation service: few things say "here's your zero noise list" as an unrequested list of jobs that don't fit my profile.
• Crypto-native talent network: the biggest surprise for me was to find out that, apparently, we are still doing blockchain in 2026.
• Someone who isn't even trying
• Someone who is trying really hard: from one guy who can't be bothered to learn about encodings to another one who wants to build an entire market. Perhaps I should put the previous guy in touch with this one.
• Actual, non-spam job offer: they didn't reply to my follow-up e-mail but at least they were on topic.
• Job recommendation service with recruiter referral code: I thought that job agencies weren't allowed to contact me at all but a deeper read of the rules reveals that this is technically not true -- they cannot post in the thread but there's nothing about them mailing me directly. And since the link is to a job (not one that this person is hiring for but a job nonetheless) it technically qualifies as "work opportunity". A previous version of this article had this e-mail classified as spam, but I've since bumped it to "not what I wanted but ok".

I know this sounds really dumb but part of me was hoping that the HN crowd would be different to that of literally every other forum on the internet. At least just because I hoped it would be better doesn't mean that I'd be naive enough to post my personal e-mail address. Despite all the noise I still find it mildly amusing to receive e-mails from bots that think my name is "Probably".