Welcome to Hotfix Research

Hotfix runs ghost-job detection over tens of thousands of tech listings every day. Most of what the system finds never leaves the database. That's a waste. This is where we'll publish what we see.

What we have that other observers don't is the raw material itself. Every job posting that hits a major ATS, every closing, every requirements bump, every salary disclosure, every quietly removed listing: it lands in the same dataset the product runs on. When a company's hiring rate changes, our system notices before anyone announces it. When the median experience requirement for senior roles drifts a year in either direction, we can show it. When 12% of a hot subsector's listings are statistically dead, we know which ones and why.

We're going to publish four kinds of things.

Ghost jobs, quarterly. The number, the breakdown by industry, the worst offenders. This is where most of our citation work will land. The topic is provably newsworthy, and we're one of the few people with a real signal for it.

Hiring trends, monthly. Which companies are actually staffing, which slowed down, which went quiet. Indexed against their own histories so we can call out genuine inflection points instead of seasonality noise.

Salary trends, monthly, alternating with hiring trends. Not aggregate compensation. Levels.fyi has that covered and does it well. What we cover is what the listings themselves give away: salary disclosure rates by region, requirement inflation, the share of senior IC postings that now include AI in the title.

Weekly observational essays. One thing we noticed in the data this week, written short. Not a roundup, not a digest. Just one observation, sometimes with a chart, always with a take.

What we're not going to publish: generic career advice. Resume tips. Interview hacks. Listicles. Anything an LLM can write in five seconds from training data. That market is full, the content does not deserve to exist, and we have no edge there. Our edge is the data.

A note on how we work. Every piece is sourced. Every methodology is public. The flagships ship with a downloadable CSV. If we make a call you disagree with, the numbers will be in the post for you to argue back with. We will be wrong sometimes. When that happens, we'll update the post in place with a dated correction, not quietly memory-hole it.

This is the editorial arm of Hotfix. The product surfaces tech jobs that actually exist, no padding. This publication surfaces what those same listings tell us about the market.

Expect data, not advice.