With AI's help, I tracked how programmer salaries changed over 10 years

About 8 years ago, I built a tool that downloads all the job postings people share on Hackernews and provides keyword statistics. We can use this tool to get a sense of the trends behind some keywords in the tech industry. For example, the chart of the three keywords below shows the shift in popular frontend frameworks:

I was actually also curious about salary trends, but since different employers describe salaries in wildly different ways, it's hard to extract the salary range of a given job posting with simple word-frequency counts or regular expressions. The arrival of LLMs in recent years made this easy: I just feed the job posting to an AI (Gemma 4 12B for this analysis) and let it tell me the salary range for that posting (the same goes for other information that's hard to extract programmatically).

So, together with Claude, I wrote a script to download all the job postings on HN from the past 10+ years and feed them one by one to Gemma 4. After 3.02 days, we got the chart below:

Over 10 years, the average salary on HN went from around 120K to about 180K — roughly a 30% increase.

Some other interesting findings

• A sluggish overall job market? Whether or not it's due to the impact of AI, the number of job postings has lingered at low levels in recent years.

• The share of AI-related jobs keeps growing, in stark contrast to the decline of Java. If you're just getting started with a programming language, think twice before picking Java 😅

One more thing

I also built a website: hacker-job.com, where you can explore all the charts above yourself. For instance, are more and more companies supporting "remote"? (In fact, the data shows the share of remote-friendly jobs has been declining recently.)

This website will also keep adding new "hacker jobs," so if you're job hunting, take a look there too.