Glossary

Definitions for every recurring term on HiringTrends.

Last reviewed

  • As-of date

    The timestamp on rendered data. Live entity pages show the last rollup refresh; snapshots show the month-end date. Visible on every page per strategy Rule §3.

  • Base salary

    The fixed cash component of compensation, before bonus or equity. The number companies disclose most often in job postings.

  • Co-occurrence

    A pair of stacks that appear together in the same job posting. Co-occurrence frequency drives our "What pairs well with X?" recommendations.

  • Crawl

    The nightly pipeline that ingests fresh job postings from company career pages. Failures and retries are tracked in the ingest history; the daily-ops dashboard surfaces stale boards.

  • Demand share

    The fraction of all tech postings in a given week that mention a given stack. A demand-share trend tracks how engineering hiring is shifting between technologies.

  • Density guard

    A minimum-data threshold (typically 5 postings) below which an index page returns 404. Prevents thin pages from being indexed, per strategy Rule §7.

  • Experience level

    A coarse seniority bucket: junior, mid, senior, staff, principal. Inferred from the role title and stated years of experience. Distinct from the role itself.

  • Fully remote

    A role with no expected office time at any location. Distinct from "remote-friendly" (some onsite expected) and "hybrid" (mixed schedule).

  • Hybrid

    A role with mixed remote and onsite expectations — often 2–3 days/week in office. Specific cadence varies by company.

  • Median

    The middle value of a sorted dataset — equivalent to p50. Less sensitive to outliers than the mean.

  • OTE (On-Target Earnings)

    Base salary plus full commission/bonus at 100% quota. Most common in sales and BD roles. Distinct from TC because OTE excludes equity.

  • p25 (25th percentile)

    The value below which 25% of observations fall. In compensation, the p25 salary marks the lower quartile — three out of four offers exceed it.

  • p50 (median)

    The midpoint of a distribution — half of observations sit above it, half below. The most common single-number summary of salary.

  • p75 (75th percentile)

    The value below which 75% of observations fall. Common upper-bound for posted salary ranges.

  • p90 (90th percentile)

    The value below which 90% of observations fall. Outlier-resistant marker for the upper end of salary ranges.

  • Paywall

    A page section visible to Pro subscribers only. We declare paywalled subtrees in JSON-LD with isAccessibleForFree=false (Phase 0.4.5) so Google can sample the free content without flagging cloaking.

  • Percentile

    A value below which a given percentage of observations in a sample fall. We compute percentiles via PERCENTILE_CONT WITHIN GROUP — a continuous interpolation that handles small samples without rounding to a single observed value.

  • Posting

    A single job row in the source applicant-tracking system. We count one posting per unique (company, title, location) combination per crawl window.

  • Remote-friendly

    A role where remote work is permitted but some onsite presence (e.g., quarterly summits) is expected.

  • Role

    A curated job-family slug (Frontend Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Staff Backend Engineer, etc.). Roles span multiple stacks and companies; we maintain a finite, hand-curated taxonomy.

  • Role profile

    An internal record (one row in the role_profile table) that anchors a curated role slug. Each role profile gets weekly rollups in role_hiring_weekly.

  • Role-in-city

    A scoped view of a role at a specific city (or remote tier). Salary by role-in-city is the most accurate benchmark because comp varies sharply by metro.

  • Rollup

    A pre-computed weekly aggregation table — role_hiring_weekly, company_hiring_weekly, skill_weekly. The rollups power the entity pages and snapshots; live SQL only happens for the most recent week.

  • RSU (Restricted Stock Units)

    Company shares granted on a vesting schedule (typically 4 years). RSU value at hire is calculated from the grant-date share price; it can move significantly before vesting.

  • Salary band

    The disclosed range on a job posting, typically expressed as min–max. Half of US postings now disclose a band by law; we compute percentiles only over rows with a disclosed band.

  • Sitemap verifier

    A per-route module that enumerates candidate URLs, attaches a real lastModified timestamp, and confirms each candidate resolves. Verifiers prevent the sitemap from claiming dead URLs.

  • Snapshot

    An immutable view of an entity (stack, role, or company) for a closed calendar month. Snapshots are append-only — past months never change once published.

  • Stack

    A specific tool, framework, or technology mentioned in a job posting (e.g., React, Rust, Postgres). Distinct from a "role" — a single role typically uses 3–6 stacks.

  • TC (Total Compensation)

    Total annual compensation — base salary plus expected bonus plus equity vesting. Most companies disclose only the base in postings; TC is what engineers compare across offers.

  • WoW delta

    Week-over-week change. A WoW delta of +0.5pp on demand share means a stack picked up half a percentage point of postings between consecutive weeks.