Here's a fun little secret about the job market: a huge number of employers never post their openings on major job boards like Indeed. They quietly list them on their own company websites, where they sit unseen by the vast majority of job seekers scrolling through the same recycled Indeed and LinkedIn results.

One developer decided to do something about it — and the result is genuinely impressive. A new tool called Hiring Cafe aggregates job listings pulled directly from hundreds of employer websites hiring in San Francisco. As of this week, it's surfacing nearly 22,000 jobs in the city alone.

That's not a typo.

The tool lets you filter by salary, keywords, schedule type, and distance. You can stack multiple locations. And here's the feature that should make every frustrated job hunter want to weep with joy: ghost jobs and fake listings are automatically blacklisted. If you've spent any time applying to positions that seem to exist only to harvest your data or pad a recruiter's pipeline, you know what a plague this has become. There's even a "degen mode" you can toggle to see exactly the kind of garbage postings being filtered out — staffing agencies, consulting shops, fraudulent listings, the works.

This is what happens when an individual with actual skills gets frustrated with a broken system and just... builds a better one. No government grant. No committee. No three-year feasibility study. Just someone identifying a market failure and shipping a solution.

Contrast this with the city's own workforce development efforts, which burn through tens of millions annually with outcomes that are, shall we say, difficult to quantify. Meanwhile, one person with a plugin and a spreadsheet is doing more to connect San Franciscans with real employment than an entire bureaucratic apparatus.

If you're job hunting — or know someone who is — bookmark this thing. Use the salary filter so you're not wasting time on listings that conveniently forget to mention they're paying $18 an hour for a role requiring five years of experience. And if you have feedback, the creator is actively developing the tool and asking for suggestions.

The free market remains undefeated.