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Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them think

Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write. The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?

smcl 11y ago
I think the author being deliberately hyperbolic for humour's sake, playing up lots of British stereotypes etc for laughs or a bit of catharsis. It's a Friday afternoon "I've had a shit week" blog post and it wasn't to my tastes, but I wouldn't necessarily assume the author has some problems.
- deleted 11y ago
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- luch 11y ago
  Exactly. His post is rather long to be only an outburst of angriness. I think he is pretty pissed off by the recruitement process and decided to take it up a notch in order to make it grotesque.
joeyspn 11y ago
You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an incredible opportunity to move to London and the result was: - £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer - No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc) - No free food/snacks/bevare at the company - No perks (equipment, etc) When questioned about this, the recruiter said: hey! impossible to get this, this is were I make my money you know!. How is this a "fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions"?
- deleted 11y ago
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- Loque 11y ago
  This is why I dislike them - I get sent jobs from recruiters and it irks me to not know the cut they are taking (and I can only guess it is above their actual value). If they were completely open about it, maybe it would improve the state of the industry?
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  Recruiters sometimes lie or exaggerate. That's nothing new. Actually, they have to do it, to show their bosses that they're getting warm bodies into interviews. Did your co-worker actually take this job, without doing the due diligence of reading the contract and the offer letter?
- nordic_nomad 11y ago
  Holy god, that's a job in technology? Sounds like your typical retail wage slave situation here in the US. Even entry level tech jobs are in the $40-$50k range generally.
  - gambiting 11y ago
    Lol, I'm a C++ games programmer and make $30k/year. North East of England + games industry.
    - CyberDildonics 11y ago
      If you are able to produce anything or contribute at all you are getting rolled. Find a new job.
    - thisone 11y ago
      There is no reason you should be that badly paid up here. Look around for a new place.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
JPKab 11y ago
He's obviously very hyperbolic, but when you leave the sphere of elite IT (Google/Facebook) and head into the folks who are in other geographic locations (and not willing to move to tech hotspots) suddenly the skills in demand and the positions available become overwhelmingly large enterprise type IT jobs. The recruiters who are working for these companies are, to some extent, as the author describes. The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Never mind that the C-level management at large, established companies is, for the most part, hopelessly disconnected from what it takes to have an effective technology capability at a company. If you don't agree with me on this, then ask yourself why SAP and Oracle continue to make so much money selling huge software implementations that are known to never work and always go over budget.
- SandB0x 11y ago
  > The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Absolutely true. Simplifying a little, there are companies here that everybody wants to leave and companies that everybody wants to join. It's difficult to leave the first category since the employee's skills have atrophied (see https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/ https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/).
  - finance-geek 11y ago
    This is absolutely on point. As I said in another comment, often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters. Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. So perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people. If the skill-set is worth more than 100/hr, then the company cant recruit the right talent, and complains of "shortages" whereas in reality, the "shortage" is because too many third parties have their hand in the cookie-jar leaving too little to pay the actual market wage.
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deleted 11y ago
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xixixao 11y ago
Since it wasn't stressed yet to you: The article talks about recruiters from outside of tech companies, not recruiters at FB or Google. I have to say I'm doubtful you "know" hundreds of recruiters (inside or outside the companies), unless you mean you got an email from hundreds of recruiters. If you just reject the emails, you probably won't get the experience described in the article.
m_fayer 11y ago
I've been fine with recruiters until i came to berlin and somehow let my phone number slip to the uk recruiters. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to block all uk numbers, nothing I can say will make them stop cold calling me, and they're so aggressive it's hard to escape a call without being rude. I really don't get why uk recruiters in particular are so awful, the German ones are fine.
davidiach 11y ago
My theory is probably wrong, but it is possible that this article is a way for the author to signal his skills/worth/value. Someone with low skills and who's desperate to find a job is highly unlikely to publicly complain about the amount of attention he gets from recruiters, so by actually doing it, he signals that he has high value. But I do believe the more likely explanation remains that this guy got angry after getting harassed repeatedly by recruiters and decided to do something about it.
fredkbloggs 11y ago
He's not commenting on the in-house recruiting staffs at the major corporations, he's commenting on the third-party (usually contract) recruitment industry. They're not the same; the lack of knowledge and perverse incentives are much less an issue with direct recruitment. It's my experience that the third-party recruiting business is almost as terrible in the US as the author describes in the UK, though sans the oddball Brit dialect. There also doesn't seem to be as much of the third-party contract scam going; if the recruiter is a contracting agency, they'll tell you that up front. But the incoherent and misspelled emails, the rampant spam, the lack of knowledge of the roles they're recruiting for, yes that all rings true in the US too.
pjc50 11y ago
"Recruiter" in UK context means an independent agency, not the actual hiring staff at companies who nearly always handle themselves professionally.
rnovak 11y ago
> I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. Congrats. That must be how the entire industry works then </sarcasm> > a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions Yeah, bull-shit, if you think every engineering job is in a comfy office with great pay and great working conditions, you are seriously delusional. I've worked at places where this wasn't the case. If everything was all sunshine and rainbows all the time, companies wouldn't have bad reputations, or have a hard time hiring new people. But plenty do have a bad reputation, and plenty do scare off new recruits. That's kind of the entire point of sites like GlassDoor. > The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...? First off, it's his opinion, and his blog, totally his right to have unsupported claims. But considering how many comments actually support his claims, it's my belief you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry.
- ryguytilidie 11y ago
  I'm impressed at your infinite snark and sarcasm to actual arguments ratio. When you START your post with a combination of intentionally misunderstanding my point with the sarcasm tag than it is literally impossible to take you seriously. To end the post with saying "you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry." is just like, jesus man, are you going for some sort of insufferability award? Go outside. Perhaps there is something more rewarding there than grasping at straws to get mad at a stranger on the internet...
  - deleted 11y ago
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s73v3r 11y ago
"To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write." It was at this point that you lost me. You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job.
- ryguytilidie 11y ago
  "You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job." I'm getting a lot of REALLY bizarre straw men responses to my posts but this one has to take the cake. You managed to turn me saying that people should stop bitching about IT recruiters calling them for offices jobs that pay well and have great conditions ito a conclusion that I have CLEARLY never had a crappy job? I...what? How? How does a human brain take my input and produce your output? I'm blown away. I'll give you a hint. No recruiter called me for my crappy jobs. I went and applied for them. Sorry this doesn't fit into your projection that you were clearly qualified to make from that single thing I said.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Once again, you've clearly never experienced a recruiter trying to get you for a crappy job. Consider yourself lucky. And since you haven't, you really need to stop telling other people what they can and cannot complain about. Seriously, at what salary level are people not allowed to complain about work conditions any more? What exactly are the conditions that an office has to have before one can no longer complain? Free soda? A snack machine?
finance-geek 11y ago
Firstly, Google tells me outright they do not source from outside recruiters, which the OP is speaking about. Perhaps it is different at executive levels or outside the US. Secondly, Google is a world-class, forward-thinking company so they are probably not representative of the rest of the millions of companies out there. That is like saying..."of course 100% of companies provide free lunch, after all hundreds of departments at Google provide free lunch." It is just silly. Finally, the OP is not upset about ending up with "a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office." How many engineers even have offices these days? Which company do you even work for? The OP is upset about rent-seeking behavior of outside recruiters. Often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters. Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. OK, perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people.

smcl 11y ago

I think the author being deliberately hyperbolic for humour's sake, playing up lots of British stereotypes etc for laughs or a bit of catharsis. It's a Friday afternoon "I've had a shit week" blog post and it wasn't to my tastes, but I wouldn't necessarily assume the author has some problems.

deleted 11y ago
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luch 11y ago
Exactly. His post is rather long to be only an outburst of angriness. I think he is pretty pissed off by the recruitement process and decided to take it up a notch in order to make it grotesque.

joeyspn 11y ago

You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an incredible opportunity to move to London and the result was: - £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer - No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc) - No free food/snacks/bevare at the company - No perks (equipment, etc) When questioned about this, the recruiter said: hey! impossible to get this, this is were I make my money you know!. How is this a "fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions"?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Loque 11y ago
This is why I dislike them - I get sent jobs from recruiters and it irks me to not know the cut they are taking (and I can only guess it is above their actual value). If they were completely open about it, maybe it would improve the state of the industry?
blisterpeanuts 11y ago
Recruiters sometimes lie or exaggerate. That's nothing new. Actually, they have to do it, to show their bosses that they're getting warm bodies into interviews. Did your co-worker actually take this job, without doing the due diligence of reading the contract and the offer letter?
nordic_nomad 11y ago
Holy god, that's a job in technology? Sounds like your typical retail wage slave situation here in the US. Even entry level tech jobs are in the $40-$50k range generally.
- gambiting 11y ago
  Lol, I'm a C++ games programmer and make $30k/year. North East of England + games industry.
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    If you are able to produce anything or contribute at all you are getting rolled. Find a new job.
  - thisone 11y ago
    There is no reason you should be that badly paid up here. Look around for a new place.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago

JPKab 11y ago

He's obviously very hyperbolic, but when you leave the sphere of elite IT (Google/Facebook) and head into the folks who are in other geographic locations (and not willing to move to tech hotspots) suddenly the skills in demand and the positions available become overwhelmingly large enterprise type IT jobs. The recruiters who are working for these companies are, to some extent, as the author describes. The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Never mind that the C-level management at large, established companies is, for the most part, hopelessly disconnected from what it takes to have an effective technology capability at a company. If you don't agree with me on this, then ask yourself why SAP and Oracle continue to make so much money selling huge software implementations that are known to never work and always go over budget.

SandB0x 11y ago
> The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Absolutely true. Simplifying a little, there are companies here that everybody wants to leave and companies that everybody wants to join. It's difficult to leave the first category since the employee's skills have atrophied (see https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/ https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/).
- finance-geek 11y ago
  This is absolutely on point. As I said in another comment, often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters. Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. So perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people. If the skill-set is worth more than 100/hr, then the company cant recruit the right talent, and complains of "shortages" whereas in reality, the "shortage" is because too many third parties have their hand in the cookie-jar leaving too little to pay the actual market wage.

deleted 11y ago

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deleted 11y ago

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xixixao 11y ago

Since it wasn't stressed yet to you: The article talks about recruiters from outside of tech companies, not recruiters at FB or Google. I have to say I'm doubtful you "know" hundreds of recruiters (inside or outside the companies), unless you mean you got an email from hundreds of recruiters. If you just reject the emails, you probably won't get the experience described in the article.

m_fayer 11y ago

I've been fine with recruiters until i came to berlin and somehow let my phone number slip to the uk recruiters. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to block all uk numbers, nothing I can say will make them stop cold calling me, and they're so aggressive it's hard to escape a call without being rude. I really don't get why uk recruiters in particular are so awful, the German ones are fine.

davidiach 11y ago

My theory is probably wrong, but it is possible that this article is a way for the author to signal his skills/worth/value. Someone with low skills and who's desperate to find a job is highly unlikely to publicly complain about the amount of attention he gets from recruiters, so by actually doing it, he signals that he has high value. But I do believe the more likely explanation remains that this guy got angry after getting harassed repeatedly by recruiters and decided to do something about it.

fredkbloggs 11y ago

He's not commenting on the in-house recruiting staffs at the major corporations, he's commenting on the third-party (usually contract) recruitment industry. They're not the same; the lack of knowledge and perverse incentives are much less an issue with direct recruitment. It's my experience that the third-party recruiting business is almost as terrible in the US as the author describes in the UK, though sans the oddball Brit dialect. There also doesn't seem to be as much of the third-party contract scam going; if the recruiter is a contracting agency, they'll tell you that up front. But the incoherent and misspelled emails, the rampant spam, the lack of knowledge of the roles they're recruiting for, yes that all rings true in the US too.

pjc50 11y ago

"Recruiter" in UK context means an independent agency, not the actual hiring staff at companies who nearly always handle themselves professionally.

rnovak 11y ago

> I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. Congrats. That must be how the entire industry works then </sarcasm> > a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions Yeah, bull-shit, if you think every engineering job is in a comfy office with great pay and great working conditions, you are seriously delusional. I've worked at places where this wasn't the case. If everything was all sunshine and rainbows all the time, companies wouldn't have bad reputations, or have a hard time hiring new people. But plenty do have a bad reputation, and plenty do scare off new recruits. That's kind of the entire point of sites like GlassDoor. > The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...? First off, it's his opinion, and his blog, totally his right to have unsupported claims. But considering how many comments actually support his claims, it's my belief you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry.

ryguytilidie 11y ago
I'm impressed at your infinite snark and sarcasm to actual arguments ratio. When you START your post with a combination of intentionally misunderstanding my point with the sarcasm tag than it is literally impossible to take you seriously. To end the post with saying "you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry." is just like, jesus man, are you going for some sort of insufferability award? Go outside. Perhaps there is something more rewarding there than grasping at straws to get mad at a stranger on the internet...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

s73v3r 11y ago

"To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write." It was at this point that you lost me. You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job.

ryguytilidie 11y ago
"You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job." I'm getting a lot of REALLY bizarre straw men responses to my posts but this one has to take the cake. You managed to turn me saying that people should stop bitching about IT recruiters calling them for offices jobs that pay well and have great conditions ito a conclusion that I have CLEARLY never had a crappy job? I...what? How? How does a human brain take my input and produce your output? I'm blown away. I'll give you a hint. No recruiter called me for my crappy jobs. I went and applied for them. Sorry this doesn't fit into your projection that you were clearly qualified to make from that single thing I said.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Once again, you've clearly never experienced a recruiter trying to get you for a crappy job. Consider yourself lucky. And since you haven't, you really need to stop telling other people what they can and cannot complain about. Seriously, at what salary level are people not allowed to complain about work conditions any more? What exactly are the conditions that an office has to have before one can no longer complain? Free soda? A snack machine?

finance-geek 11y ago

Firstly, Google tells me outright they do not source from outside recruiters, which the OP is speaking about. Perhaps it is different at executive levels or outside the US. Secondly, Google is a world-class, forward-thinking company so they are probably not representative of the rest of the millions of companies out there. That is like saying..."of course 100% of companies provide free lunch, after all hundreds of departments at Google provide free lunch." It is just silly. Finally, the OP is not upset about ending up with "a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office." How many engineers even have offices these days? Which company do you even work for? The OP is upset about rent-seeking behavior of outside recruiters. Often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters. Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. OK, perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people.