I recently posted this on my blog about why it's so hard to get an experience software engineer to respond to a recruiter: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/w

I recently posted this on my blog about why it's so hard to get an experience software engineer to respond to a recruiter: https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/why_software_engineers_dont_respond_to_recruiters https://andrewrondeau.herokuapp.com/why_software_engineers_d... But there are a few things that I didn't put in that article: In my case, with 20 years experience, it's critical that I am not hired as a possession, or a trophy member of a team. It always works out poorly when someone pulls me onto a team because of my pedigree but tries to manage me like a junior developer, or someone who needs a lot of hand holding. What's critical is that I will have a high degree of control in my job. This ranges from control of my day-to-day workflow, control of my development environment, and control of the architecture of the thing I am working on. I also seek to have some amount of control over the work of more junior developers. Without that kind of control coming in the door, I really won't bother applying, because every time I've started a new job with an existing team, I've always had to fight to clean up messes. These messes will usually make a project fail, yet for various reasons management needs a lot of convincing to fix the messes.