58 ms·

We're so lucky to be in an industry where our biggest problem is too many people trying to hire us. Thank god I'm not an auto worker.

by mikekij 13y ago

noelwelsh 13y ago
Exactly. The good times are not going to last forever. Then we'll see how happy the recruiters are to talk to you if you've been an arrogant arse in the past.
- jzawodn 13y ago
  I think the maddening part is that most of the recruiters really aren't... oh, what's the word? Right "trying" very hard. They're doing the least possible amount of work and thinking we won't notice or care. And that's just insulting.
- gpsarakis 13y ago
  (good) Software Engineer demand isn't likely to drop in the future I assume. Except if Skynet takes over and writes code by itself.
  - Kudos 13y ago
    There are two sides to supply and demand.
- eshvk 13y ago
  > Then we'll see how happy the recruiters are to talk to you if you've been an arrogant arse in the past. Really? We are arrogant because the following behaviours appear to imply arrogance on the part of the recruiter: 1. A recruiter constantly spams our inboxes with job descriptions that are either wildly different from our skillsets. (I get job descriptions that talk about 10 years of experience). It is not that fucking hard to read my Linkedin profile before you spam me. 2. Ask me technical questions which the person asking me has no qualification to answer. This is the one that pisses me off. It started off when I was just starting out with questions like what is Polymorphism where an answer which didn't sentence match the company answer confused them. Recently, one asked me to describe statistical graphic modes (when they should have meant statistical graphical models). The person had no idea what any of these things meant. 3. Try to play a pressure game. When I politely declined to do further interviews at one company because I had accepted another offer, the head recruiter literally harassed me, telling me I was making a bad decision, resorting to outright lying about the work I would be doing. (I knew enough about what the role would involve from talking to their engineers) and calling me twenty times or so that week. No, this is a group of people who don't know how to do interviewing, working for broken companies. Now, not all recruiters are like that. One time, I was recruited by a company where the "technical recruiter" had a degree in Computer Science. That was a joyful experience. I felt like what I was saying was understood and they weren't looking for whether there was intonation match going on here.
aliston 13y ago
13 years ago the Nasdaq closed above 5000. Two years later it was at 1100. I wasn't working as a software engineer then, but I remember it well enough to know that not only will it not be like this forever, but that it has been "like this" before. Hell, when I graduated college 5 years ago, we were talking about the precipitous drop in CS enrollments and the outsourcing of the entire software industry. Now, CS is the most popular major at my undergrad.
jakejake 13y ago
I'm always polite to recruiters and just say I'm not looking right now but please keep in touch. Occasionally someone will follow up with a meeting request and I just repeat the same thing. Usually though they just say thanks and I occasionally hear from them once in a while. Maybe it's different in Chicago, though, I don't have people calling me every day or being rude. I just feel like it doesn't hurt to keep a positive relationship with anybody who might one day find me a job when I really need it.
- jaggederest 13y ago
  I found it really amusing when I worked in the office at a tech company I would get recruiters calling me on my office phone to try to recruit me away from them. That's where I draw the line from 'polite refusal' to 'try to string them along to figure out where they got my info'
beachstartup 13y ago
i'm a startup co-founder. i quite like getting recruiter emails as it lets me know what the competition is doing (in my city, and dozens of other cities around the world), hiring-wise. i can even get one on the phone and find out exactly who is hiring for specific technologies (so conveniently listed in the email), by pretending to be interested in a job. if i'm in a chatty mood, i can even get insider information from these casual conversations like how fast these companies are growing and what technology they use behind the scenes. when companies hire recruiters, this information is leaked out. they know this; that's part of the dance to attract talent. this information then can be used in my own interviews with people i'm trying to hire. see how that works? it's almost as if we're competing in a market. let's call it.... the labor market. good recruiters are highly active in this back and forth, that's how they make their living. bad ones just send shitty emails and give out info without producing/capturing any value themselves. the thing most engineers don't understand is that in a business context, everything in your environment can be used to your advantage, if you just figure out how. even annoying emails. i'm not saying i've figured it all out, but this is definitely one obvious thing that everyone who runs a company or even a small team is aware of. and that's why most people don't run startups. they'd rather sit there and be annoyed at things and write passive aggressive emails to people who won't even read them. LOL you might as well write something similar up and send it to the guy who sends the penis pills or oxycontin emails also. make sure you make those nice check boxes too! he's going to give just about as much of a shit. furthermore, 80/20 rule applies and a simple set of procmail filters can get rid of the vast majority of recruiter emails. there's only a few dozen firms that do this sort of thing at any any appreciable scale. but really, you should be reading these emails too, if you give a shit about the industry you work in to me this just sounds like faux-annoyance / ego tripping on how in-demand our field currently is. it won't last forever. i know because i've lived through 2 downturns already.

We're so lucky to be in an industry where our biggest problem is too many people trying to hire us. Thank god I'm not an auto worker.

by mikekij 13y ago

We're so lucky to be in an industry where our biggest problem is too many people trying to hire us. Thank god I'm not an auto worker.

noelwelsh 13y ago

Exactly. The good times are not going to last forever. Then we'll see how happy the recruiters are to talk to you if you've been an arrogant arse in the past.

jzawodn 13y ago
I think the maddening part is that most of the recruiters really aren't... oh, what's the word? Right "trying" very hard. They're doing the least possible amount of work and thinking we won't notice or care. And that's just insulting.
gpsarakis 13y ago
(good) Software Engineer demand isn't likely to drop in the future I assume. Except if Skynet takes over and writes code by itself.
- Kudos 13y ago
  There are two sides to supply and demand.
eshvk 13y ago
> Then we'll see how happy the recruiters are to talk to you if you've been an arrogant arse in the past. Really? We are arrogant because the following behaviours appear to imply arrogance on the part of the recruiter: 1. A recruiter constantly spams our inboxes with job descriptions that are either wildly different from our skillsets. (I get job descriptions that talk about 10 years of experience). It is not that fucking hard to read my Linkedin profile before you spam me. 2. Ask me technical questions which the person asking me has no qualification to answer. This is the one that pisses me off. It started off when I was just starting out with questions like what is Polymorphism where an answer which didn't sentence match the company answer confused them. Recently, one asked me to describe statistical graphic modes (when they should have meant statistical graphical models). The person had no idea what any of these things meant. 3. Try to play a pressure game. When I politely declined to do further interviews at one company because I had accepted another offer, the head recruiter literally harassed me, telling me I was making a bad decision, resorting to outright lying about the work I would be doing. (I knew enough about what the role would involve from talking to their engineers) and calling me twenty times or so that week. No, this is a group of people who don't know how to do interviewing, working for broken companies. Now, not all recruiters are like that. One time, I was recruited by a company where the "technical recruiter" had a degree in Computer Science. That was a joyful experience. I felt like what I was saying was understood and they weren't looking for whether there was intonation match going on here.

aliston 13y ago

13 years ago the Nasdaq closed above 5000. Two years later it was at 1100. I wasn't working as a software engineer then, but I remember it well enough to know that not only will it not be like this forever, but that it has been "like this" before. Hell, when I graduated college 5 years ago, we were talking about the precipitous drop in CS enrollments and the outsourcing of the entire software industry. Now, CS is the most popular major at my undergrad.

jakejake 13y ago

I'm always polite to recruiters and just say I'm not looking right now but please keep in touch. Occasionally someone will follow up with a meeting request and I just repeat the same thing. Usually though they just say thanks and I occasionally hear from them once in a while. Maybe it's different in Chicago, though, I don't have people calling me every day or being rude. I just feel like it doesn't hurt to keep a positive relationship with anybody who might one day find me a job when I really need it.

jaggederest 13y ago
I found it really amusing when I worked in the office at a tech company I would get recruiters calling me on my office phone to try to recruit me away from them. That's where I draw the line from 'polite refusal' to 'try to string them along to figure out where they got my info'

beachstartup 13y ago

i'm a startup co-founder. i quite like getting recruiter emails as it lets me know what the competition is doing (in my city, and dozens of other cities around the world), hiring-wise. i can even get one on the phone and find out exactly who is hiring for specific technologies (so conveniently listed in the email), by pretending to be interested in a job. if i'm in a chatty mood, i can even get insider information from these casual conversations like how fast these companies are growing and what technology they use behind the scenes. when companies hire recruiters, this information is leaked out. they know this; that's part of the dance to attract talent. this information then can be used in my own interviews with people i'm trying to hire. see how that works? it's almost as if we're competing in a market. let's call it.... the labor market. good recruiters are highly active in this back and forth, that's how they make their living. bad ones just send shitty emails and give out info without producing/capturing any value themselves. the thing most engineers don't understand is that in a business context, everything in your environment can be used to your advantage, if you just figure out how. even annoying emails. i'm not saying i've figured it all out, but this is definitely one obvious thing that everyone who runs a company or even a small team is aware of. and that's why most people don't run startups. they'd rather sit there and be annoyed at things and write passive aggressive emails to people who won't even read them. LOL you might as well write something similar up and send it to the guy who sends the penis pills or oxycontin emails also. make sure you make those nice check boxes too! he's going to give just about as much of a shit. furthermore, 80/20 rule applies and a simple set of procmail filters can get rid of the vast majority of recruiter emails. there's only a few dozen firms that do this sort of thing at any any appreciable scale. but really, you should be reading these emails too, if you give a shit about the industry you work in to me this just sounds like faux-annoyance / ego tripping on how in-demand our field currently is. it won't last forever. i know because i've lived through 2 downturns already.