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Comment by kzisme | Hacker News Reader

When I hear these sorts of comments I'm always curious how long these people have been working. It obviously isn't everyone receiving cold calls and such, so what sets them apart?

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A LOT of open source development would be a big one for me. My name is all over the internets as a result (google: Jeff Schroeder Linux -"Smashing Pumpkins").

My first OSS contribution, before I could code, was a Bluecurve icon set for Rhythmbox that was merged into an ancient version of Rhythmbox on an ancient version of Fedora Core Linux on Jun 13, 2005. Your name stays in open source things virtually forever, and if you make it easy to find your email, recruiters hound you non-stop:

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/rhythmbox.git/tree/r...

Also, hiring managers, or decision makers (I could count myself as someone in this category) often do give a crap about OSS work. Give it a shot! Find a project doing something you enjoy and contribute to it. It doesn't have to just be code, documentation and graphics are also important (amongst other things).

Based on my own experience, the large majority of students looking for industry jobs (including myself) will apply to many jobs without even hearing back. To read about people complaining about being recruited is the complete opposite of our problem.

It might happen as soon as you land a job in the industry. You're a much easier sell for a recruiter if somebody else has already interviewed and hired you; it's less risky.

I've been at my job for about a year post university. Semi-actively applying and not a single reply back. I don't know if its my resume, me only having a single year of experience, or something else.

Make sure you have your full profile filled on LinkedIn, as recruiters pay to access their database.

I see, thank you. I guess I should dust it off and update it. It's been a while..

Even as a software engineer, I love hearing from recruiters. Sometimes I get a call a day. Great.

The more opportunities = the more likelihood for a great opportunity. I'm always polite, tell them I'm not looking now, send me the job description and I'll forward it to my friends who are, reply to their email and tell them it's my preferred method of communicating.

Lets me build up a nice fat folder in Inbox of "jobs", filled daily by recruiters. I can skim it, see none of the companies I'm interested in, and click "done" on the whole folder. Takes a couple seconds, no skin off my bones, and the last time I was job hunting it meant my search took about a month to find something that really is a perfect fit.

So, why not spend a couple minutes a day dealing with recruiters?

This is my attitude as well. There is no down side to politely replying to recruiters, even if the role they have for you is not interesting. The best that can happen is that slim chance you'll find your dream job. The worst? I dunno--the recruiter doesn't get back to you?

Yeah that sounds like a great way of dealing with it.

For me it was just location. When I was in Atlanta for grad school my LI profile was quiet. As soon as I moved to the Bay Area for work it exploded. And I don't mean after having gained a year or two of work experience; I mean within a month of changing my location on LI.

I sort-of figured it was going to be related to location, but I've been working for almost a year and a half full time. (Midwest)

I have a CS degree, but only spent a year in a technical/developer position. Since then (a decade), my job role, responsibilities, and titles have all been around strategy and operations. I get regular recruiter emails telling me about "awesome" developer jobs for which I'm a perfect fit.

I've been working for 16 years in the IT sector in software dev (senior/architecture/devops cack) and then 3 years engineering before that.

You don't get cold calls. You plonk your CV somewhere, take a position and then have to change your phone number because they won't go away even if you have taken a position :)

By ~somewhere~ you mean like LinkedIn?

Standard job board type sites. I don't use LinkedIn.

I have a CS degree and just short of 5 years worth of buzzwords in my resume(React, Rails, JavaScript and alike) I don't get cold calls(ok, I've gotten it maybe once or twice), but I get spammed on email and Linkedin because of people crawling for keywords on these sites, they barely ever read your resume.

I'm assuming he's talking about people who are not developers / technical.

I have been working for almost 15 years as an electrical, systems, and software engineer. Except for the initial flurry in the 2-3 days after I post my resume on a job board, I get maybe one hit a week. Throw out the shitty, clueless recruiters and it's more like one every month or two. Throw out Amazon, and I consider three a year to be good. That's what I get for spending almost all of it indirectly working for the government.

Of course, I am not now not will I ever be in web development.

I've been running digital marketing and doing front end work for about 6 years - I get contacted pretty consistently. If you put your location on Linkedin as NY or SF and you have any kind of technical skill-set, particularly with startup experience, recruiters will contact you.

I've got close to 20 years under my belt and am in Silicon Valley, and I'd love to hear from recruiters more often. I am curious to know what magic sauce you "captains of industry" have causing you to get so many calls from recruiters that you find it annoying.

Try hitting 50.

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