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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

There’s a lot of people in here complaining about various things recruiters do. Let me give a different perspective. For the first couple of years of my career, recruiters just ignored me. It was like I simply didn’t exist. I hadn’t studied computer science and didn’t work at a well known company. Meanwhile, my coworkers with CS degrees constantly complained about having to bat away recruiters offering them crazy money.

It’s different now. I worked at a well known company for a few years and get plenty of recruiter emails. Many of them are for positions I’m not interested in. Many of them use tactics I’d prefer they didn’t. But I don’t complain because the only thing worse than receiving these emails is not receiving them.

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This reminds me of how excited I used to be to get spam emails. I'm a lot happier to get recruiter spam than I was before getting them. It is awfully tempting to be a dick and treat them poorly, but I rather entertain the calls. Most are very polite too and I'm happy to tell them my current salary and what I don't like about my current job; usually they offer some other career advice from their perspective like what other companies are offering.

A lot of what I hear about recruiters on the internet is foreign to me. I’ve never once in my life had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me. Most recruiters I’ve had reach out to me either clearly never looked at my resume, can’t figure out what they’re hiring for, or can barely speak English. Most of them hire for underpaid enterprise or body shop roles. Meanwhile I hear people talk about how Facebook or Amazon recruiters are contacting them all the time despite having little experience and no previous FAANGs on their resume.

The FAANG strategy these days is to outsource all the top-of-the-pipeline generation and build a huge pool of possible talent at that stage. Then they weed most of them out through hackerrank type stuff. I think that explains why you see that.

Stupid question, but how are they finding you now? LinkedIn?

Not stupid at all. I had a bare bones LinkedIn profile before and the same profile now. Only difference is a mention of a well known company.

I completely agree. If getting emails from a recruiter is your biggest problem then you’re doing just fine.

I strongly disagree. If I want to move on from my current role then I'll reach out to recruiters. They don't need to come to me first.

So you're saying the things they do that annoy you are: ignoring you until after you got a good job because you didn't have a CS degree, using devious tactics, and spamming you. And having so much power to affect your career that you don't even like to admit when they annoy you.

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