Takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech
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This has been my experience as well, and while I understand the desire for introductory "sales mode" type calls, I think it's progressed past that point to something nearly pathological.
As an example, I recently had a recruiter that I was previously in contact with over email cold-call me while I was skiing, trying to schedule a meeting with a hiring manager (I picked up the call because I thought it might be one of the people in my group that I didn't have in my contacts). When I requested she please send me an email to schedule the meeting, as I was out of the office, I got an email where she sent an email to schedule the phone call, to then schedule the meeting over the phone. It was 100% the least efficient way to do this, and only happened because of this illogically strong preference for phone calls that recruiters seem to have...
Is this something unique to the personalities of people that thrive at sales jobs? I've encountered this sort of behavior with real estate agents, car salesmen*, and of course, third party headhunter/recruiters. They love phone calls, will try to get you on the phone no matter what, and actively try to avoid e-mails/text/etc.
* although, I recently purchased a car a few weeks ago, and nearly all my communication with the salesman was done via e-mail and text. Very pleasant experience, but I wonder if this is the new norm, or if he was a unique exception.
Secondly: Yes, people who like talking with people tend to go into careers that primarily involve talking to people.
The mental switch is one part of the issue, and time fragmentation is the other.
The idea of sitting down and making dozens of cold calls, outbound, would be my own idea of a personal hell. There is not enough money in the world to get me to do that.
It definitely takes a certain personality type.
Would you buy a car with no return policy without speaking to someone or examining it in person? How about spend $200K on a software bundle? Face to face meetings matter for large size deals, and recruiting a candidate is a huge one.
But a lot of recruiters insist on nearly every single communication be over the phone when an e-mail or text exchange would suffice. In fact they'll leave a text or e-mail with no content other than "yeah, so when can we talk on the phone?"
I have “fired” pushy recruiters even at the offer stage by walking away. Trying to sell me a job like a used car salesman at a scummy lot when you’ve made me a large offer is a really strange decision.
I also regret not walking away from some recruitment funnels where bad recruitment vibes were indeed strong signals for bad workplace situations.
A short screen call is pretty standard. Many "candidates" aren't serious, so they show good faith by hopping on the phone. Text only communication is the path to getting ghosted, especially when it comes to emotional topics like salary.
For everyone complaining here about getting phone calls, there is another half who'd jibe "Damn, another templatized email. Why should I be interested if you haven't put any time of yours into communicating with me??"
TL;DR: programers are hard to please. No good deed goes unpunished.
I'm very protective of my time in general because I tend to be involved in many things: sometimes technical, bureaucratic, sometimes internal-political, and so many more. Each category requires a different part of my attention/focus which I'm not always readily able to shift to, or more importantly, would rather not shift to as I'm more preoccupied with a different category.
Most importantly, the majority of the time all these calls have one common denominator; the requestor wants/needs something from me, not the other way around. Wanting/needing my help or input isn't something wrong in and of itself, but if it's not reciprocal and especially if it's not something I'm obligated to do, I absolutely tend to be pretty defensive of my time.
It's perfectly common in modern business to exploit people's tendency towards good faith interpretations and our aversion to conflict, and disengaging from situations/requests that aren't one's responsibility is something many people have difficulty with. (Just think in your work place if you know someone who just has a hard time saying "no" and over-commits themselves constantly) And it's a skill to identify these situations and gracefully disengage depending on the person who is creating the situation in the first place.
When there are complaints about a template email, the opposite of that isn't a phone call, it's taking the time to state a point clearly and directly and showing that it has specific relevance to you and justifying your time/attention. A conversation can be just as "template" as any email, even more so sometimes when you are listening to someone who speaks only in aphorisms but cannot go deeper than that. ("You have a chance to get in on the ground floor of something truly revolutionary!", "It's a high-paced high-reward environment that a 10x-er like you can thrive in, and the growth opportunities are limitless!", or even we can think of the hey-day of descriptions along the lines of "the Uber of _____") If the conversation lacks substance or purpose to someone specific and relies on general advertisement like attention grabs to keep you going, it doesn't matter what the medium is, the conversation simply offers next to no value.
A phone call doesn't mean personal by any means, it just means a slightly higher amount of attention and a situation that is sometimes difficult for people to exit. It has it's time and place, but far too many people exploit the good nature of others to peddle some agenda that serves only themselves. Absolutely, we should be more protective of our time/attention, and we should be more respectful of other people's time/attention
...
> but if it's not reciprocal and especially if it's not something I'm obligated to do, I absolutely tend to be pretty defensive of my time.
You have every right to protect your time - I did not state otherwise. For abrupt interruptions on the phone, the simplest way that has worked for me is to not answer the call.
All I stated was that phone calls have their value, and the reason for using them is NOT exclusively to avoid leaving a paper trail. If one of the people on the call wants to leave a paper trail, it is easy to email "Hey, thanks for the call. Just so I totally understand, we agreed XYZ on the phone. Please confirm if that is your understanding too."
Also, if I understood correctly, the person I was replying to was not exclusively talking about phone calls for the first outreach. But your response suggests you are talking about interruptions on the phone.
This is a false dichotomy. A non-templated phone call can be replaced with a non-templated email. Incredibly easy to please.
Paper trails are very professional.
And if you're a recruiter and you can't listen to a request like that, how are you going to listen to the rest of what the candidate says?
It is not trivial either. Neither side wants to show their full availability immediately and you eventually have to block multiple timeslots till a response comes in. On a call you can give out preferred times at first and if they aren't a match look for alternatives. And you can confirm on both calendars at once without blocking other slots as well. But yes, shouldn't be hard to manage ...
I've only had that go more than a couple rounds when trying to setup meetings with someone incredibly busy (and those people often have assistants that I can work directly with to find a slot). I'm not opposed to getting on a phone call to setup a meeting, but only after the vastly more efficient method has failed twice.
that makes sense and I respect that. the problem is that it is a jerky thing for the recruiter to do. and as someone looking for a new job/gig one of my top filters is to avoid/eliminate jerks where I can.
it might feel paradoxical or counter-intuitive to the recruiter, but in trying to weed out jerks, they themselves can behave like a jerk. and thus we will weed you out. ;-)
but I didnt say or imply that
what I was saying is that if you as a recruiter demonstrate that you disrespect my time -- important upfront when one is bombarded with hundreds of recruiters a month/week -- then that is jerky behavior. one's "reasons" don't matter, they are indistinguishable from "excuses". only actions and impacts. upfront folks ought to use their time efficiently. treating every random recruiter ping to the red carpet is a recipe for much time wasting and frustration. its more polite to nail down and filter out any showstoppers as upfront as you can. email is much faster and easier at doing that, and less prone to being gamed/abused by the recruiter as a bonus.
once an initial fit is determined, then yes doing a brief call can be nice. but as a candidate, I dont honestly care if the recruiter himself/herself is sane or pleasant to talk to on the phone. I do care much more about the job details, and about whether the hiring company likes me or not, upfront. Anything that is an obstacle to that should be minimized or routed around.
but in a sea of alternative uses of my time the recruiter is competing for my time, the talent candidate's time, just as much as the reverse, and arguably more so
CAVEATS: decades of real world experience, not theory. I'm also talking more about third-party recruiters not in-house. and when I say "recruiter" I dont mean like the CEO of the hiring company, or a senior tech leader -- those folks tend to be MUCH better uses of call time, plus they inherently signal a hiring company is interested in you. and yes you DO want to get a sense for whether those folks are sane and not-jerks -- they are potential bosses afterall -- and calls help with that.
In-house recruiters are totally different. They represent the actual hiring company and aren't just submitting your resume to a job posting.
because when recruiters want to do that it feels like they're just fishing for how little they can pay you, or perhaps just collecting PII for <reasons>.
software companies are becoming much too coy about setting pay expectations upfront. its disrespectful of the talent's time. and feels like a growing fad of gaslighters. "Well they get away with it so we'll try as well..."
What do you define as and asshole, and do you run across many of them?
By that definition, I've worked with three clear matches and four pretty good runner-ups over the past 20 years. The absolute worst one was not a dev, but a PM.
For obvious reasons I'm not stating even the time frames when I crossed paths with such characters.
There's three reasons:
#1: The phone call allows them to get a read on your personality by listening to your tone of voice and your attentiveness.
#2: There's a whole body of research that says building rapport etc means the deal is more likely to get over the line, basic sales.
#3: Recruiters like to talk on the phone. The primary reason people get into recruiting is that talking on the phone all day sounds like a swell time to them.
In reality they are probably applying selection bias and only moving forward on the people sufficiently interested that they actually pick up the phone.
Not really. Just the mere act of talking to a human being is a more invested act than an email.
If it's done via email it's basically a silent auction.
So your first offer HAS to be good, because you don't know what the other bidders are bidding.
Seems like a weird rule, since the compensation is often subject to negotiation.
I usually don’t waste my time with recruiters who don’t answer the most basic questions via email.
That could be. If the candidate isn't willing to take the time for a phone call, can the recruiter be confident they willing to take the time for an interview?
I enjoy my job and salary...I don't have anything to lose by filtering out non-serious recruiters.
Why is asking basic questions over email considered "not serious", but doing the exact same thing over the phone is considered "serious".
The recruiter is just an asshole for wasting everyone's time by not just answering the basic questions in their email reply. They are already replying to the email, so they might as well answer the questions.
Desired inner monologue I think they hope to generate in us: "I've already spent 3 calls and a couple of hours talking to <recruiter>, so I might as well continue on with the process lest I end up wasting all that time."
disclosure: I'm a dev and not a recruiter, so take this with a grain of salt.
So I definitely think phones are used because it allows the rules to be bent in a multitude of ways with a lower risk of consequence.
Plus it’s easier to pressure people when you’re on the phone than it is when they’re emailing.
When you know the name and fact of the person you are working with, you're much more likely to have it stand out in your thoughts as something material.
Sometimes that might feel a bit odd with our view of efficiency and rightly so by some measures ... but it's a bit cynical to wrap everything up in a 'sales tactic'.
If recruiters didn't show value I don't think they would be used so they're not just 'selling' something, they are ostensibly 'providing' something.
It's been a while since I've worked on that front, but I do remember job hunting as a lot of 'empty time' I wonder if it's worth contemplating those direct connections as being material to the mechanics of the system overall.
In almost 100% of the cases, if a Recruiter is able to get someone a job, it's immensely beneficial to the new employee, far more so than for the recruiter.
Up-thread they said they explicitly asked for email instead after taking the cold-call. What's the good faith reason for insisting on a warm phone call when it's not wanted?
If not, then getting you on the phone is an absolute necessity along the path to you accepting an offer. It's also practical for covering items like salary expectations, how serious you are about job hunting, outlining the role, etc.
Nevertheless, every step prior to discussing salary and interview with the actual employer/team can be done over email. Recruiters are typically less informed on the tech side anyway so there's really little reason to phone call type interviews/discussions.
I think I did this in reverse with a recruiter when I turned down a job with JP Morgan. He didn't like my reason for turning the job down and kept trying to give me a proper answer and kept calling several times as well as others in the firm calling.
however, not an unknown tactic!
Example 1: they need to get a rough idea of whether you're a jerk, whether you can communicate in the required language, whether your resume is BS, etc. Remember, nobody's paying the recruiter to find you a job - somebody's paying them to find high-quality candidates. Their job is to sell you, so naturally they want to know what they're selling.
Example 2: simple context switching. If your job required you to be involved in dozens or hundreds of simultaneous ongoing negotiations, wouldn't you find it more efficient to block out 30-minute calls with each stakeholder, rather than jumping around between a hundred different email threads full of single-question emails?
One could probably come up with more straightforward reasons. As a general rule though, nobody is ever consciously trying to waste your time. They're trying not to waste their own.
There is also a legal concern - phone calls often times cannot be recorded so one can be more loose with their language.
Right now recruiting is Yet Another Dysfunctional Industry with non-optimal behavior that favors job creation and useless busy-work instead of finding optimal solutions.
But if you just pay an agent to run around selling you, there's no longer any value being added. Why would companies listen to a recruiter that just refers any old candidate that pays them?
1. They want you to feel a sense of trust to increase the probability of taking additional steps in the process.
2. They are mostly extroverts who want to hear someone talk about their career aspirations -- for the same emotional reasons that coaches want to see people learn.
though for 1) in a way, it IS about maximising efficiency. The recruiter wants to place candidates, and those with whom s/he has a strong human connection are more likely to convert into placements. Hence, efficiency is the ultimate driver for this behaviour
However a few have been outstanding. The common denominator I've seen with the best third party recruiters is that they tend to work for smaller boutique shops (or even completely on their own) and cultivate good relationships with hiring managers.
I don't pay attention to unsolicited phone calls, so recruiters might as well be yelling at an empty chair when they call. My email is spam filtered, automatically sorted and tagged, so unsolicited recruiting goes directly to the trash. I've had a few really positive interactions that started via SMS and led to an accepted call from a recruiter.
¹The salary question is illegal in some places and kinda shady in the others.
The recruiter might not be party to the final negotiation, but they’ll be a net positive at hiring meetings if you’ve got them in your corner.
Recruiters will want to talk on the phone at every stage, not necessarily for long periods of time, but certainly frequently. They are constantly gauging how you feel as a candidate, and getting the measure of how to close you once you get an offer.
Dance along to their tune and it will be one more reason you get top market price for your labor.
As a hiring manager, I can't recall ever being influenced by a third-party recruiter as they "love" all candidates at a rate equal to 30% of the candidates' first year comp.
As to scheduling meetings I just give them my Calendly link. They are loving it.
So, a couple sentences describing this is a very easy way for me to filter out recruiters like this, and jobs as well. Especially with working remotely.
https://twitter.com/JillWohlner/status/1418568163898368003
"I got my first 'im not looking right now, but please sign up to my mailing list to be notified when I am looking' from a candidate. The market is peak something!"
Would you not go to a party because your shower’s hot water temperature fluctuated and put you in a bad mood?
I don’t like wasting time, but I also feel like the biggest hurdle would be just finding people to trust me to help them find a job.
My favorite was when I was contacted by the CEO of a small company asking if I was interested, foisted off on a recruiter who didn’t have time to schedule a call for a week and a half, and then told the position was no longer open.
There is, however, one exception to this rule: if recruiting/hiring is outsourced, then one may not interfere too much about the company from recruiters' behavior (there are many corporation where the friendly HR lady next door was replaced by a mailing list in a low cost country).
I am not committed to their process, not to the process, you know?
But I suspect it's not recruiters who are the weirdos. It might be us!
Many normal people seem to prefer phone calls. Programmers seem to be in the minority of people who prefer written and asynchronous communication.
However if I were hiring for an engineering leader, I would probably pass him over. I don’t see anyone being an effective leader by only sticking around for less than 2 years. Having tenures less than 2 years especially at senior roles doesn’t give a lot of positive feelings of leadership in my opinion.
For a managerial or leadership position? I can't say, to be honest, but what you say makes sense. Then again, I'd say long tenures as a SWE ought to be considered a positive too (or at least not a negative), but it isn't, so...
Right now I'm just thankful where I am now. My compensation quadrupled coming from an investment bank. I actually suspect my compensation might actually be a bit lower than my peers at this company or those like it, relatively speaking, but at this point I don't care.
Combined with the fact that the work and project are super interesting, I could live with this compensation and title until I retire (in my late 30s now). I'm certainly in no hurry to put myself through leetcoding again, though to cover all my bases I probably ought to follow the principle of "a leetcode a day keeps unemployment at bay" sooner rather than later again.
But even if the delta remains, I'm just plain thankful*. The amount I'm earning now is jawdropping for my wife and I. When I was interviewing around, we were half-joking how awesome it would be if I could replicate those stories you see on Blind about people doubling their compensation. That it quadrupled instead is shocking.
* Probably not a popular thing to say in tech circles, but my wife and I are Christian, and suffice it to say we are mindblowingly thankful to God for this. I don't endorse prosperity gospel, but I'm now earning more than we know how to utilize. We've committed to using at least some of it for good causes - my first month's salary was given wholesale to a charity trying to rescue/resettle/support Afghan refugees.
But it has been corrupted. Demonstrating your thought processes, communication style, and problem solving approach is still a factor. But being able to quickly get the hyperoptimal solution in 20 minutes usually trumps everything else and often becomes the single make-or-break factor.
Apparently long tenures denote being an expert beginner, 1 year of experience repeated 5 times instead of 5 years of experience, complacency, laziness, things like that.
Again, I don't agree with this personally, but this seems to be the prevailing attitude. People like you and I being a minority.
There seem to be exceptions - the chief one being if you stuck around at a top company versus a mediocre one, that doesn't ding you much.
(This is obviously orthogonal to your point about perceptions and attitudes, but I felt compelled to chime in.)
Increasingly, talking to friends and colleagues who are also SWEs, the leetcode interview process is also seen as daunting and a huge barrier that can make someone think twice about switching jobs.
I'd say a FAANG (or similar tech company) engineer is more likely to move - and be capable of moving - than someone at a non tech company.
There's a lot of truth to this, but the result is that the inertia effect acts as a form of retention for FAANGs. This has only increased since they are losing their ability to maintain anti-poaching agreements.
Base pay isn't FAANG competitive. But I get a decent percentage of new projects (7%), not all are successful though of course. It might fall short even with that factored in, but I've made enough such that I could have retired in my mid 30's if I didn't have kids.
I like what I do, I like who I work with, I get to work from home, and we have had a variety of projects over the years so things stay fairly fresh.
I might be able to make more if I landed a job at a hot new startup or FAANG. But I might also hate working there. Doesn't seem worth the bother given I'm pretty happy here.
Not the person you asked the question, but yes.
The most successful startups to IPO in the last 20 years include B2B companies like Service Now, Datadog, Crowdstrike, Workday, Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler etc. Count some others like MongoDB, AppDynamics, New Relic, Rubrik, Nutanix etc. These companies don't trend on Twitter, or are included in FAANG, but have had long periods of growth.
Many employees in those companies have stayed at those firms and have grown in their careers.
(Disclosure: I worked at AppDynamics for ~10 years).
so you increase your engineers' salaries according to the market rate and they stay for longer than 2 years?
I think a lot of people would like to work under you too, consider leaving your recruitment email here, they will be glad to stay for more than 2 years
If you want a company where merit is rewarded but taking your time is accepted as long as you dont whine each time a brilliant innovator is promoted, finding people who stay longer will yield you either innovators able to move upward quickly enough or solid maintainers who are satisfied specialising.
Job 1 (Years 1-2): 100k/yr
Job 2 (Years 3-4): 200k/yr
Job 3 (Years 5-6): 400k/yr
Job 4 (Years 7-8): 800k/yr
Job 5 (Years 9-10): 1m/yr
Not sure any dev using this approach would need to work after year 10!
I quadrupled my compensation recently coming from a non-tech/tech-as-a-cost-center company to a FAANGMULA level company. However I don't foresee experiencing another huge jump like that ever again in my career.
If you're going from one FAANG to another FAANG, what are the odds you're going make six figure jump in compensation unless you're also moving up the ranks while doing so?
When I hire, I'd like to keep them for at least 2-4 years for the company's sanity.
If I move again, I plan to stay at least five years for the reasons in this thread.
But employers sometimes forget that even current employees are still operating in the jobs market.
I spent 18 months in my first post-PhD job and in that time I drove consolidation of all of the tests (code base has acquired 6 frameworks over 20 years) into a single framework and got people actually writing new tests. I fixed parallel building which brought down the clean build time from 3 hours to 15 minutes. I did the work for a feature which was used as the major marketing selling point in that year. I got a very decent pay rise and bonus because of these things before I left.
It’s not like we are all working in a legacy codebase that never changes. I just don’t get it.
Even consultants swap clients often enough to where as far as work an impact goes it’s not more than a year usually.
I would never consider someone staying at their current job for 5+ years a negative, unless it is accompanied by negative references from coworkers.
This is for the usual reason of not getting raises, so veterans tend to be very underpaid.
It’s not uncommon in my experience to hear engineers say they would view tenures of 2-3 years as a red flag for hiring other engineers, but the hiring managers who actually make the decision have always preferred short tenures of hopping around or staying at one place only if there’s a title change every ~2 years.
It is quite concerning to see so much knowledge about how things work walk out the door and it is miserable if something goes wrong and nobody left knows it existed. So I get why engineers view a year as hit and run.
But yes, companies seem to interpret staying a year or two as evidence of growth/a highly desirable candidate.
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpViLcTp64
Finally it was open sourced and is currently sold with the following warranty: “[…]driver alertness is necessary, but not sufficient, for openpilot to be used safely and openpilot is provided with no warranty of fitness for any purpose.”
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L3gNaAVjQ4&t=1903s | Ethereum startup story, George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets | Lex Fridman Podcast #132
2. https://twitter.com/jinglejamOP/status/1310718738417811459 | an EVM to OVM transpiler
He approached a couple members of my current team about the idea of open sourcing some infrastructure he worked on, and I think he was shocked to find that his efforts were not as appreciated as he thought. A bad copy of something better. He left shortly thereafter. I’m not sure if that was always his plan and he wanted to take some things with him, or if he was disheartened. But I know for sure that of he had left earlier he would have never heard that feedback and would have walked away feeling really good about his work.
For myself, I tend to want to know how we got here, wherever “here” is. I don’t need to have made a decision to learn from the consequences, but I do have to understand the decisions to some extent.
A lot of my old team at my previous company (tech-as-a-cost-center), including myself, left for Silicon Valley style tech companies or similar (tech-as-a-profit-center). All of us probably at least doubled our TC, some of us more (4x for me).
The majority of engineering organizations are quite terrible at recognizing and promoting engineering talent. They’re fine with letting even good engineers leave as the cost of doing business. Looking at just the tenure and making an assumption about the individual sounds ridiculously backward and that’s pretty poor engineering leadership imo.
At my previous job, I spent some of my evenings and weekends to build internal tools to help members of the organization be more efficient, saving certain people on the team dozens of hours of work per week. I largely did it because I wanted to learn libraries and tools we weren't using on a day-to-day basis.
Instead of allocating more time for me to work on these projects or to work on improving our developer workflow, my reward was being assigned some of the most mind-numbing projects imaginable, tasks that quite frankly an entry-level developer fresh out of a bootcamp could accomplish. That wouldn't bug me if inefficiencies in the workflow wasn't such a bottleneck to the entire team.
Disheartened, I (and many other senior devs) applied elsewhere. One of the strongest devs sent a scathing email to leadership before getting let go. I managed to land a position with a great company that lets me jam and nerd out on cutting edge technology.
Total guess.
Since when was this a thing? I guess I was under a rock when it came to this :)
For that matter, I think Lyft, Uber, & Airbnb are capable of paying more on average than Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon at least. Or at least that's the impression I get on Blind.
Seriously? This is absurd.
If he can describe how he was meeting his career goals while also staying in the same position for nine years, then there's no reason to avoid him.
But if he spent the last six years stagnating, it might be worth giving extra scrutiny to how up-to-date his skillset is.
I don’t care about personal development to the same degree as making money. That’s what the business is about after all.
What they'll do is see it as a red flag and dig into it and find out what the circumstances were. If they feel those circumstances are ok, then you're fine. If they feel they were not ok, then you'll get dinged.
Versus back when I started my career, it would have been a universally positive indicator, that would score you points over a "job hopper". Nowadays it seems the job hopper is in a better position.
Improve safety for the users. Preserve the sanity of the ops team. Start actually competing for our business instead of relying on relationships with politicians. That sort of thing.
Most often these hireworthy behaviors correlate with bringing value to the business, but sometimes the business's values need correcting.
I realize this is an abnormal perspective, but I think it's important.
I spent seven years at a company whose main talent was finding ways to sell software that nobody would use (fewer bugs that way). We would build relationships with politicians who needed to spend their budget in order to have it renewed next year at the same size, and sell them something that claimed to do whatever made them look good.
It took us lowly engineers a long time to find out what was going on, but one day somebody actually tried to use it and you could tell from the bugs that nobody before them had ever managed to make it work.
Corrupting politicians is profitable. It adds value to the business. Creating an R&D group to actually drive the industry forward? That's risky, and in the end, less profitable. But I respect the hell out of the people who managed to do it, business value be damned, and would hire them to smack me around from time to time if I were a CEO.
It's more along the lines of "Fred, you exceed all our expectations but we're worried that you haven't been keeping up with the trade skills in your area due to being in only one company and likely been way too cozy there to evolve your skills".
I have been in the final stages of a interview and reject an offer for personal reasons, had the manager say to me “I’m looking for people who are here to stay and make a career, so let me know if you reconsider”. He had been a manager for a year and half… I found out not to long ago he left to become a Sr. Manager else where.
These rules around tenure are silly. If you have impact in 2 years or less that’s all that matters.
Job hopping attitude is very visible in someone's work as well. You see them focusing on short term gains only with most of their technical decisions and leave the mess for someone else to cleanup while they move on to the next thing. Zero skin in the game.
Job hopping is the most effective way to increase your income and position in tech.
Personally - I’ve had no issues getting a job. I’ve job hopped consistently since I started working in 2013. I haven’t had a single job last more than a couple years. I will be looking for a new job in 2022 as well. I don’t expect anything bad to happen due to my hopping. It’s a norm within the industry.
If companies didn’t want this to happen then they’d work harder at retaining talent.
If you are at the same company people want to at the very least see growth. Positional or responsibility wise.
I rather hire someone with multiple 2-3 year stints, than someone with one 8 year job. But it’s only a small part of the hiring equation.
This is an awful mindset and one wish would just get deleted forever from all the memory of all humans for good.
I've been trying to find a senior dev position for the last ~20 months and most gigs I only lasted 3 months and that was because all employers (except one) didn't adhere to the agreed upon contract because let's face it, how will I enforce it?
So I was left with a few CTOs asking me why am I job hopping and they didn't believe me that I busted my arse working to prove myself on every single gig I landed in the mentioned period but was given super unfair conditions and deadlines and was met with expectations that the most senior dev in their company couldn't adhere to.
So please, do consider that what you say is only one side of the coin. I don't know if it was bad luck or me emitting the wrong signals during interviews; likely the latter because Occam's Razor says so. But even if that's the case, I feel I didn't deserve the skepticism that was projected towards me. The interviewers came to the interview already assuming that I am a job hopper. It is not fair.
If every person you meet is an asshole... Consider some self-reflection.
Don't answer, it's obvious that you haven't.
It's also obvious that you didn't notice that my previous comment did contain self-reflection. I always seek the blame in myself first. That doesn't mean that blame is always in me however. Bad luck or poorly communicated expectations happen to all of us.
Go read this comment chain again and consider if the way you commented here actually helped you at all.
I know for sure that I wouldn't hire you with the attitude you're expressing here (and unlike you, I'm a senior engineer who's involved in hiring) - some thoughts:
You seem to want to fight.
You're getting emotional and angry.
Things are "Obvious" to you. (So obvious!)
You're throwing off red flags left and right - To the point where I almost believe you that all your gigs suck, since I can't imagine many decent companies agreeing to hire you in the first place.
I'll take a generous approach, and assume you're really venting here, and acting in a way you wouldn't at work.
So take it or leave it, here's my piece of advice (and don't worry - I won't comment again).
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There's a sliding scale for how people tend to judge others at work -
You can be EXCELLENT at the literal job, but if you're miserable in social interactions, you're going to be a mediocre employee at best.
Alternatively, you can be stunningly underwhelming at the actual job (even just plain bad, honestly), but as long as people enjoy doing it with you, you will also be a mediocre employee.
If folks have to pick between mediocre employees, people pick the guy they enjoy working with. This applies for basically all choices (who gets hired, who gets fired, who gets promoted, who gets bonuses, etc). Is it fair? No of course not, nothing is "fair".
Your best bet is to be positive on both sides of the scale - be somewhat enjoyable to work with, and do the job ok.
Your worst bet is to be painful to work with, and egotistical about how valuable you are.
If you can only pick one - prefer being easy to work with. It pays better dividends and is more transferable.
And well, see, your comment here is the problem with virtual text-only communication. You start off spotting one or two signs that might point to a pattern that you recognize from your past experiences, and then every other ambiguous sign afterwards you interpret in favour of your preliminary conclusion. Yes, I was venting here on HN; I am calm-mannered and fairly normal guy in all work settings -- this has been said to me many times. I am a professional, and the last time I raised my voice (or were conflict-y in general) in a work meeting was at least 7 years ago.
Let me also remind you that I am referring only to a fairly recent period in my career (less than 2 years) which spans 20 years in total.
Can't fault you for rushing to conclusions given how the chats here went. But I get sad when I spot people doing it regardless.
I am having difficulties accepting that you're taking a generous approach when you tell me that I give off red signs left and right, which by itself is a generalization. If you truly were generous you'd assume that I have sort of a PTSD (which I absolutely do have, sadly) from toxic employers that I did misjudge so it's also at least 50% my fault for working with them and getting some traumas out of those experiences (which then make me less desirable because I became jumpy).
That becomes a self-perpetuating cycle at one point: you get so used to toxic people that you start reacting violently and negatively early in the process which can and will turn off legitimately positive and constructive employers. Had that happen to me as well, twice, and I hope that I have taken my lessons from it.
And this is the problem for me here:
> Go read this comment chain again and consider if the way you commented here actually helped you at all.
I should give positive benefit of the doubt but none is given to me. Compare this to school bullying: you have done nothing bad to anyone, get bullied excessively anyway, then one day erupt and smack somebody in the face who completely deserves it, then eat all the blame? I will refuse to accept blame in such a scenario.
So my apologies for previously negative tone but in your comment here you leaned waaaaaay too far in a negative direction and I can't in clear conscience agree with what you said. I had my faults (likely still have some of them) but you did fail to consider that I was "bullied" and at one point stopped giving a frak. That can happen to anyone and it's very easy to sit on a moral high ground when it never happened to you -- or imagine that you would never react like this had you been in my place. I am very skeptical on that last point. I've seen very calm and almost phlegmatic people turn into raging aggressors given the right shitty conditions in life. You're not immune as well, I am sure.
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Going to the second half of your comment, I get what you're saying and I always preferred to be nice to work with and not necessarily super excellent in what I do -- although I keep trying every day; that's why I picked programming ever since 12 years old and I am still doing it now at 41 y/o; it's passion, it's not only money.
But I do get sad when people who only read how I got a little bitter from past experiences immediately jump to conclusions. :(
Critical thinking and good self-reflection on your side would have told you that you might be rushing into judging. Still, I can't take that away from you and I would not even if I could.
This comment of mine is also not strictly positive but at one point it gets hard to be peaceful and calm when you feel people are claiming things about you that many others have told you are not true (and again, I do my very very best not to only utilize my own judgement which is of course skewed; ego and all, as we all know, but to ask for other people's feedback).
This is my more level-headed take. You can do with it as you please, I believe I expressed myself much better this time around.
(EDIT: If you are curious, go through my comment history quickly. I am not the most politically correct person -- and never will be -- but I don't go around attacking people or jump at them.)
People that exhibit bad behavior in peer groups that tolerate it love trotting this line out because it lets them invalidate others' valid criticisms of them.
Sorry, but this is reality. The next job you get, I suggest you tough it out for 3 or 4 years or more to show that those short gigs aren't the norm.
Oh well, I tried.
(And by the way it was 3 shitty gigs. No idea why you somehow draw the line at 2.)
Is it fair that you get discriminated against because of your claimed bad luck? No. But that is the reality of the situation. You need to accept this instead of whining about it. But a bunch of short term jobs means you’re either a job hopper or you have been fired very quickly many times. To be honest, assuming you’re a job hopper is the better of the two assumptions.
Instead of trying to fight it, I suggest you figure out a way out of it. Get a new job and stick with it for a longer period of time. Or don’t include some of the jobs on your resume when you apply for a new job. Or put on your resume that you had short term contract positions and now you’re looking for permanent positions.
I have over 25 years of experience. I need to do leetcode every night so that I can compete against kids half my age for the same job. Is that fair? No. I have over quadruple their experience. But it’s the reality of the situation. So instead of whining about it, I’m studying leetcode every night so that I can find a new job.
I suggest you take the same attitude.
How does practicing leetcode help you do your job, or do you just practice it for interviews?
I do most of the things that you said I should. I understood that I got through a bad period, realized that parts of what I do would only perpetuate it since I became negative and it started showing in interviews (and that means that some of them got cut short because of it -- and yes that absolutely was my fault). But then I changed things around and now I am in a better place. Literally and figuratively.
It would help you in your life and work to judge less or, failing that, judge in not such a quick manner as you did here.
I have zero problems doing these but I was going through a rough patch and needed a job that was more merciful to my mental health. I was realistic about my situation and communicated the right expectations early. I specifically asked for that, was promised that, signed a contract that said that, and they still turned back on their word (and signature) no later than my 3rd week with them.
In retrospect there were red flags from both sides (from the employer and from myself) but they weren't as obvious to me back then. Oh well, we live and learn.
I had an experience with an independent recruiter that went so poorly that I haven’t been able to take those kinds of people seriously since.
A few years back, I was recruited to an up-and-coming startup in the healthcare space in a senior role. It was a massive pay increase, meaningful equity, and a company name I was proud to put on my resume.
An independent firm reached out to me about the role and I was definitely interested. One thing I noticed while doing my independent research was that lots of people had very poor Glassdoor reviews of the company, basically comparing it to Theranos in terms of its culture, constant firings, cult-like CEO, etc. I reached out to several former employees to discuss their experience and could not get one to talk to me about working there. Meanwhile, I was hearing from the recruiters that they hired a new exec team and most complaints were not relevant to the current situation there.
I brought the complaints up with the recruiter and the company during my interview process, and they both told me it was just a couple disgruntled former employees trying to make the company look bad. The recruiter offered to put me in touch with others they placed at the company, but I couldn’t view them as objective sources.
I started the gig and it took me all of two weeks to realize the company was in fact firing people constantly and I had been completely lied to by the recruiter and the company.
As much as I want to believe that there are recruiters out there that look out for devs, the reality is that software talent is the product in that relationship and there aren’t a lot of financial incentives to ensure transparency going into these professional relationships. Recruiters get paid when you sign, which creates an inherent conflict of interest when you’re looking to them as a trusted resource.
Usually, even if one leaves a place and can't share their grief they will at least try to point out a positive.
That said, phrasing such as "You'll become a world class VB6 Developer" is a lovely way to let people know what they are in for in a way that is not disparaging, per-se.
Most of them are just trying to churn you through the sales process quickly; some are outright scammers (if you've not had to blacklist a recruitment firm you've probably not done much hiring); and a very few are absolutely gold who will matchmake better than automated systems. Those people deserve positive word-of-mouth.
You identified some red flags yourself pre-hire and then bailed early when it turned out bad. It all seems pretty much fine.
I was terminated and feared what it would do to my career, it was most certainly not "pretty much fine."
> It's unclear to me what you'd like the recruiter to have done differently
This is my point, there's nothing you can make a recruiter do to truly act in your interest. Because they get paid when you sign, they're motivated to act on behalf of the company, not you the developer.
As far as I understand it their fee is (often/always?) also contingent on you staying there at least 6 months.
Nowadays most independent recruiters I know of are rehashing the jobs I can see on Linkedin and the like. They're often 22 year olds at their first job right out of college.
There are some independent headhunters who add value, but most do not. The one thing they do seem to get is feedback they can pass on. Maybe companies feel more comfortable telling a third party.
I have two decades in my specific eng field. I (very intentionally) have little name recognition but I come highly recommended and have a proven track record. Getting senior roles is not all that difficult, if you have proven yourself and know how to network. I don't look for jobs any more, I consider offers. To me, that's how senior roles should and do work.
On the + side, at least "senior" in tech is not nearly as bad as "VP" in the banking world, where a "VP" at a household name bank might be lucky to scrape out 200K and is probably an IC salesperson or low mid-level manager :p
Time to find fun outside of work.
Strongly recommend The Gervis Principle for an entertaining overview of what organizations really are.
Those are averages (and probably slightly old ones at that). Mid six figures is in-range for Senior at most of those companies.
> While the ladder in Google goes up to 11, 90% of people never exceed 5 (senior).
But when do people first reach that level? Again, my point was that "lots of tech workers with Senior in their title are in fact mid-career or early mid-career." Not that everyone with the Senior title is mid-career.
Looking at Levels.fyi, and my personal experience, typically between 5 and 10 years.
Reminder: Retirement age is 65 and people graduate college around age 22. 65-22 = 43. Let's be generous and assume tech workers retire over a decade earlier than most people.
So if you become Senior with 12 yoe, that's an early mid career position. If you become Senior with 15 or even 17 yoe, that's solidly a mid career position. Even 20 yoe is mid-career if your work to 65. Looking at levels.fyi, becoming Senior with 5-10 yoe is not abnormal.
I'm not sure how you can realistically say that someone in their late 20s is "not mid-career".
Basically the incentives make sense, to a point. They get paid a quarter of your first annual compensation. So they want to place someone, and they will do a lot for you if you are a profile that seems like a match for the roles they are covering.
Note it's important that you find people who actually have the goods. There are a lot of recruiters who seem to think spamming peoplev with crap is a way to get placements.
The thing to do is look at the jobs you like, for finance that's on efinancial and one or two others, and then call the most pertinent recruiters. Don't use the application systems, they're a black hole. Get the person on the phone, sell yourself, hopefully get some interviews lined up.
The really good recruiters will keep the relationship open. They call me now and again to check my status (I'm also a hiring manager prospect), they call to ask me technical questions, and they get me to refer people I know as well. It's actually a lot of work if you consider the average candidate is only going to change jobs a few times in their life.
And yes, keep organised, try to know where you are with each firm. It's important not to get introduced by different recruiters to the same firm, it messes with that incentive I mentioned and the recs are scared of being the second person to intro someone.
Also
> The really good recruiters will keep the relationship open. They call me now and again to check my status (I'm also a hiring manager prospect), they call to ask me technical questions, and they get me to refer people I know as well.
That sounds like it's not for everyone. I'd probably find those check-ins mildly disruptive and the other parts feel like I'm doing someone's job for them.
Curious to know if other folks have encountered these issues or have thoughts on them.
Keep in mind it's only a % of your first year income. If you hang around the company for a few years, that few % is really nothing. Also your production to the company is unlikely to be so finely balanced with your salary, the type of jobs where the 3p guys work tend to be ones where the firm is expecting to make several x whatever they pay you.
The firm is looking at:
- Your gross salary
- Various taxes on top, depending on where you live that could be anywhere from 0 to dozens of %.
- Costs of business: rent for your desk. Tools like a Bloomberg Terminal, $24K/year. I'm sure other industries have other necessities.
- The cut to the 3p.
- The additional revenue they can support with you on the team, which hopefully is at least 2x all the above. Alternatively, revenue might decline if they don't replace someone who's expected to leave. That's money that's already in the bag that might vanish.
Remember the 3p guy is also interested at least partly in you getting a higher salary, so they are also looking for people who are willing to pay. A cheapass hiring firm is about as useful to them as an applicant who can't do the job, so if the 3p guy is smart he'll find the firms who are properly looking to hire people.
Don't forget firms that are only expanding a little bit have networks to rely on that they don't have to pay for. It's going to be the firms who have exhausted the networks that are happy to pay up for talent.
> That sounds like it's not for everyone. I'd probably find those check-ins mildly disruptive and the other parts feel like I'm doing someone's job for them.
Certainly true, but check-ins are only a short coffee or other break-like activity. I sometimes arrange a day in London where I catch up with people, and it's a low stakes mildly rewarding thing to do, if your personality suits.
I've been a professional software dev for 25 years, spanning five countries (edit: including 5 years in San Francisco) and almost every part of the industry from embedded to enterprise, startups to multinationals, hardware to finance. I have written software in almost all major languages for multiple years, have worked with many major software stacks, and delivered major 6-month-to-multi-year projects. None of this is hyperbole.
I have hundreds of github projects that are not forks, ranging up to tens of thousands of LOC, some that companies have built entire businesses out of (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash).
I receive one, maybe two recruiter emails per year (only from Facebook - I think whenever my contact info goes to a new person), and that's about it. I've never been in a bidding war, and I can't remember a single job search that's completed in under 4 months.
Are people ACTUALLY getting inundated like this so badly that they need a SPREADSHEET to keep things in order? Or is this just bragging?
Join Meta. Move to Silicon Valley. Then tell me what you're experiencing 2 years later.
That said, I'm also still getting periodic offers for unpaid summer internships from out of state. Maybe it's because I never finished my degree, and they're finding me from my college's records?
Also, it's very dependent on linkedin, so depending on your presence or if linkedin thinks you do/don't have skills you may be missing the recruiter searches, and get less outreach.
The note on here is I have software engineering and security experience, so a ton of companies growing their security organizations are actively looking. I have about 9 years of experience but job hop (~2 years) which probably hurts me a little. I think if I stay at my next role for 3-5 years then principal roles will open up for me. Target comp for this round of interviews was 300k which I came in just below and should make in years 2 through 4 at this company (based on minimal stock growth + refreshers).
I always say "thanks but no thanks" when not interested, but definitely leave it friendly. Recruiters move and I've had a recruiter for a company I wasn't interested in later pop up at a company I was interested in. As I've moved along in my career, recruiters I've worked with to hire at my own company have also moved on and brought me opportunities in their new companies.
* used terraform to manage aws infrastructure
* developed microservices using cqrs and event sourcing
* application monitoring with cloudwatch, grafana, prometheus and loki
Make yourself searchable and make it clear what you bring to the table.
Last I tried to find a job when I really needed it (because I took a job that was absolutely hell and was let go after 6 months because I actually tried to do something productive and other people didn't like that), I quickly found out nearly all those emails were just recruiters sending out as many messages as they could to anyone with any kind of development experience... and I would still have to go through multiple interviews, including basic programming assignments which I find so direspectful when you've been doing it for a couple of decades already. Nothing like an experience like that to dissipate the feeling that you're a rockstar and everyone wants to hire you immediately should you just pick up one phone call. The truth is that there are hundreds like you a and while there is definitely a programmer shortage in most parts of the world, companies that are actually worthwhile working for will still filter candidates a lot and may discard you for the smallest shortcoming (like not having 3 years experienc with some niche framework they use). While I was on my comfy job receiving those emails and occasionally answering a few to see what's on the board, it felt like I just needed to say yes to get an offer, which is not exactly how it turned out to be.
I get 1+ per week, sometimes as many as 5. To me it seems like there's at least a few databases of developer profiles built by recruiting agencies by scraping public info from LinkedIn. Smaller startups then defer to these recruiting agencies to find talent. Mid-size startups have their own recruiters. My profile on LinkedIn is barebones, I only have the company name and my title listed and I still get contacted often.
The emails I get frequently have a sentence such as: "You've been 2+ years at <FAANG> so consider joining our cool startup that needs an Android app to disrupt the basket weaving industry". I'm guessing the DB software has some rules to categorize people into various groups, such as "likely looking for other opportunities after 2 years at FAANG".
There's a clear pattern to these emails. First is initial contact, then a follow up email if there was no response, then one last attempt, usually in the span of a few days.
I don't mind the emails too much. I usually reply to establish an initial contact with the sourcer / recruiter, which lets me build my own database of recruiters which I might send an email to when I decide to jump ship.
Your profiles must not be very marketable, or they're worded strangely if this is accurate, as you should have seen similar levels of cold recruiters. I'm not an outlier, all my coworkers get similar levels, usually the same people/emails.
a person of your background should be inundated with job offers. The issue is probably discoverability. Engineers live on Github, Recruiters live on LinkedIn. If you spent some time updating your Linkedin with more detail, especially on tech environment / tooling, I should imagine your message rate would go up substantially.
Most of the devs I know have never used any recruiting companies, since they are not required to "get in the door" in my country. Its just not part of the culture. I personally have used one once, about 5 years ago as an experiment... I'm still at the same company, so there's that. I don't have linkedin. I had an account many years ago but it was spammy and wasting my time so deleted that account and have never been back on it.
Zero affiliation just a very happy user. As an example, here's my TV show tracker in both forms:
Sheet Style: https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=df6...
Kanban Style: https://www.notion.so/b7da6a3929624f0c9d30e248111eff2a?v=fd9...
While I have worked with some great third-party recruiters in the past and actually got my current job through one, most of the time the phone call is equivalent to the resume submission stage.
It would literally be faster to apply directly than have a conversation.
Those are the third party recruiters you want to work with. They are pretty rare though.
1. Got a student visa to come study a masters in Germany
2. Did an internship and got a job offer before I completed my studies.
3. This is the part that blew my mind - my employer asked me if I can start working in May 2021 and I said I would like to (I was almost done with my masters thesis) but I don't have a masters degree yet and I can't work full time on my student visa. They simply applied for an EU Blue card based on my bachelors degree that I got from my home country (Computer Science) and I started working. The immigration office ("Ausländerbehörde") did not even care that I was currently enrolled as a student in Germany and that I haven't graduated yet. Germany gets a bad rep for its bureaucracy but this was one instance where it was surprisingly flexible.
I made a boilerplate page on my personal site to send back to the occasional job that looks interesting and some recruiters have legitimately been offended by getting a form response.
Some of the crap I’ve had pulled on me:
- Salary expectations not shared with the company. Went through the entire process only to get lowballed.
- Bait and switch by offering one enticing job only to inform me that’s no longer available and would you be interested in working for a body shop?
- Phone calls at work. Emails at work. The list goes on.
Also them insisting on phone calls is easy to explain. It’s because people are pressured easily over the phone.
In order to build companies, we have to hire people. In order to hire people, we have walk them through interviewing. Devs don't exist in a vacuum, so you won't ever be done with recruiters.
I wish, I find that there seems to be an infinite amount of recruiters collecting names and resumes willing to waste infinite amounts of time… and then you discover they don’t know Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing.
This has really hindered me as a person with a severe hearing impairment. It's annoying how pushy some people can be about it too, insisting that there has to be SOME way to make it work.
It’s completely counter intuitive but that was my biggest take away from interviewing this year. You would think it’s the unqualified candidate that were the time waster.
Prospective employers will lead you on and waste your time with nonsense and hope of employment with numerous interviews until their bias either qualifies or filters you.
My recommendation: put your cards on the table at the very beginning and filter yourself out. There is no point in pretending it will be a beautiful marriage when they are an old man undergoing midlife crisis looking for a hot teenager. If, as an actual senior, that’s not what you want to be then it’s not going to work.
The arguments supporting their use (e.g. hiring company does want to leak information) seem weak.
I would tend to think that a strong hiring company should be able to bypass this information leakage on their own and own the process. Using an external headhunter does not prevent the leakage that much and removes ownership and control from the hiring company’s hands.
As a senior lead, being approached by an external head hunter has always triggered a knee-jerk negative reaction with me.
I would not mind being proven wrong.
I think it's close to the 80/20 principle: 80% of people whose job title would be "third party recruiter" are not (or are just barely) worth your time, but 20% will do wonders for your career and network.
Good recruiters are primarily skilled at building a wide but high-quality professional network, keeping information flowing through it, and, generally, significantly raising the signal:noise ratio of the connection process for both sides. This earns them repeat customers on both sides. Hires convert into hiring managers convert into founders, and good reputation for quality on both ends goes a long way. It's actually not too dissimilar from good LPs in a VC firm, and there's some VC firms that function pretty explicitly as recruiting hubs.
The practical differences: good third party recruiters invest in long-term relationships, with an incrementally increasing quality bar for people and companies admitted into those relationships. Mediocre third party recruiters are more transactional (maybe they see it as an in-between gig, or don't get/want to get the bigger picture) and follow the money with minimal attention paid to quality. The latter are more numerous and more vocal. The good ones exist, but there's probably not a lot of them, and they don't reach out as often.
IME, you can usually distinguish between the two based on the portfolio of companies they work with, if you're familiar with the companies you can draw your own opinions.
However, with anything qualitatively-differentiated like this, it is hard to persuade somebody that this thing exists. You would know it when you see it.
And the article is on-point with the "you get 30 minutes of my time otherwise you are wasting my time." Recruiters love their phone calls because they are trying to sell you something.
Just to clarify to other reading this, it’s about a particular group of Brazilians that used to work at SoundCloud and the referred post made claims about them being protagonists in some sort of divisive infighting.
This is something I always wonder, why there are no recruiters who are paid by the candidate rather than the hiring company? Kinda like an agent-client relationship.
Probably wouldn’t work for junior people, but it could be a good fit for seniors
Everything I've done in the past 10 years has not been from a job that was advertised as an opening anywhere, but through industry contacts.
I've never worked for a cellular carrier so as an example there's whole swathes of telecom stuff I only have a passing familiarity with.
But I suppose that software engineering in general, there probably are a lot more coders out there. At least judging by what I see in Seattle.
The isp community in and mid to large sized city is probably still small enough that most people know each other.
I have noticed there appears to be a huge divide between the FAANG'ers and the FAANG'nots from my perspective. The smaller companies in the area, all generally know each other. Similar to your experience
One ex-colleague I know is able to get a new job within a matter of days by poking around his network. These are SWE jobs at NYC hedge funds of varying caliber.
The caveat is that he can't be picky. He might have to work with unsexy tech, or in a boring project shuffling around XML feed files, etc. Hedge funds being hedge funds, they still pay at least above average.
That said, he's the only SWE I know of who can land jobs through his network without being tortured by the leetcode gauntlet. Everyone else, myself included, might at best skip a phone screen but still ultimately be subjected to leetcode.
Such things gotta be done in an async manner e.g. by email.
> And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you.
Perhaps there's a new venture opportunity here: recruiters that find jobs that are on the employee side. They get the same money (e.g. paid by the employee's sign on bonus) as those working for the other side, but try to find a good role for the employee.
It's not as bad in the US now but I get a ton of cold emails (and even phone calls). I've seen similar advice here on HN about how you should respond to these and make a personal connection even if you aren't looking now. Do people really do this? I think this would take me hours each week. I'm not even a superstar. Far from it so please don't take it that way.
I'm an introvert. I'm far from alone in this as a software engineer. Now this, contrary to popular belief, doesn't mean you want to avoid social interactions. It simply means those social interactions have a cost. For some people (ie extroverts) the opposite is true. They feed on those interactions. I imagine you'd need to be that sort of person to be a recruiter.
The author here posits that independent recruiters are "valuable". Now this could be London colouring my view but I've found the complete opposite to be true. I've only looked for a job twice in the last 10 years and each time I quite deliberately only ever spoke to a company's recruiters. I've found independent recruiters and agencies to simply make a difficult process even more difficult.
My advice for any recruiter thinking of cold calling is:
1. I've long since stopped picking up unrecognized numbers. If you call me instead of emailing me, it's going to get ignored;
2. If your email doesn't look personalized it just gets immediately binned. I'm talking something like:
> Hi, I came across your profile and like the look of your skills and experience...
3. My experience has been that even sending a polite "I'm not currently looking" or even just a thank you is far too often taken as an invitation for follow up contact to "get to know you" or "discuss [whatever] further" so it's best for my personal sanity to simply ignore pretty much every email;
4. Just because I don't respond or respond immediately, it doesn't mean I haven't read it. The last time I looked for a job I ended up contacting a recruiter who'd sent me an email months earlier. This may not be how you as a likely extrovert deals with communication but you're not me and you inserted yourself into my inbox. It's not personal;
5. If you aren't able to cater the hiring pipeline to my experience then seriously don't even bother. What I mean by this is I've worked at Google and Facebook for >10 years. Do you or your client really think I can't code? If you are going to get someone a year out of college to give me a test on bisection search because "that's their process" then that tells me a lot about their culture and/or how they value your input. You want to talk systems design? Coding philosophy? Tech leadership? All of those are fair game. Bring it on. Happy to do it;
6. Realize that many of us engineers find phone calls to be disruptive and a profound waste of time, particularly when it usually entails a 30 minute "getting to know you" chat before you even start the process;
7. Do yourself a favour and if we must chat, send your calendar so I can pick a slot when you're available. I know my own schedule. I don't want scheduling to be a conversation;
8. If you reschedule or cancel once we've agreed to talk you'd better have a good reason or at least don't lie about it. Tech is a small world. If you tell me an emergency came up and you actually went skiing, don't think the candidate won't find that out from a friend or a friend of a friend who can check. Trust matters;
9. If you send the same email more than three times, it gets binned; and
10. There are certain areas I simply have no interest in (eg finance, Blookchain Andys). You're not to know that. It's not your fault. Everyone differs on this. Again, it's not personal.
If I was less picky, I could probably have gotten a new job at a decent, but not spectacular, company, with probably at max, ~3 months of active interviewing.
Likewise one of my friends is what I'd like to describe as a "master networker". The way he can easily and quickly network his way into a new job is shocking - often times without an leetcode interview. These jobs typically tend to pay at least above average (hedge funds). However the caveat is that he has to be very unpicky about the exact nature of the role, sometimes working with very boring or unsexy tech stacks for example.
I have a Senior title (at a "no name" company) and can probably get a Senior title elsewhere (I also get recruitment emails for those all the time), but perhaps only for some values of "Senior".
For people with strong resumes, it's hard to leave home without tripping on the offer letters jammed under your front door.