Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of comments here talking about how many recruiter messages and calls and bidding wars they get, and I'm seriously wondering how much of these are tall tales...

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?

I'm surprised you don't get constantly spammed by recruiters.

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.

Another data point: I tend to receive far more recruiter cold calls in an old email address that I no longer use than in my newer more active email address.

You've had a lot of experience in all the wrong places for this type of recruiter inbound.

Join Meta. Move to Silicon Valley. Then tell me what you're experiencing 2 years later.

I lived in San Francisco from 2011 to 2016 (9th and Folsom, right above the corner store). Same thing.

I've been getting ~2-5 recruiter emails per week for the past several months. Silicon Valley is a bit weird.

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?

It is not fake. I just went through an interview cycle and set up Calendly to manage availability between my work and personal calendars. I interviewed with 3 big-n companies (two were remote bait and switches, one did not meet my salary expectations), 3 smaller companies (really appreciate big-n interview structure after speaking with them), and one post-IPO finance company (accepted). I set my LinkedIn profile to looking for work and fielded almost every recruiter who messaged me in that time.

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 think junior and intermediate developers get a lot more noise from recruiters as they form the bulk of the dev community. Recruiters are just in a frenzy to stack the ranks, where with more senior roles you have less positions to fill and the talent pool is even smaller... and I dare say most of the higher positions are filled via connections/nepotism etc and not using recruiters to bulk-fill.

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.

My guess is it depends on how discoverable you might be. For me, I found the recruiter spam declined substantially when my title is team lead or manager, something seemingly much less likely to match the filter being used. Although instead I get spam from recruiters (as in agencies) or sales reps, but I suspect less than when I had individual contributor titles. Any I put basically zero effort into my linkedin profile.

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.

Yes, we really do, ESPECIALLY around quarter boundries. Multiple a day, often expecting phone calls for basic information, it's really annoying sometimes when they don't even include a basic job description and salary band info.

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.

this is hugely surprising!

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.

Do you have a LinkedIn account, GitHub account and/or blog? Those are the three avenues recruiters find me by, and LinkedIn dominates of the three.

Yes, I have all three:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kstenerud/

https://github.com/kstenerud/

https://www.technicalsourcery.net/

I took a look and on linkedin it isn't sure where you are and you haven't listed any technologies. If you put in go-lang, c, Python, linux, Docker, containers that'll make you searchable. If you want remote jobs for US companies say so.

I'll second this. LinkedIn relies on search, and your profile has very little information. I'm hitting 23 years in the industry, with the first 17 of those in small startups, and 2010 was the last time I made the first reach out in a job search. When my profile is listed as "Open to Opportunity" on LinkedIn, I hear from people daily, with about 50% being non-spam and at least remotely relevant to my role and YOE. When the profile is not open, it's one or two a week on average.

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.

You should improve your previous experience description. Use bullet points and keywords, for example:

* 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.

I have a similar, but less impressive background. I receive a few emails per week from recruiters but I know from experience that most are just spam.

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.

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