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Comment by qubyte | Hacker News Reader

Most of the recruiter traffic comes from LinkedIn, which is not particularly surprising. The very first line of my profile there reads:

  Please do not contact me about cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, or associated technologies.

Almost all recruiters who contact me on LinkedIn are talking about... cryptocurrency, blockchains, or NFTs etc. If a recruiter isn't prepared to read even the first line of my profile then I think I'm fine to ignore them. For all other recruiters I'll send a polite and friendly "thanks, but I'm not looking at this time".

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I bet you it's those keywords in your profile that draw them to send you a message

Up until I added that line it was "rust" which was doing it. Perhaps the line makes it worse, but at least I'm happy to ignore those requests now. :)

I added rust to my list of skills and then got swamped with blockchain nonsense. It’s very odd, I took it back off again.

Haskell is probably the worst (best) blockchain company magnet. Scala too, to a lesser extent. It's not that odd when you think about what they're trying to build.

It is ironic that so many companies are using such an efficient programming language to implement the most horribly, deliberately wasteful computations on the planet. I got into rust because I want to do meaningful work efficiently not proof-of-meaningless-work.

Not sure if you're just calling blockchain development meaningless work in general, or referencing proof-of-work, which refers to meaningless computation done for blockchain security despite the unnecessary wastefulness.

If you're referencing the latter, maybe it's worth pointing out that all the blockchains using Rust (or the popular ones anyway) are proof of stake.

Still arguably not the most meaningful use of storage space

Is it meaningful for you if I store petabytes of hentai on my disks?

I'm not sure this is the venue for a debate on the merits of art.

But they were talking about hentai, not art.

I explicitly state in my LinkedIn profile “do not contact me I’m not seeking new opportunities at this time” and I still get a half dozen a week.

Recruiters are the laziest humans on earth.

Recruiters work super hard with archaic, shitty tools. You may not like their methods, but (mostly) they are anything but lazy.

If they can’t be bothered to read the all-caps text stating I don’t wish to be contacted, then yes, they are lazy.

If they read it and contact me anyway? Then they’re disrespectful of my wishes and not worth my time. But I’ll concede that isn’t lazy!

Work hard, not smart, I guess...

Do you have it as "Open to positions" or whatever is called? Reading this thread I feel like I'm flying under the radar somehow given my experience. Could it be US specific? I'm a FAANG engineer in Europe with a small LinkedIn network (less than 100) and I rarely get bothered

No, I do not. I’m an older Network & UNIX Admin type who is qualified for a lot of different positions. I suspect I many have in-demand skills and as such I end up in a lot of search results.

It is most likely because you're in Europe that you're not getting many requests. The job market for devs in the US is insane, much higher than in other areas of the world.

It is insane in Europe too.

I see so many people complaining about it and I wonder if it is a US thing. I'm a FAANG engineer in Europe with a small LinkedIn network (less than a 100) and I rarely get contacted unless I open my LinkedIn profile to be seen by recruiters.

I don't know what I've done to be so blessed as to not receive any blockchain recruiter spam.

Everyone thinks I do Ruby on Rails though, because someone accidentally endorsed me for it once years ago. Somehow 50+% of the stuff I get is RoR.

You can remove endorsements if you don't want to get those anymore.

I have one line from 2017 about working on blockchain proposals. I never wrote any blockchain code. But it is half of my LinkedIn inbox.

I think it happens to me because I mention that I'm dabbling in rust in my profile, and I guess that's a keyword they scrape for.

There are certain platforms that support smart contracts written in Rust (like Solana), so yeah, there's a chance that's triggering them.

Honestly, I'd recommend taking that off your resume, or describing it in a way that avoids using keywords. Your resume doesn't have to mention every job you've ever had, especially if they aren't relevant to the work you're looking for.

I told a recruiter I wasn't interested in crypto jobs and they laughed at me and said I was crazy. Pay must be high...

Well if you want money, 500k/yr is very possible.

Easiest way to do that is to not have a linked in profile

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