Dear Recruiters | Hacker News Reader

Dear Recruiters

kencochrane.net

36 pointsKenCochrane60 comments

...by the way, if you find any recruiters offering a 200k job with 6 weeks vacation and a signing bonus, where you can telecommute from anywhere, but darnit they require Windows or PHP work now and again... drop me a line! ;)

I'd be willing to write in brainfuck exclusively for 200k. This guy has it good, doubt he'll ever find a job with that kind of attitude. He could be ol' Don Knuth, still wouldn't get a job from anyone worth working for.

Although, with that guy's track record, maybe he knows being a cocky asshole is just the way to get a good job in software, I don't know.

edit: after thinking about it more, I think this may be a parody of the sort of unrealistic expectations recruiters have for 'talent'.

> This guy has it good, doubt he'll ever find a job with that kind of attitude.

These comments sadden me. I work with Ken at dotcloud and can tell you he is one of the most humble and easy to deal with colleagues I've ever had.

Have you never been contacted repeatedly, almost to the point of harassment, by a recruiter who wouldn't take no for an answer, yet could not be bothered with even the most basic research about you?

It's that combination of a) blind persistence and b) disregard for the actual person that defines truly spammy recruiters, and which obviously drives Ken crazy. I don't blame him for trying to stem the flow. If anything I would like to find out if this new anti-spam tool actually works :)

Yes. And never mind the fact that he's stating what it would take for him to leave a job he obviously loves. Of course he is going to make outrageous demands. He doesn't want to leave! Hello.. is this thing on? I feel the message got lost on a lot of people that maybe haven't been inundated with recruiter calls and emails or had their time wasted talking about positions that they would never take.

I mean who here hasn't been contacted by a recruiter asking about a skill set you barely know or don't even have on your resume? Or their understanding of it in general is so far off you don't even want to deal with it? Or ones where they try to connect to every person in your company through you? I could go on and on. It gets maddening.

Ah, that explains it then. I didn't realize he wasn't actually looking for jobs and was just trying to get the recruiters to stop harassing him. One of my professors had been harassed by recruiters like this, but I haven't had that happen.

There is an old strategy - when you don't want a job or contract, name an unrealistically high price instead of saying no. That's all this is.

I know multiple people who have taken this strategy and learned that "unrealistically high" wasn't. By and large they regretted that strategy. But hey, at least they got paid for it!

The page states explicitly that he is not really looking for a new job :)

Considering we're in something of an IT bubble at the moment, I sometimes wonder if we'll look back on stuff like this in a few years and think "Wow, we had it good".

Almost undoubtedly, I would think.

Why talk down to people like so, almost treating the recruiters like they were little children who need to be lectured about how to behave. Recruiters are human beings too, who are just trying to do their job.

Who's being disrespected when our time is wasted because a recruiter can't read a simple profile and has zero understanding of the technologies they are recruiting for? That's where the treatment comes from. Recruiters as a whole seem to be transient bunch that never intended to become a recruiter or care about what we do in the first place. Some of us have devoted our entire lives to this field. So when you come at us with "I Need something insanely stupid because I couldn't be bothered to READ", well you're wasting our time. Who likes to have their time wasted?

This is no worse than the 10 word message I get offering me an opportunity that's "perfect" for me.

If a large chunk of the recruiters weren't so lazy, there'd be no need for this.

Try posting a public resume on Monster sometime, and wait for the multiple e-mails about a perfect opportunity, and then if you follow up on them it's a 3 month contract in Lower Bumfark, Kansas.

No, actually, it's almost always insurance sales or multi-level marketing.

As a recruiter I find the post refreshing. It has a bit of a negative streak in it, but I understand where that's coming from.

The word is pompous. Nobody deserves to have a bunch of 'you' assumptions thrown their way without ever speaking to them.

That said, I've had a few recruiters irritate me before.

  Minimum offer

   ...

  Pony: 1+

There are certain social behavioral norms and breaking them makes you look cocky and unprofessional, even if in reality you are not. This would be an example of that.

I love it. Very succinct and to the point. I don't agree with some comments saying that it is naïve because it is not beating around the bush.

If I am a recruiter or any potential employer, I can now instantly see what this applicant wants and expects in the form of compensation, and it is now my job to exceed that compensation and entice this person to come work for me.

If I don't want to meet his target salary, then so be it, I go my own way and he goes his with no love lost. I find this type of discourse very refreshing.

Why am I reading about someone's slick way to solicit recruiters while pretending he is happy with his great job?

If I was his manager reading this, I would bring him in for a 1:1 to determine what truly motivated him to write such a worded diatribe. Best case scenario he doesn't understand how multiple audiences would react to it and assumed only developers that agree with him would see it. This is never the case with the Internet so I'd then have to question his capacity to understand the field he is in.

At the very least it reflects poorly on his current employer, as I wouldn't join in fear of having to work with him.

In this world you must assume that everything you write on your blog, Facebook, etc will end up in front of your grandma, your parents, and your boss. Assuming otherwise is a risk, or at least a demonstration of thoughtlessness.

I looked at his minimum offer first and thought he was a professional football player. But no... he's a LAMP developer.

Disclosure: I have worked with Ken.

I'm not sure you are aware what LAMP means. He prefers (for good reason) nginx, as it states in the post. Ken is someone who gets shit done, for lack of a better expression. He is well worth whatever he is paid at DotCloud, and I would venture to say he is worth his "Minimum Offer".

His LinkedIn profile has an alphabet soup of technologies and programming languages. Even if a recruiter did read it, like he requests, they would have no idea what this guy's real focus is. It even mentions Windows, as well as Xcode and iPhone development when he is clearly a server engineer.

Maybe he needs to revise or shorten his resume before lashing out at recruiters for not reading it. I'm not a recruiter, I'm a developer who makes $225k, has unlimited vacation and lives In San Francisco. As a developer, I feel that guys like him give us all a bad name and make us look arrogant, inflexible and hard to work with. Maybe this attitude is why he still doesn't make his ideal salary of 200k.

After this blog post I doubt he's going to get any other job, let alone one that meets his minbar.

So why are you even on LinkedIn? If you're trying to deter recruiters, what desirable functionality are you getting out of the site that keeps you from just deleting your profile?

Or do you actually enjoy the attention and are you just pretending to be annoyed by it as a way of bragging?

I don't use Facebook, so I use linkedin as a way to stay connected with people I have worked with in the past. As people move on, phone numbers and emails change, but linkedin lets me stay connected to them even if I no longer have their email or phone number.

Once again, I'm not against getting sent relevant job openings, I'm just tired of people who just spamming everyone without even bothering to read the profiles.

Maybe he's looking for others to help him with his current work. That's why I'm on there at this moment. Maybe in the future that will change. It's for networking to others in my field. Not just job hunting. I can do that on dice.com. Do you take your profile down when you're not looking for work?

It is rather arrogant I think.

Why? He's being honest about his expectations. If a recruiter thinks they're unreasonable, the recruiter is free not to contact him. Sure, he may not be worth that much so nobody will contact him, but he's not really looking anyway, so he doesn't waste time deleting useless emails. Recruiters don't waste their time contacting him. Seems like a win-win in my book.

How's so? Is it arrogant to set ground rules for a response to a voice mail? to physical mail?

It's not like he's out there promoting himself. This is for the blast-everything style recruiters that bug me as well.

And yet, an order of magnitude less arrogant than the recruiting attitude that led to its authorship.

How is it arrogant to state your minimum requirements up front? To me it shows respect for everyone's time and attention.

The wording is arrogant not the minimum requirement.

I don't see anywhere that he is displaying an exaggerated sense of his abilities. He says look at my history and judge my capability from that.

What exactly strikes you as arrogant? Is it the fact that he says to recruiters "go read this before we talk further"? The fact that he calls out bad behavior?

I agree, especially the deal breakers section. No Microsoft Windows? At all? I use whatever gets the job done, as any good technologist would.

Technically, any technology CAN get the job done, but the author clearly feels that Windows is never the best choice. Personally, I completely agree with him. Developing on Windows offers no advantage over OS X or Linux.

Sure, we all do, but there's a difference between using something because it is the best tool for the job, and using it because "we use hammers for everything around here."

I think it's a matter of enjoying what you do and he seems to not enjoy Windows.

I don't think it's arrogant - it's direct. I would think a recruiter would want to know about these kinds of preferences, if only to save them the time spent contacting someone who wouldn't be a fit for an opening.

Yes especially the dealbreakers section. I don't know why a lot of developers are so compelled to only work with a specific programming language (i.e ruby/python). Does it really matter that much what the underlying codebase is when you know the fundamentals of computer science. I pick up new languages if the job requires it but I wouldn't toss out a job offer for 200K because the company uses a certain stack that I had a bad experience with in the past.

It does come off as a little condescending, but hopefully we can take that to mean that he is really really in love with his current job!

If you don't want to get approached by recruiters then don't be on LinkedIn in the first place. This is just my opinion though.

LinkedIn is for more then just getting job offers. I don't use Facebook, so this is my way of keeping in touch with people I have worked with in the past.

Also, I don't mind getting emails telling me about jobs I might like, but as long as they are targeted and relevant to me. Most of the people sending these emails don't even read my profile.

There's more to linkedin than recruiting.

Issues with that:

1) I started on LinkedIn 5 years ago. I have a few recommendations from former managers/coworkers on there. So even though I don't wish to be contacted by recruiters today, deleting it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face.

2) If I did delete it, then when I did decide I want to start job-searching again, and start a new LinkedIn account, it would be a big red flag to my current employer, assuming I wanted to keep my job search quiet.

These days, I reply to recruiters with what they can realistically expect in the market, job description vs. expect pay rate. More often than not, the pay they're offering is way, way too low for the market at large, never mind myself.

Sometimes I get a reply, sometimes not, but I get the feeling that by & large the terms are out of their hands, and I doubt the recruiter sending the emails/making contacts is the same person that got the req from the hiring manager/company. It's that person, the person accepting the req, that needs to know the market and work with the hiring entity to put together a realistic job package. It's that person you should be frustrated with.

I love Portland, Maine. I don't blame you for not wanting to leave.

I'm shocked how many telecommuters live here in Maine; and dismayed at the number of companies who think we actually want to move to the Valley.

You might not be 22, full of idealism and hope for the future, completely distracted by high profile start up capital and valley life style. As someone who was recently interviewing in SF, I find that the younger "nothing but my bike and my MacBook" type well geared for that. The pay is good when you don't have a family and are willing to pay 2300 for a one bedroom shithole.

Of course, I'm hand waving and over generalizing. But I'd say a large portion of the talent demand meets that transient start up life style and many recruiters probably assume that if you are in tech, that its what you want.

Sounds like you have the same experience with recruiters as I do!

I wish linkedin would allow you to add this stuff to your profile. Ideally the search/spam feature of linkedin that recruiters use, would have to pass your filter before getting sent to you. This way if you get notified at least it passed your filter and you would be OK with it.

That would be a feature I would pay for.

I put it right in my summary if I'm getting nagged a lot. Just a notice saying for recruiters to not contact me that way our time is not wasted.

A link to a post like yours would be the perfect response for emails such as:

"Hi James

Please contact me asap or I can call you ??

I'd like to discuss a PHP contract role your perfect for

Speak soon"

Yeah, I'm hoping it will save me some time. Now I can just send them this link each time I get a message, and if they bother following the link, doing as I say, and writing back then I know they are at least serious and not just fishing.

OP, why bother replying to posts where the recruiter clearly didn't read your profile at all? It's a nice gesture, but the sender is creating work for you by being lazy and off target. An offline version might be responding to junk mail with a note about what you'd really like to buy.

Are you replying on the off chance the spammer is sitting on a cushy job order they haven't mentioned?

I mark-as-read without reading unless I'm actively looking. So why do you open them?

Adding a criteria filter is also a feature I'd pay for. Great Idea.

What I want is even simpler.

On LinkedIn I told you that due to family circumstances I am not available for full time work until the summer of 2014. Is it 2014? Do you have a part time contract? No and no? Then why are you contacting me?

I really don't mind recruiters badgering me by email or any form of non-disruptive communication. Keeps me nicely updated on the market, and tells me who to avoid should I actively be looking for something.

Heh, I wish this sort of stuff happened to me.

I don't receive recruitment messages, not even the spammy ones.

This guy will change his tune when he gets fired for being an asshole.

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