We're so lucky to be in an industry where our biggest problem is too many people trying to hire us. Thank god I'm not an auto worker.
Maybe it's different in Chicago, though, I don't have people calling me every day or being rude. I just feel like it doesn't hurt to keep a positive relationship with anybody who might one day find me a job when I really need it.
That's where I draw the line from 'polite refusal' to 'try to string them along to figure out where they got my info'
Hell, when I graduated college 5 years ago, we were talking about the precipitous drop in CS enrollments and the outsourcing of the entire software industry. Now, CS is the most popular major at my undergrad.
Really? We are arrogant because the following behaviours appear to imply arrogance on the part of the recruiter:
1. A recruiter constantly spams our inboxes with job descriptions that are either wildly different from our skillsets. (I get job descriptions that talk about 10 years of experience). It is not that fucking hard to read my Linkedin profile before you spam me.
2. Ask me technical questions which the person asking me has no qualification to answer. This is the one that pisses me off. It started off when I was just starting out with questions like what is Polymorphism where an answer which didn't sentence match the company answer confused them. Recently, one asked me to describe statistical graphic modes (when they should have meant statistical graphical models). The person had no idea what any of these things meant.
3. Try to play a pressure game. When I politely declined to do further interviews at one company because I had accepted another offer, the head recruiter literally harassed me, telling me I was making a bad decision, resorting to outright lying about the work I would be doing. (I knew enough about what the role would involve from talking to their engineers) and calling me twenty times or so that week.
No, this is a group of people who don't know how to do interviewing, working for broken companies. Now, not all recruiters are like that. One time, I was recruited by a company where the "technical recruiter" had a degree in Computer Science. That was a joyful experience. I felt like what I was saying was understood and they weren't looking for whether there was intonation match going on here.
if i'm in a chatty mood, i can even get insider information from these casual conversations like how fast these companies are growing and what technology they use behind the scenes. when companies hire recruiters, this information is leaked out. they know this; that's part of the dance to attract talent.
this information then can be used in my own interviews with people i'm trying to hire. see how that works? it's almost as if we're competing in a market. let's call it.... the labor market.
good recruiters are highly active in this back and forth, that's how they make their living. bad ones just send shitty emails and give out info without producing/capturing any value themselves.
the thing most engineers don't understand is that in a business context, everything in your environment can be used to your advantage, if you just figure out how. even annoying emails. i'm not saying i've figured it all out, but this is definitely one obvious thing that everyone who runs a company or even a small team is aware of.
and that's why most people don't run startups. they'd rather sit there and be annoyed at things and write passive aggressive emails to people who won't even read them. LOL you might as well write something similar up and send it to the guy who sends the penis pills or oxycontin emails also. make sure you make those nice check boxes too! he's going to give just about as much of a shit.
furthermore, 80/20 rule applies and a simple set of procmail filters can get rid of the vast majority of recruiter emails. there's only a few dozen firms that do this sort of thing at any any appreciable scale. but really, you should be reading these emails too, if you give a shit about the industry you work in
to me this just sounds like faux-annoyance / ego tripping on how in-demand our field currently is. it won't last forever. i know because i've lived through 2 downturns already.