> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text. This means that it is very easy to get overwhelmed by the number of recruiters trying to call you, and we will explore time management a little further down the text.
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...
I have a feeling it's a sales tactic which seeks to purposely use up a candidate's time with the hope that the candidate falls victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
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.
It's weird to imagine devious hidden motives like this, when recruiters already have obvious natural reasons to want to do a phone call.
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.
Another element to a phone call is commitment. If you are casually looking and only entertaining emails then you're probably not an active candidate and are a waste of their time. I don't even respond to recruiter emails anymore since I assume they are email bots.
Side discussion: Why is it that they have to find someone for the company? Why can't I instead have an agent that goes around and sells me to potential companies?
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.
The value that recruiters offer is delivering good candidates. If you convince a recruiter that you're a good candidate, then they will run around selling you to companies! And companies will listen, because the recruiter has build a reputation by delivering good candidates in the past - that's how recruiting works.
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?
I mean you could if you wanted. But why would you want to pay someone to line up interviews for you? Agents don’t get you jobs. They get you visibility.
I would tend to agree. My intuition is also that (1) some headhunters might use time-spent-on-the-phone as a metric linked to bonuses (think: click as a proxy for sales in online advertising) and (2) the phone lets headhunter gather intel that you end up leaking in the discussion and that you would not leak via email. Some have great tactics to make you speak “now that you’re on the call”.
I think the time on the phone metric is a big thing, especially when the recruiters were working in office. I've been in the offices of recruiters and it's very much a bullpen-type situation and there's a manager on the side somewhere who's watching and will view those not on the phone as not working.
Thinking about my most recent job search (in 2021), I think that this is very much the case—I had a lot more email and text-based interactions this time around than anytime before.
The latter is a negotiation tactic given in "Never Split the Difference". Essentially communicating over text/email allows you to carefully think about your words, whereas over a call or video call you can read tone of voice, body language, etc. and throw people off balance and reveal info.
I’ve seen recruiters “leak” a lot of “confidential” information from their clients saying “I’ve been asked not to share this but…”. I’ve always taken such messages with a pinch of cynicism but typically such messages are corresponded by phone where an audit trail is less more easily deniable.
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.
Yes this. I see a lot of elaborate ideas about why recruiters prefer the phone, but it's simply playing to their strengths. It doesn't even need to be nefarious, everyone in the world plays to their own strengths in life.
Too cynical. Having been through dozens of these over the last couple years, it genuinely seems like most are just trying to make sure they aren't referring an asshole. One of the many personality filters.
I don't think assholes are common enough to warrant a blanket filtering process. I think this is just a common way to justify closer contact, whether it be phone or video. It really is just sales, and the more personal, the better.
You will be surprised. The absolute worst candidates can stay very long in market and appear everywhere. Someone can look good on paper but a short call can tell you right away that you do not want to deal with them.
Ok, remove any cynicism. I just don't want the phone call, I don't care how 'warm' the other party finds it.
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?
A 'warmer' (aka 'qualification') means finding out if there is likely a material, beneficial connection between the parties.
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.
While that may be true, the recruiter doesn't get paid if you don't get hired. And even if it is a bad match for you, they still want you to get hired so they get paid.
There is no such thing as a perfect alignment of incentives but there is such a thing as 'no alignment of incentives' and it's better for parties to know that straight up.
It's a bit more complex than that in my experience, think Dale Carnegie's tactics. They want to build "rapport" by making you to talk about yourself and then use that to make you to commit. It probably worked much better 20 years ago, when people actually talked to their friends on the phone but, I guess, they still get bites since they stick to this so hard.
Human connection counts for something, for some people more consciously than others.
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.
I don’t think it’s so complicated. It’s more that everyone in a sales oriented profession knows that phone calls are where deals get done. Almost impossible to close a deal over email.
Details get hashed out that way. But I've never seen a multi-million dollar deal closed anywhere but in the crypto space without at least a call, and much more often a video call.
If a large deal ($25,000+), this is only the case with the largest tech companies (most customers would order $25k of Apple products online but not buy new expense management software without a call).
Yeah this is a backwards way to think about things. The vast majority of "deals" that I do on the buy side are done with significantly less friction than even email, and I place a high premium on that convenience. If every newsletter I subscribed to required a phone call to close the deal with me, none of them would have my business.
Are you going to go work a job without ever talking face to face with someone there?
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.
All of those items can be accomplished over email. I think the recruiter/employer might have more of an advantage of discussing items like salary over the phone but that's all the more reason to prefer email as the potential employee.
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'm happy to spend a lot of time talking interactively with hiring managers and prospective teams. Recruiters aren't hiring managers and I think the entirety of my interactions with them can be managed successfully and efficiently asynchronously.
It's true, you would want to talk to some people eventually but the current state of the affairs is that the recruiters insist on communicating over the phone only. E.g. you get a message on Linked in "Hi, I have a software engineer job, interested? Let's hop on a quick call!", if you reply with something like: where is this job? what kind of industry? what is the compensation? etc. 90% of the times will be "Let's schedule a call". If you insist - they will either keep replying the same or disappear.
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.
It was an application support position with shifts and I was looking for a software dev position and I just didn’t feel any good vibes in the interview. It didn’t seem like the kind of place I wanted to work.
only very smart recruiters would think to do this, most are likely just trying to expedite the process against competition (other recruiters, other candidates represented by those recruiters)
It's more about objection handling and not letting prospects fall out of their funnel. In email, if someone has an objection and they are an avoidant type (most people), they will ignore the email thread for a long time and potentially forget about the thread completely. This can drag out communications for a weeks as the sales person is constantly having to revive the thread after it is apparent the prospect is avoiding. On a phone call, they can sense the apprehension, elicit the objection and handle it in minutes rather than days of silence. For this reason phone calls feel more efficient and safe to them.
I always thought the preference for phone calls over e-mails is so there's no written account of anything that might be convenient to backtrack on in the future.
Not really. No recruiter is trying to avoid a paper trail, that's not their gig. It's a reputation based industry, there's no limited liability like with corporations.
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.
Having worked with recruiters on the other side, I think the biggest contributor is a version of number 2 - they think they will get a better result via their amazing powers of verbal persuasion and charm.
In reality they are probably applying selection bias and only moving forward on the people sufficiently interested that they actually pick up the phone.
That sounds effective, they are probably happy with that bias. If people aren't interested enough to talk to them for half an hour then the outcome will probably be so-so.
Even if the selection part is true, it chases away people who cannot be bothered to interact with a human being for 20 minutes or so. High value is a different set of people with unknown intersection.
No, it is not people who can't interact with a human being for 20 minutes, but with tens of them. If it were an agent / talent model, where it is a somewhat large amount of interaction with a single individual, that would be one thing. But interactively sharing the same information with 20 different recruiters is just a waste of time that has nothing to do with an inability to be bothered to interact with people.
When I get 10 LinkedIn messages a day, no, I cannot be bothered to interact with each of them for 20 minutes. And since they all refuse to send along any relevant details whatsoever, I can't even cull that to the subset that's plausibly interesting.
I'll add that sales is about overcoming objections. This is done most effectively in real-time. Sales of all variants have a preference for real-time discussions because they can get people to agree with things and navigate the turning no into yes.
Right, this makes sense for the person doing the selling. And it's why it makes sense to have a strong bias against people treating one's career as a sales engagement.
I don't think that is true anymore now that several jurisdictions says that the recruiter must mention a number first on the salary. They would never do that if they can at all avoid doing so. At any cost.
When I was a recruiter, mostly I wanted to make sure you could speak English well enough to hold a conversation, make sure you were interested enough to go through the process, and make sure you weren’t an asshole. Also I could help sell you to the hiring manager by getting details I know the manager is looking for, and getting that information over email can take too much back & forth. But really just making sure you could hold a conversation was big, as so many applicants cannot.
I've heard many people, often project managers, mention 'fit' and filtering out assholes, but my definition of an asshole is one who's mean, uncaring, and arrogant. But I've never seen that kind of person in the 10 years I've worked in software development.
What do you define as and asshole, and do you run across many of them?
When you are a recruiter, you talk to all types. You probably have seen many in part because the recruiter filtered them out. And you are right, most people are not assholes. But if a toxic grade-A dip shit applies, it’s my job to make sure that person doesn’t get within 100km of the hiring team, or they will start questioning why I’m even around at all.
> my definition of an asshole is one who's mean, uncaring, and arrogant
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.
> When I was a recruiter, mostly I wanted to make sure you could speak English well enough to hold a conversation, make sure you were interested enough to go through the process, and make sure you weren’t an asshole
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. ;-)
Strong disagree. As a candidate I want to make sure everyone’s time is being used effectively, and I’m perfectly happy to offer up information that can be used to make sure it’s a good match. It’s not “jerky” to want to know a candidate can hold a conversation: it’s (in my opinion) eminently reasonable due diligence.
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.
Third-party recruiters are the ones who always waste my time. Before Covid, many would insist on meeting in person at their office. I even had one that wanted to meet me at 4:30pm in downtown Dallas. That was an easy 'no' for me.
In-house recruiters are totally different. They represent the actual hiring company and aren't just submitting your resume to a job posting.
Someone who immediately jumps to calling someone a jerk, not knowing that there are probably good reasons for what a professional recruiter does (like phone calls) probably is a jerk themselves, honestly. I personally appreciated when my recruiter would talk with me on the phone versus email, as they took the time to really listen to me and find out what I wanted from a job, rather than treating me like another dart they had to throw out of twenty darts to try and get a bullseye. Maybe I’ve always talked to good recruiters but I’ve never questioned their methods and gotten several good jobs with great pay raises from them.
I totally agree. The problem isn’t that I don’t want to get on the phone. The problem is that I don’t want to get on the phone for half an hour without even having a job description or a pay range. That makes the recruiter a jerk.
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..."
No. Phone calls are more personal than emails. Some people like that.
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 mean, all I expect is a mail written by someone personally, referencing at least any of my work, offering a job I’m actually qualified for and would fit previous experience.
Receiving fifty mails for a senior Java developer is pretty jarring if there’s no single Java role on your CV…
Is that too much to ask from recruiters?
Programmers as a group may be hard to please. The programmer in question, though, is not so hard: Send them an email to schedule the meeting with the hiring manager. That's not hard.
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?
> The programmer in question, though, is not so hard: Send them an email to schedule the meeting with the hiring manager. That's not hard.
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'll typically give out 3 slots that work for me and "if none of those work, propose a few days next week where you have availability and I'll offer additional slot in those days".
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.
Sure, if I wanted to offer “take any free time” to the counterparty. It’s more common that I want to offer a slot that’s adjacent to other interruptions in my day. If I have a 4 hour block of focused work time, I’m not offering as an opening bid 30 minutes in the middle of it to my CEO let alone a recruiter.
Now gomand schedule five interviews that way. Makes 15 slots blocked, till responses are in. And then the day not packed in a way that remaining time can be used in meaingful ways.
What happened to the happy middle ground of sending a personal email? Why are the two extremes having someone insist on synchronous voice communication on the one side and a fully automated e-mail on the other?
I don't think it's that simple really; it seems like people (not just programmers) are hard to please because the circumstances and available time differ from day to day, and different conversations are better sometimes in email and others on a call.
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
> 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.
...
> 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.
Former recruiter, current data analyst here… recruiters do that for 2 reasons.. 1) when you call someone it is immediate and you control the process. They aren’t waiting for you to email back. 2) recruiters want your “buy in”. It’s old school bs but if you can’t make time for a phone call then how committed are you to the process. Having said that, I’m currently looking and receive 10+ calls and emails a week. I rarely answer the calls or reply to emails but if the email is interesting to me and looks like a fit then I reply and ask them to call when they can.
Well, you just described the process for most programmers: we want to first see if we are interested and only then schedule a phone call. Pressuring me into a phone call just nets you a generic "let me get back to you" and 90% of the time I never do.
I am not committed to their process, not to the process, you know?
You're right on the money. Plus, most people want to see if the role is actually a fit. 50% of the roles I receive are data pipeline and BI infrastructure roles. I'm on the analytics side but because SQL is on my resume, it comes up in their searches. Majority of recruiters don't know the different so of course I don't want to waste 10-15 minutes on each of these calls.
The worst are the ones that will somehow dig up your company desk phone # and call you in the middle of the day at work.
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.
I have never heard of this maker vs manager schedule thing before. It really resonates with me. I just finished a rotation as a primary contributor on leave from my manager role and was having a real hard time telling people I had to cancel meetings from my normal job bc I couldn’t switch mental gears like that. This link is so very true it’s scary…I had been wondering if anyone was good at doing both, and if I could exercise my brain muscles to be able to switch between the two during the day. Anyone have any luck at that? I feels really really hard.
My job involves a lot of meetings, and also doing a lot of IC work. What works for me is to take 2-3 hrs every week thinking through all the IC work I need to do and breaking it down into chunks that can be completed in 6-8 1 hour blocks of time. That’s the longest block of time I can hope to find without any interruptions. I break things down to the level that I can write the commit message for the changes I’m about to make. Then I use to time slots to make the changes.
Yea, I assume it would be something like cutting the day in half. PG said to put the calls at the end of the day, so it didn't feel like an interruption. I can see how that would work; similar to what you're saying. I wonder if top-of-game CEOs and people like that are better at switching between IC and manager, or if they are just manager from day one. It seems like Elon Musk may be one of these bright people who can concurrently IC and manage.
Because getting someone on the phone is a necessary stop along the path to closing a deal. It's also a high bandwidth form of communication, so it's just plain practical.
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.
I absolutely agree a/some phone calls are necessary at some point in the recruiting process between recruiter and candidate.
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.
This isn't "a deal", it's a job that someone will spend a huge portion of their time doing for multiple years. Thinking of it like selling a car is exactly why the approach is so problematic.
In my experience, sales people who have very few reservations about cold calling somebody treat it as a bulk process and depersonalize things.
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.
I have had many similar experiences. A recruiter contacts me via email regarding an open position, I ask for details in the email reply. They send me an email back saying we should schedule a call so they can answer my questions. I’m not even asking hard questions just “what is the salary range”, “when are you looking to fill the position”, “how many are on the team”, etc.
I usually don’t waste my time with recruiters who don’t answer the most basic questions via email.
Perhaps it's a filter to make sure they don't move further with a candidate who is not serious? And like most things...there are likely few good confluent reasons for it despite none of the reasons influencing eachother. Some that others have mentioned so far.
> Perhaps it's a filter to make sure they don't move further with a candidate who is not serious?
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.
I wish they would operate over sms and email as well...but they have it in their minds that the little games help. I'm sure it right runs people off but for them, answering texts and emails all day is probably not fruitful. It is much more convenient for us but not them and...we are not the customer.
> Perhaps it's a filter to make sure they don't move further with a candidate who is not serious?
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?
On the other hand, if a recruiter isn't willing to 'work with me' and spend a few minutes on replying an email, are they 'work with me' in the future? Or push their way around for what's best for them?
I enjoy my job and salary...I don't have anything to lose by filtering out non-serious recruiters.
This works both ways. If you're unwilling to respond to the most basic questions about the job, how serious are you, and/or why are you concealing that information?
Every call you take is an opportunity for you to bolster your final asking price. Use calls to your advantage.
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.
My experience (mostly on the hiring side) is that an in-house recruiter is indeed trying to close you if they think you'll be a good fit (they're measured/bonused on metrics around their job, after all) and third-party recruiters are just interested in closing the deal and you staying 90 days.
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.
"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!"
The goal isn't to maximize efficiency. It is to increase human connection. Why?
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
I'm deaf and wear hearing aids, so talking on phones or any situation where I can't effectively lip read is an exercise in frustration. I can hear the other side, but the words just aren't coming through in my brain.
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.
I made a big point of saying this over and over during a previous job search and people still ignored what I said and called. They'd even acknowledge that I asked them not to call at the beginning of the call.
Phone calls are synchronous. You have each others attention, questions can be answered quickly. Also the big one is that hard to answer questions will die in an async setting. What's your current salary, why did you leave your last job so soon, anything that creates a desire to procrastinate with an answer.
Questions like these may be appropriate¹ to ask in a scheduled interview. It's completely not respectful to pepper a person's week with multiple unscheduled "quick chats" or callbacks. If they want to schedule something that's what calendly is for.
¹The salary question is illegal in some places and kinda shady in the others.
> 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.
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.
The like the phone so that they can ask questions in passing to find out what other roles they're competing for. You're their commission, so they have a sports coach/psychologist approach to groom and herd you. I pretty much shouted at the recruiter for my current job, finally losing it with all her calls just before I went into the interview - a sheepdog darting left and right of the sheep.
Well that just sounds like that particular recruiter had some operational issues. Although she got you on the phone and got you to agree to a meeting so she was doing something right. At any rate, she should have just used a Calendly link or something. But there are many reasons why introductory phone calls (screens) are very necessary.
In the past I have had this problem often, round after round of handshakes back and forth trying to get availability to schedule brief phone calls despite me saying repeatedly “just call me”.
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.
Annoying, but an important signal in a job search. If they don't have it together when they should be putting their best foot forward, they're going to be a complete disaster on the other side.
Yes, company recruiters are part of the external face of the company. If they are chaotic - don't sign on.
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 used to have recruiters call me daily and I just had to stop answering the phone on random numbers. I can't work for a customer and take recruiter calls at the same time. You would think recruiters would understand this but they just done care and just continue calling about new roles.
Having read some of the comments, I wonder about the challenges with making myself a recruiter that doesn’t do the stupid things such as cold calling and wasting peoples time.
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.
The use calls because they can lie on the call without the fear of being called up on it, while in email you are will have a record of the conversation.
I generally do not like independent headhunters. My experience with most of them has been mixed.
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 think this is because the recruiting agencies deliberately hire extroverts. As an example, in New York City, Talener. My friends tell me that the company mostly hires young people who engaged in a large number of social activities at college. Sororities, fraternities, soup kitchens, art clubs, music clubs, anything social. It’s a company of extreme extroverts.
When looking at his LinkedIn, I only see one job with tenure over 4 years almost 10 years back and most other jobs are well below 2 years. It seems like he definitely is able to find new jobs very efficiently so I think his advice here is valuable.
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.
I don't think this is only for leadership roles. If you don't stick around long enough to see how your work has evolved, your APIs have been used, how easy is it to adapt your work to new requirements, how you handed over ownership to someone else/another team etc etc, I think you left very valuable learning opportunities on the table.
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.
As an employee you should never think of yourself as having skin in the game. The company pays you for your time and expertise and compensates for your time. How successfully they leverage that time and expertise is on them, not on you.
Job hopping is the most effective way to increase your income and position in tech.
I think you misunderstood the parent posts. It's that your impact on a particular project doesn't become visible for a few years. If you think you quit after delivering your project near to budget and timeline, then you're left thinking you did a pretty good job, but only later is it possible to see if your architectural decisions are easy to maintain; if your API is easy to use; etc. The Senior Roles are supposed to have grown in knowledge about how all their decisions play out over a long time period, but if they've never stick around to observe the consequences of their decisions, then that might lead a recruiter to suspect whether they have learned what a Senior would be expected to know.
If we were talking about SWEs, I'd say short tenures are now considered a pro, not a con. Likewise, staying too long at a company (say, 5+ years), seems to be considered a big red flag now. Exceptions given if company is FAANGMULA or similar caliber.
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...
I dunno, if I make a list of leaders I've worked with that I'd want to hire if I started my own thing... I'm sure keeping the machine alive and the paychecks flowing was near the top of their priority list, but most of their decisions seemed motivated by other things.
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.
Right, but these are value adds to the business, rather than personal career goals, which is what I’m getting at (a business will assess your worth not on your career goals but what you are worth to the business, and personal career goals aren’t a great measure of that, unless you can craft such goals very carefully).
I guess I'm trying to saying that you should craft your goals that way. And if accomplishing your goals doesn't also count as adding value to the business, you should go find a company where it does.
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.
Also I don't think anyone will outright reject you for staying too long at one company.
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.
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".
At my company at least, we definitely prefer longer average tenures over shorter ones. Very short stays (say less than 2-3 years) and many hops implies you’re more interested in filling out your resume and jumping to the next pay raise than you are in making any meaningful contribution to the work our team is doing.
I would never consider someone staying at their current job for 5+ years a negative, unless it is accompanied by negative references from coworkers.
Do you give your employees substantial raises every year as an incentive to stay and not look for a job elsewhere every 2-3 years?
I was able to increase my salary by 400% in the past 2 years by moving around. But that doesn't mean I haven't made a huge impact on the products I've worked on for 1 year each, because I did.
We had a guy who made a huge “impact” alright. He left almost three years ago and we’re still trying to unwind the mess he made.
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.
look up people that can accomplish a lot in short period of time, at least less than half a year or <2years, like geohot, Alyssa Rosenzweig or Mike Blumenkrantz and more
Have no idea who the others are, but I remember geohot from the various HN threads discussing their self-driving project: a safety-critical piece of software with important parts implemented in Python and running on an Android phone. When the NHTSA started asking some questions about safety standards compliance, geohot cancelled the project.
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.”
Another example for a 10x developer would be fabrice bellard. I've participated in this year's advent of code and usually needed dozens of minutes if not hours to solve examples. Then you see some of the videos from streamers on the leaderboard. they just quickly type out code. Sure, I hadn't practiced much and they had a lot of practice (doing AoC was my attempt of getting some), but they are definitely a two digit multiplier away from my performance. Of course, this doesn't directly translate to performance on the real job though, but there is a correlation I'd say.
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).
I’m sorry but it sounds like you’ve just been really lucky in where you’ve worked at.
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.
What a pleasure it must be working with someone who think important work is mind numbing and great company let him "jam" on "cutting edge" stuff (which I always translate as "dead in two years because too boring eventually for the jammers")
People work somewhere to make money... shocker! Unless you're some sort of non-profit or a real pioneer in a certain field (SpaceX?), your employees will be there mostly for the paycheck. People aren't interested in making a meaningful contribution if they're building a rehashed CRUD app for the 15th time.
+1 for this. At six months At my current place I am in the top half of engineers for seniority and this has been one of the nicest places I’ve ever worked. At previous companies I’ve been in meetings where high level managers veto prospective hires the entire team wanted because they had been at their current company for “too long” where “too long” was 4 years without moving into management.
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.
I get why engineers hate it. I am on a team where at 2 months, if we become fully staffed at some point, I will be in the top half of seniority between resignations and transfers to new teams.
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.
It makes sense since such people have more diverse experience and more adaptive, agile. They could bring new perspective to the team. I would say balanced approach is better - part of long tenure applicants and part of the hopping ones.
Large traditional engineering companies have tenures like this. I joined a dev team working on CFD software and the average tenure was over 10 years. Made even less sense when by jumping I’m working on much less difficult code but getting paid a lot more.
I’m 18 months in to my current role. Strong performance reviews but promotion is based on tenure so I need to wait at least another two years to have a good shot. Or, I can go elsewhere and get the promotion (and remote work, which is what I really want).
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.
How is it not? How does anyone join a company and make any significant contributions in less than 2 years? How do you even become a leader within a company in less than two years? You just throw out all the relationships you have built every 2 years? It is a red flag.
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.
I mean, I agree, personally. But my encounters in the wild while interviewing, plus comments on Blind, etc. would indicate the wider consensus is that short tenures are preferable to long tenures.
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.
I work at one such "top company". Internal mobility is very, very easy and well-supported by the company (great business choice IMO). I am not sure if would even make sense to talk about "sticking around" at the company level. One can easily choose between 1x5yrs of experience, 5x1yr or anywhere in between.
(This is obviously orthogonal to your point about perceptions and attitudes, but I felt compelled to chime in.)
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
Anecdotally, I've worked at the same small company for around 15 years now.
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.
Yes, there are still many. The reasons can be varied. A lot of times the person might just like where they are doing what they do. Or at least are not unhappy enough to experience the disruption of looking for a new job.
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.
the leetcode interview process is also seen as daunting and a huge barrier that can make someone think twice about switching jobs
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.
> Outside of FAANG, do you frequently find candidates who stick around that long at companies?
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).
How do you reconcile that as a red flag with the massive raises people get from moving companies? Are you basically looking for someone who would turn down doubling their salary?
Yes, I know I do consider it: will this guy believe there's a right to raise or will he instead accept there's a duty to perform ?
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.
Well, if I think the person is just job hopping for salary and will only stay six months, then I'd pass them over. Or offer a six month contract if we really need them.
When I hire, I'd like to keep them for at least 2-4 years for the company's sanity.
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?
I think the opposite. Usually a short (sub 2 years) tenure at a company means they're on the chopping block, bonuses didn't come through, refreshers weren't granted, stock options didn't continue, etc.
How can you assume that? Especially when people are moving around constantly due to lack of promotions, compensation or recognition. It’s essentially religion at this point to hop every 2 years to “level up”.
Yup. It's common knowledge that in average Big Tech company culture, the easiest way to get a raise, better total comp, or a promotion is to get a new job every 2-3 years. Why would any engineer put himself/herself through a review process to get a measly sub-10% increase when they can get 20%+ by interviewing?
Speaking as someone who was recently outside of FAANGMULA type companies, but now finally got in...
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.
How do you reconcile that your peers likely earn more than you, and perhaps then, you were underpaid for your (negotiation) skills of the same position?
I don't imagine the delta is extreme. I know the delta exists because post-hire, my manager implied it, and that he would do his best to close it. Part of it is my lack of negotiation skills as you say (also implied by my boss), and part of it is because my background is coming from an unsexy non-tech company (implied by the internal recruiter).
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.
I'm astounded that FAANGs would want people who had already done a major, intensive leetcode interview to get in the door and had been working for 2-3 years would be asked to do another similarly-intense interview. I've commented on this before, but it seems as if there's not much trust or standardization in interview processes across the top of the industry. If there were, they wouldn't be asking engineers to grind leetcode again a few years later after already proving their mettle.
I believe the original intention of the leetcode interview is to let the employer gauge the thought processes, communication style, and problem solving approach of the candidate, more so than strictly the candidate's ability to get the absolute hyperoptimal solution.
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.
I mean, I agree, personally. But my encounters in the wild while interviewing, plus comments on Blind, etc. would indicate the wider consensus is that short tenures are preferable to long tenures.
I had no idea Lyft and Uber both paid as much as FAANG - the stock prices don’t seem to correlate (it’s sub-50 compared to the rest), nor did I think they paid as well as Google, Microsoft or Facebook.
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.
By contrast, I have recently accepted a new position, and in almost every interview I was asked, with a negative connotation, why I had stayed so long (6 years) with my current employer.
In my opinion it can be a sign of loyalty, depth, engagement and responsibility among other things. I don’t understand how this can be viewed as a negative. Seems almost pathological to me to suggest that job hopping is preferred.
Very few companies increase their pay in line with market trends. If you’re at a company for 6 years, you’re likely getting paid undermarket rate. When I see someone doing that - I wonder, “are they not willing to go outside their comfort zone even when there are clear benefits?”
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.
You do realize you are on HackerNews, where Paul Graham says it’s a negative trait for founders, start up workers, etc. So most companies that are growing or are looking to change directions will feel this way.
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.
> 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.
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.
Have you considered that I had exit interviews and gathered actual feedback before generalizing?
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.
So chiming back in here a few days later since it will probably be just you that sees this...
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).
---
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.
(I don't at all mind if you comment even further.)
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.
---
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.)
Although a wonderfully pithy platitude this doesn't tell the whole story. Assholes often congregate in groups because they reinforce and enable each others' negative tendencies, so if you consistently meet a lot of them then it can also mean that you're at least an OK person that's bad at selecting friends, coworkers, or places to live.
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.
I’m sorry but I fully stand by what I wrote. Seeing many jobs with short tenure indicates something is wrong, either the person is too hard to please or the person isn’t good at their job. I will most certainly pass on that candidate unless there’s an extraordinary reason not to.
1 or 2 short gigs is bad luck. A resume filled with short gigs indicates that the person probably has issues. I don't need to take a chance on hiring this person where there are dozens upon dozens of qualified candidates with better grades of resume.
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.
You don’t seem to understand. No one owes you a job. It doesn’t matter what their reasons are.
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.
Saying that I am "whining" when I tried to ask for an alternative take on a seemingly suspicious situation clearly shows who is "whining" here and who came for a discussion. Saying "it doesn't matter what your former employers' reasons were" is also making me doubt you are even interested in discussing at all or just came here to throw your opinions at me. We no longer live in slavery, you know?
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.
In what way were they not sticking to the agreed contract? Because whether people view you leaving as reasonable or not is going to hinge a lot on what you mean by that
I was promised -- and signed a contract with that language -- that my job will be strictly technical and I will not be made responsible for project planning, prioritization or coaching.
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’ve never had a same manager for longer than 2 years in my entire 14y career. In fact average is around 1 year. Even if they stay at the same company they sure move teams around frequently. Directors and above tend to stay for longer.
I came here to say this as well I was at a company for 6 years. Much more after often I would see managers hop every 2-3 years and be the one to get raises and promotions.
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.
> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource
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.
It's unclear to me what you'd like the recruiter to have done differently. They don't work inside the company and have no more access to unbiased information about it than you do as a candidate.
You identified some red flags yourself pre-hire and then bailed early when it turned out bad. It all seems pretty much fine.
"they told me it was just a couple disgruntled former employees trying to make the company look bad" is still deceptive with this setup. If they really don't have any inside info, why make that claim?
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.
I started dealing with independent IT headhunters back in 1997. Back then they were more valuable, and seemed to somehow know about open positions that I did not know of.
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.
fees are usually paid on candidate start date, with a rebate clause based on how long the candidate stays (i.e 100% refund if placed candidate does not stay past probation)
A lot of recruiters don't get paid when you sign, they get paid when you've spent something like 90+ days in the role to avoid that exact problem and align incentives a bit better.
Yes, it's a two-sided market like estate agents (realtors) and used car salespeople. But without enough turnover to do statistical satisfaction management like Uber. And the dating company problem that satisfied customers don't come back.
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 could have done worse than two weeks. The former employees who would not talk were probably under a non-disparagement agreement from their severance - and that agreement under a non-disclosure agreement.
In this case however, the relative silence is a good indicator.
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.
To clarify, “senior role” here means a senior management role (the author is a Senior Director Of Engineering) rather than Senior Software Engineer, as probably most folks will read it. Might want to update the title to “senior management role” to make that plain.
Almost all of the advice is good either way. I don't use a spreadsheet yet, but there was very little else that was inapplicable to the recruiter relationships and hiring processes in which I've thus far participated as a senior engineer.
This article does not echo my personal experience. I recently left a company. Prior to leaving but after making it know to a few key people that I wasn't likely to stay, I had two exploratory contracts lined up. (Exploratory for me, not them.) Within two weeks, I had a massive offer in front of me from a third company. When I let them others know I was going to take that, there was a minor bidding war. I landed a senior (Head of ...) role with little to no effort and negotiated maintaining advisory roles with non competitive orgs.
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.
Particularly confusing because "Senior X" is a job title in big tech cos where it actually means "mid-career" or even "early mid-career". Certainly not Xm massive, but maybe the upper half/third of XXXk massive.
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
This is wildly inaccurate. Senior in Google is 350k, in Microsoft 260k, in Amazon 340k. "Early mid-career" is also wildly inaccurate. While the ladder in Google goes up to 11, 90% of people never exceed 5 (senior). It's also the last level where your primary responsibility is designing and developing software, everything above that is about influencing.
> This is wildly inaccurate. Senior in Google is 350k, in Microsoft 260k, in Amazon 340k.
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".
This reality ("influencing" as you put it) hit me hard this year. It's something I don't care about in the least, and I had to accept staying "senior" for the indefinite future. Human organizations are not what you thought they are when you were in your early 20s ...
Definitely get comfortable with independent recruiters. I've written a few blurbs about this to people who've contacted me here on HN.
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.
I've always avoided independent recruiters because they charge a big commission (30% of my salary?) to the employer, and I worry that with smaller startups this will put meaningful downward pressure on the salary I can negotiate. Also, I did once go through a 3P recruiter by mistake and they insisted on intermediaries every part of the process in a way that felt inefficient (e.g. send recruiter a list of times, they send them to company, company picks one and tells recruiter, who tells me).
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.
I’m a recruiter but I’ve also been a hiring manager working with recruiters. Generally recruiter fees and salary fees come out of separate pots for permanent roles, although for contract roles they will come out of your end.
Probably the big thing about the 3p guys is they seem to know who is hiring, and it goes beyond what you can find yourself. So those extra jobs are basically free-rolls for you. Conversations with them always end up with "have you heard of x" where x is yet another firm that either I haven't heard of, or I don't have a contact there. Firms that are known to be currently hiring are worth a lot more than firms that are just a known name.
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.
How do you deal with separate emails from different recruitors all for the same job? I notice if a new job in my area I get everyone telling me about the same position. Who do you go with? If you deal with multiple recruitors and it turns out they are selling the same position the company may refuse to accept your resume.. Sometimes it's easier to apply directly so they try to hold back who the position is for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keeping a spreadsheet is such a good idea - during my last search I was talking to a dozen different companies initially, and it would have been impossible to keep on top of everything without some sort of organization.
years ago I went further and created a full web app to manage/track. it could manage email templates, send out emails with link tracking, had some ways to keep track of opportunities, let me keep multiple versions of a resume on hand, etc. Was moderately useful, as years before, I'd done 'spreadsheet' stuff, and that was painful. 3-4 weeks, 120+ outreaches, very few replies, etc.
My big gripe with the phone calls is that it is 30 minutes to just have your resume presented to someone and likely rejected (I am on the low end of experienced, so get recruiters pitching my 2 years of experience for senior roles).
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.
Sounds like you could probably vet recruiters/opps a bit more heavily. You have to place your chips on the best bets and screen aggressively to make sure there's a mutual fit. You can hang up on them quickly if things don't seem right.
This. I'm at a point where I can get the feel for a third party recruiter, especially on whether they can sell me to a hiring manager with whom they have a personal relationship with.
Those are the third party recruiters you want to work with. They are pretty rare though.
Before you take a call, make sure they have done their homework and are presenting a role that is the right fit for you. If they won’t tell you the company or basic information through email, throw them out — they’re not acting in good faith. On the call, cut right to the chase and ask for salary range and what the role will actually entail. They should tell you. Make sure they have a specific hiring manager in mine. A targeted role will be more promising than a general one.
15 years of waiting for a green card. 15 years of being on a visa that can have you kicked out anytime no matter how much you’ve invested into life there. Hats off to the folks who put up with this.
Yeah that's what stood out for me as well. I wonder how long it takes to get a citizenship in the US. I immigrated to Germany and the experience has been surprisingly smooth and flexible:
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’m done with recruiters. They’re only looking out for themselves. They basically rent seek and make things more difficult. They never have the information I need. And they never seem all that interested in the relationship if it doesn’t serve to fill their desired quota of candidates in a pipeline.
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.
Nah, it's because in order to convince you to make a major life change, you have to speak to them on the phone first. Tell me, have you ever interviewed for and accepted a job 100% through email?
They rent seek and look out for themselves? So do you. Capitalism, baby.
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.
> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource
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.
> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text.
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 article is sound but I am on the fence regarding external headhunters.
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.
It's very similar to financial/wealth managers. You don't want to work with a "Financial Manager", but you would probably happily give your portfolio to Warren Buffet or Seth Klarman (there's 1000s of other people in this sphere, whose names we don't know).
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.
I am not a big fan of head-hunters, as the ones I've talked to seem to act like used-car salesmen (deceptive and plain slimy). That said, external recruiters do make sense for small and growing companies who haven't sorted out an internal recruiting system yet.
My experience with the candidates introduced to us by well known recruitment firms here in Tokyo has been fairly positive. Of course I have no idea how many equally great candidates they filter out before they get to us.
Using a spreadsheet as a cheap CRM to track your job search and where you are in the process, cold leads, warm leads, follow-ups, and so forth is precisely what I do. I thought I was the only one who did that. Nice to know I am not crazy. :-)
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.
[OFF] Isn't this one of the guys mentioned at the soundcloud post a long ago about Brazilians and their engineering culture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712840) ? Curious if these takeaways can be sort of a protection for that kind of situation.
I read this as something related to the engineering culture of Brazilian people.
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.
> And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you.
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
How picky are you able to be with these jobs you get via contacts?
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.
You might want to mention your industry though, IIRC yours is quite esoteric (backbone/wholesale/IXP's). Generic software engineering roles have an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio. Recruiting was pretty much required at my previous gigs to try and cut through some of the fluff
I guess any industry seems less esoteric if you're in the middle of it - to me it doesn't seem esoteric, there's a LOT of ASNs globally and they all need network engineers... Or other people who work in the various specialities in the telecom business.
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.
Could also be an aberration caused by the generally poor hiring practices used by these software companies. I have no idea what the talent pool actually looks like for these two industries.
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
The networking world is...weird. Very different from the coder world. I think it comes down to the fundamental truth that the network cannot fail while code can fail fast. Therefore, networking hasn't undergone the multiple seismic shifts that software has and tends to be populated with a more conservative cast of characters.
> 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.
I did the exact same thing with a spreadsheet. Pursuing only the few roles I could keep in my head at a time was not keeping me busy and was letting a lot slip through the cracks. It was incredibly helpful to take a systematic approach, to track who I'd talked to, save references to job descriptions and background information, and to separate by tech stack, locale, etc.
As an alternative to the spreadsheet I maintain dedicated repository for job search with directory for every company I apply to, then one dedicated CalDAV calendar where most important remote and onsite interviews go.
So I worked in London for several years. Over 15 years I still get emails from these people. It was the most soul-destroying experience of my professional life and I could talk about this a lot eg fake interviews, not being put up for roles they said they would put you up for, modifying your resume, pricing you out of contention by adding a markup to your rate they never told you about, submitting you for positions you never authorized.
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.
How many jobs is normal to consider at a time? I saw he had 50ish in 2 weeks which is an awful lot for senior jobs. Even as an IC I can only really handle a fraction of that. Should I be applying for 100 roles/month? I'm not sure what is normal or a good strategy.
I ignore all of this. The OP is coming from a no name company and don't have any expertises. If you are senior and you don't have any expertises or deep experience in a domain, you will have tough time getting a job even in this hot market.
You should a little negative but I read you twice and there is some truth in your message. I am actually working in one of the popular FANG company. I receive solicitations every day (3-10). I have no time to answer everyone. I have over 15 years of experience and the few times I decided to reply I realized two things. First, once you start giving a range of compensation the discussion stop rapidly for 90% of the recruiters. The market is "hot" but for folks that are not that senior (or with lower expectation that I have maybe). The second thing is that when it goes well and we start the process that everything is super slow motion. Positive feedbacks but every step take weeks to move on. At a point where I lost any excitement. Hence, I suppose my field is not such in demand... that engineers with less years of experience get these positions faster than me since I am strict about my expectation. I might have the wrong conclusion here but I found that this "hot market" is not "hot" for the whole range of expertises and years of experience.
I've been actively interviewing for almost the past five years. I recently concluded my job search and basically landed my dream job (or very close to it). However I was extremely picky about what I was looking for which probably made my search take so long.
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 spent two years looking and then just threw in the towel and took a job at GE. They turned out to have a far more inflated view of themselves than was warranted or even healthy...so that only lasted a few years. Consulting now with one of the few boutique firms in my city...which has been fairly nice.
Yes, I suspect there's a lot of title inflation going on in the industry.
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".
Phil is a great person and previously had director of engineering/product roles at Digital Ocean, Meetup/Wework, and Soundcloud. It's not worth dismissing his advice out of hand :)
I hadn't heard of it, but he also had Director titles at Meetup, WeWork, and DigitalOcean, which I very much have. (Also Buoyant, but I don't recognize that one either.)
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...