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Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

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Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#91

Post by luch »

smcl wrote: post #74
ryguytilidie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least s…

I think the author being deliberately hyperbolic for humour's sake, playing up lots of British stereotypes etc for laughs or a bit of catharsis. It's a Friday afternoon "I've had a shit week" blog post and it wasn't to my tastes, but I wouldn't necessarily assume the author has some problems.

Exactly. His post is rather long to be only an outburst of angriness. I think he is pretty pissed off by the recruitement process and decided to take it up a notch in order to make it grotesque.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#92

Post by [deleted] »

joeyspn wrote: post #88
ryguytilidie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least s…

You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an incredible opportunity to move to London and the result was: - £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer - No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc) - No free food/snacks/bevare at the company - No perks (equipment, etc) When questioned about this, the recruiter sa…

[deleted]

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#94

Post by jpmthrow »

It's the nature of the beast, other option...

Company hates recruiters.

Company builds an internal recruitment team.

Find out they can't perform.

They then start using external recruiters.

There has to be a solution to this, whoever solves it will become very, very, very rich. At present, only internal hires or referrals seem to work best.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#95

Post by Nursie »

>> Contract tech workers sometimes believe agencies insulate them from a defaulting client.

This is true.

In one of my last contracts I was working alongside a guy who was contracting for them directly. He eventually walked out when they failed to pay (again!)

Agents are scum, but as someone that doesn't have a vast network (most of the people I've worked with are still in the same perm position years or even decades later), and who doesn't live in London, I'm afraid I don't see that I'm going to be able to live without them any time soon.

Instead I'm actually trying to build relationships with the agents I have worked with that have found me appropriate work and who haven't f*cked up in any way. They are few and far between, but they do exist.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#97

Post by JPKab »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #70
mbroshi wrote: post #34

I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant. >> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited. Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for i…

Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least s…

He's obviously very hyperbolic, but when you leave the sphere of elite IT (Google/Facebook) and head into the folks who are in other geographic locations (and not willing to move to tech hotspots) suddenly the skills in demand and the positions available become overwhelmingly large enterprise type IT jobs.

The recruiters who are working for these companies are, to some extent, as the author describes. The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Never mind that the C-level management at large, established companies is, for the most part, hopelessly disconnected from what it takes to have an effective technology capability at a company. If you don't agree with me on this, then ask yourself why SAP and Oracle continue to make so much money selling huge software implementations that are known to never work and always go over budget.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#98

Post by [deleted] »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #70
mbroshi wrote: post #34

I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant. >> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited. Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for i…

Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least s…

[deleted]

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#99

Post by Nursie »

mattzito wrote: post #5

At least in the US, the whole recruiting industry hit its nadir during the dot-com bubble of 2000. I remember getting a cold-call from a recruiter, "Hey, got a great gig at a soon-to-IPO startup for a Solaris and Linux guru", "No thanks", hang up, the phone next to me rings, same dude, literally just dialing up the extension tree. My boss at the time had a strategy where whenever a recruiter called offering "top notc…

Hah. We had something similar one day on a team I used to work with in London. The agent had obviously been given the task of poaching a developer from our team but was utterly failing at it.

One by one, all 16 of us got a phone call at our desks, with no more than a few seconds between each call. By the third call we all knew what was going on so we all just laughed and told the guy to sod off.

Such a bungled effort - even if someone had wanted to take up the offer it would have been impossible at that point to say anything other than "LOL, no thanks buddy"

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#100

Post by Loque »

joeyspn wrote: post #88
ryguytilidie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all. To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least s…

You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an incredible opportunity to move to London and the result was: - £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer - No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc) - No free food/snacks/bevare at the company - No perks (equipment, etc) When questioned about this, the recruiter sa…

This is why I dislike them - I get sent jobs from recruiters and it irks me to not know the cut they are taking (and I can only guess it is above their actual value). If they were completely open about it, maybe it would improve the state of the industry?
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