After reading through this thread, it would seem that many commenters from the UK are able to relate, and that a number of people in the US market are judging based on no experience.
Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
221–230 of 335 posts
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy god, that's a job in technology? Sounds like your typical retail wage slave situation here in the US. Even entry level tech jobs are in the $40-$50k range generally.
Lol, I'm a C++ games programmer and make $30k/year. North East of England + games industry.
I certainly hope you meant to type £30k/year (~$45k/year).
If you're only getting $30k (~£20k/year) as a software programmer of any kind, anywhere in the world, you should seriously consider finding a new employer, even if it requires emigrating. And remote jobs still exist.
Canada has the 3rd largest video games industry in the world--after the US and Japan--and its growth has strained the available talent pool. So you might consider Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or Montreal. I have heard that UK-to-Canada emigration is more easily done than UK-to-US, though I had never had any particular motive to investigate the claim.
The "games" jobs earn less on average than the less-specific category of "software" jobs, and "programmer" earns less on average than "developer" and "engineer". So if you don't move, maybe you could pad out your resume to be a "software developer" instead.
I am biased somewhat by working in the US, where software writers are legion, and paid more than elsewhere, but if you have any skill at all, you can probably be paid more for work similar to what you do now.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you in the UK? If so, I'm seriously surprised this doesn't ring true. To me it exactly matches my experience both as a contractor and as an employer. As to who is being exploited here, it's the whole IT industry. They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they leech off our industry. They may not be sending children down mines, but that doesn't diminish the fact they are terrible companies and terrible people.
As a London based developer (VR these days), I have to say that I immediately recognise the hammed up picture this guy paints of IT recruiters in the UK. I only ever found one recruitment company that I liked who I felt was consistently top notch when I was freelancing. They didn't ever call me unless I signaled I was looking for work and always negotiated better rates than I felt I was able to when I was first start…
they also did a great Hounds of Love cover
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces Ahem, speak for yourself. Go check out your local newsagent's daily national press shelves. Pages upon pages of lies and spin. Hell, the Scottish versions of The Times, Express, Mail and Mirror group papers print contradicting headlines, one version for Scotland and one for England and Wales. I hate to do the "we're less gullible in Scotland now"…
As a ""cybernat"" and Wings reader, I very much agree - but that's more a sort of impersonal bulk lying, not someone calling you up personally by name and lying about job opportunities or the qualifications of candidates.
> As a ""cybernat"" and Wings reader
Heh...me too :)
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is completely common in America. Is the London job market scene just messed up?
I took a job abroad after coming from the U.S., and updated my LinkedIn accordingly. Soon after, the spam shot up through the roof. All of the same, non-descript, no-details contacts the author describes. It's been striking.
Interesting. A similar thing happened when I moved to New York City, it might just be a new node appearing in a network.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#226In Dublin this is starting to ring true for me.
though i don't agree with classing them as reptilians. They're trying to survive in a industry that forces them to things to survive.
I'm also skeptical this will last or will Tech bubble 2.0 burst soon?
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#227I don't know much about the English market, though I occasionally get their spam overflow. Still, I have to question how you regularly get into those kinds of relationships with anyone without being needlessly mean and disrespectful in initial interactions.
With recruiters here, I generally decline the job they were thinking of and tell them what I am interested given that it has to significantly beat my current work. After a few times back and forth, that eventually brings the conversation to an end. The nicer ones tell give me some local companies that wont pay third party recruiters but might be a closer match.
Really, I think recruiters naturally tend to over represent employers who are incredibly bad deals since the better the job the less often it is empty and the easier it is to fill for free through networking (I.e. you have employees who wouldn't see guilt/risk in recommending it to friends.)
Given that recruiters are sitting in that skewed perspective of the market, they should naturally get bitter and irritated with people who turn down their "best" positions while being rude throughout the process. Probably they also feel all the more helpless in their role since I can only imagine the bizarre feedback they get from their most rewarding/difficult/longstanding customers on what were "good" matches.
If recruiters were replaced by neural networks, it may kick off the first AI rights campaign to protect AI from poor input abuse.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually your CV can be hijacked by a recruiter, effectively keeping you out of a job. Imagine this scenario: You get a call from a recruiter. They seem to have an interesting position/client/network so you send over your CV. A couple of months later you are actively looking for a job, so you make a list of cool startups in your area and send your CV and a customized cover letter. They all answer that they got your C…
I think that's an exaggeration. That scenario could easily play out. However, if the employer genuinely has no connection to the candidate (other than having received their CV a couple of times, in different incarnations) then I don't see why they wouldn't pursue the candidate without the recruiter being in the loop.
I can tell you why...at my
Last firm, the "first submitting agency" was tied to your name on FieldGlass. You could not get around it. It was the only system you could hire thru firmwide.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#229I don't get all the annoyance at recruiters. I don't mind recruiters reaching out to me at all. If you don't want their help, ignore their E-mails. If the opportunity looks interesting you reply, if not, don't. Here's an entire profession that exists to help get you a job (and to help employers find talent). Like every profession in the world, there are going to be a few jerks--just ignore them. When times are good a…
The problem is that in recruiting, it's not "a few jerks". It's 99.99% utterly incompetent recent business grads. The 00.01% of recruiters that are labeled "competent" are actually still pretty bad, but they at least know that you won't find 15 years of Go experience and can at least half-tell when someone is BSing (perhaps because they actually spent a small amount of time coding themselves). Out of the dozens of re…
I agree on the pretty female observation. Just about every tech recruiter that's contacted me recently looks like someone I'd want to date. My father is a doctor in the US and the drug reps he deals with are also from this mold, so I guess that says something about what really works in male-centered professions.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#230I totally agree on asking the actual company what they're paying the recruiter before you sign on; they will always be expecting an amount of work equal to full amount paid to the recruiter rather than the meagre sum that will end up in your pocket (which is exactly how hard you're planning to work).
I have been told of people learning they were on long-term $50/hour assignments where the recruiter is making $200/hour over the top; no lie.
But the sickness doesn't just come from normal people accepting jobs; these agencies are also held up by fucking Enterprise businesses. We recently needed to hire some additional staff and only received 3 resumes; 2 of which we'd seen before and were unsuitable.
I told management that the recruiter wasn't doing their job and that maybe we could just put something on Seek, get a reply, then refer them to the recruiter. "We can't do that! The entire corporation has a contract; everything has to go through the recruitment agency and there's no way around it!"
How the fuck they knowingly got themselves into such a farcical situation (and for what benefit?) I'll never understand... except that they're fucking idiots.