Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

Like most things in life, 90% of everything is crap. That goes double for recruiters. I've worked with only two competent recruiters in my very long career, who have, at most, gotten me a low double-digit raise at best. I've had one recruiter royally screw up an offer to the point the company rescinded, and I've had another recruiter use coercion on me to not work at SONY for 20% more than the other company was offering. But as only a single data point, I can quite emphatically say no recruiter has ever doubled my money for me.

I will also say that most recruiter outreach, even in this hot market, is absolutely lousy, and the compensation on offer is below what I am currently earning at a company I am exceptionally happy with doing work I love, and I don't consider myself to be overly compensated.

Most recruiters that do any outreach immediately ghost me when I ask about compensation range, and if compensation range is mentioned, it has yet to be more than what I currently make. Once or twice in the past three months I've had an "upto $X for the right candidate" where $X is only 10% more than what I am currently making, so it is highly unlikely I will get that upper bound.

If I responded to every recruiter that reached out to me via email and LinkedIn I'd spend many more hours per day wasting my time than I would care to think about. And most recruiters that reach out to me these days are of the exceptionally low quality churn'n'burn variety.

I currently have three recruiter messages open on LinkedIn, one for an animator with 2+ years of experience, another for someone wanting a mid-level front-end web developer for an AR application, and another for a "senior" Java programmer. I don't do any of those things, didn't even look at my profile or C.V. Just a scattershot approach, which you would think on LinkedIn, with its targetted InMails, it wouldn't be the case. But here we are.

Of the one recruiter out of the three who didn't immediately ghost when asked about compensation (always my first question), the upper bound is $80K below what I currently make, and again, I don't consider myself well compensated.

My recommendation is never waste your time with any recruiter, but if you must, expend it on those that actually work for the company they are hiring for.

What is the need to interject the word 'manage' in there? Is that a powermove?

edit: Have a great day, I'm going to let this one go. Things to do, code to write :)

Does the baseline matter though? If I’m not switching for less than 1.2x does it matter if they know what $current pay is? Either they can offer it or they can’t?

In my view (your experience may differ): almost always ignore a recruiter, unless getting out of your current job situation is so urgent that you're willing to waste a ton of time, or the recruiter presents a very specific proposal that makes clear that they've done their homework meaning that you are a great fit for a unique opportunity.

In some cases going through a recruiter is a guarantee that you won't get a position, because a third-party recruiter tries to sell you to a company that has its own recruiters and is unwilling to pay the third-party recruiter's fee.

Obviously this is geared towards software development, and my personal experience with recruiters for software jobs is similar to most here.

However, I sometimes help out my client's HR departments and the recruitment experience for other jobs is vastly different. Like searching for expert welders or other specific skillsets, not unlike the ones that exists in software development (+10 years java, +15 years embedded C, etc.). They almost always use external recruiters for the first filtering, and they deliver quality candidates. Expensive fees, but worth it.

Why is this such a problem with recruitment for software development? Are there recruitment shops that DO understand the differences in software development?