Form letter response for engineering recruiting emails

Yes.

(good) Software Engineer demand isn't likely to drop in the future I assume. Except if Skynet takes over and writes code by itself.

> Then we'll see how happy the recruiters are to talk to you if you've been an arrogant arse in the past.

Really? We are arrogant because the following behaviours appear to imply arrogance on the part of the recruiter:

1. A recruiter constantly spams our inboxes with job descriptions that are either wildly different from our skillsets. (I get job descriptions that talk about 10 years of experience). It is not that fucking hard to read my Linkedin profile before you spam me.

2. Ask me technical questions which the person asking me has no qualification to answer. This is the one that pisses me off. It started off when I was just starting out with questions like what is Polymorphism where an answer which didn't sentence match the company answer confused them. Recently, one asked me to describe statistical graphic modes (when they should have meant statistical graphical models). The person had no idea what any of these things meant.

3. Try to play a pressure game. When I politely declined to do further interviews at one company because I had accepted another offer, the head recruiter literally harassed me, telling me I was making a bad decision, resorting to outright lying about the work I would be doing. (I knew enough about what the role would involve from talking to their engineers) and calling me twenty times or so that week.

No, this is a group of people who don't know how to do interviewing, working for broken companies. Now, not all recruiters are like that. One time, I was recruited by a company where the "technical recruiter" had a degree in Computer Science. That was a joyful experience. I felt like what I was saying was understood and they weren't looking for whether there was intonation match going on here.

I'm always polite to recruiters and just say I'm not looking right now but please keep in touch. Occasionally someone will follow up with a meeting request and I just repeat the same thing. Usually though they just say thanks and I occasionally hear from them once in a while.

Maybe it's different in Chicago, though, I don't have people calling me every day or being rude. I just feel like it doesn't hurt to keep a positive relationship with anybody who might one day find me a job when I really need it.

I think this really hits the point. Since the vast majority of these are no different from spam (in fact, I'm convinced some percentage may be from reengineered spam software), it's those that actually respond that they have a hope of snagging.

It's entirely possible that these recruiters are paid by how many actually respond, not how many are worth hiring. I.E. Spammers send thousands of emails and if even one sale was generated, then it was worth it as it costs them so little in the first place.