> While doing so, you likely noticed how many recruiters are interested in you.
I'd appreciate that more if not for the fact that I regularly get emails and cold calls from recruiters who do the following:
- ...want me for a job that has zilch to do with my skillset. I'm an SRE and a general infrastructure engineer. 90% the jobs I get calls about are for frontend stuff and/or involve languages I've never touched. Want me to maintain a container orchestration platform? Great! Want me to write a bunch of Python scripts to serve as the glue that holds together a complex Rube Goldberg machine? I love doing that! Want me to maintain a set of monitoring systems that alert people according to ever-changing requirements? I can do that. But if you want me to write a UX in JavaScript? Excuse me while I spend the next half hour laughing.
- ...cold call me during work hours. If you do that, I will never do business with you ever again. It's not so bad now that I'm fully remote forever, but when I worked in an office I would straight-up ask some of them "are you trying to get me fired?" before hanging up on them. Usually they cold-call and send an email simultaneously, which is especially ridiculous. With some people I've gotten repeated cold-calls during work hours multiple days in a row, so I spend some time online finding the names of their recruiting firm's head of HR, general counsel, CEO, COO, and any number of executives who look like they might be in this person's reporting chain, use the name format in the email the recruiter sent me to guess their email addresses of said bigwigs, and then send all of them a C&D letter. I've gotten profuse apologies from HR people.
- ...want me for short-term contracts in parts of the US I would never live in if you paid me. Like I'm going to give up my nice house in Dallas and quit my full-time job with fantastic benefits and generous PTO to take a six-month contract with no benefits or PTO in Lansing, MI where there's nothing to do but fentanyl. And I had that problem before I decided I intend to be remote forever and never want to set foot in an office again.
- ...lie to me about jobs being remote. Here's an example: guy cold-called me and sent an email, and normally I would've just hung up on him but I was desparate to find a remote job before my old company made us go back to the office so I listened to him. I told him I'll have to read the email first, and I hung up to read it. He called me back less than five minutes later and asked me if I'd made a decision yet. He told me on the phone the job was remote, but the email said it was just temporary until the end of the pandemic and they insisted that anyone who gets the job relocate to the metro area immediately even before the pandemic is over. I called him on his lie and told him I'll pass because the position isn't full-time remote. He lied again, said "but it's full-time!". I read back the email word for word, and just to get back at him for lying to me I lied to him back and told him I have a medical condition and I'm permanently housebound for the rest of my life. He then said "but what about after the pandemic?". I lied again and said "no, even after the pandemic I'm physically unable to leave my house". He then said "even after the pandemic is completely over?". I had to lie to him further and basically convince him that I'm in an iron lung before he finally agreed I'm not a candidate for the position.