[LRUG] ADVICE

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

Steven:  Wonderful response, thank you.

Another dev chiming in from the States.  My experience is entirely on
the candidate side; I get about 40+ inquiries a year (at least since I
started keeping count a few years ago).  I consider this almost
unreasonably low; some of my colleagues report receiving several a
*day*.

Worst part about inquiries from random recruiters:  so many of them
simply Will. Not. Read.  Several years ago, I started a FAQ.  Every
time I get an inquiry that it covers (almost always "here's this job
that requires relocation"), I try to make it even more blindingly
obvious.  By now, relocation is FAQ #1 and the answer is "No." in the
biggest font on the page:  http://resume.livingston-gray.com/faq.html

...and yet, about half of the inquiries I get are for jobs that
require relocation.

(Come to think of it, FAQs #2 and #6 are also relevant to this thread.)

It's tempting to write off the entire profession, but on the other
hand, I've had some really nice conversations with recruiters.  Some
of them have let me practice explaining things about tech, as Steven
indicated; some have yielded lovely sushi dinners; one even led to a
great new job.

-Sam



On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Steven Deobald <steven at c42.in> wrote:
> Most of the comments so far are of the "don't do" type. I've worked with
> some great recruiters (in HR, not agencies, mind you) in my career and this
> is the one thing I've noticed about them:
>
> A great recruiter will spend a ridiculous amount of time sitting with actual
> developers: at their desks, over lunch, over beer. This time isn't spent
> networking. Rather, it is spent asking silly questions: "I heard you talking
> about cyclomatic complexity... what is that, exactly?" and tolerating the
> lengthy, technical explanations. No, not everything sticks. But these
> recruiters will start to create a map of knowledge for themselves which is
> useful on a number of levels: First, it shows they care! It tells the
> developers they're recruiting that this is the industry they want to work
> in. And the map is fertile soil to grow the map; when you meet a new
> developer, ask them to explain a concept in your map which seems fuzzy to
> you. Their explanation will tell you something about their ability to
> communicate (really the most important developer skill) and potentially
> teach you something at the same time.
>
> When they're not in the mood to ask silly questions, these recruiters will
> just learn through osmosis and immersion. Go to a tech conference. Go to a
> hack day and participate. Go to the pub where the local nerds are having a
> pint and just listen. You'll learn all sorts of crazy crap: why Tim thinks
> schema-less databases are actually more rigid than relational data models...
> why Christine would rather work in Ruby than Java because she loves lambdas
> but would rather work in Haskell than Ruby because types reduce her testing
> burden... how Sam got his slowest query down from 3000ms to 120ms using
> Postgres's recursive query.
>
> And sometimes it will be boring. And often it won't make sense. But
> sometimes and often that's how we developers hear this stuff, too. So
> welcome to our world.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Steven Deobald -- ⌀ -- nilenso.com