[LRUG] ADVICE

[Steven Deobald]

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


On 24 May 2013 22:33, Liam Bennett <bennett.ljk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just as an amusing side note to this discussion, and an example of how
> limited some recruiters' knowledge of their supposed area of specialism is,
> I once received an phone call asking if I wanted a mechanical engineering
> contract because the job spec said something like
>
>  * Experience working on railways advantageous, particularly in laying *
> rails*
> *
> *
> I enjoyed that phone call and added another recruiter to my own personal
> blacklist
>
> Liam
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
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