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Originally Posted by candybar
I think we agree but I don't think there's any shortage of developers - the main reason for all this spam is that the hit rate is so low - for bad jobs, very few decent developers are interested so they must cast their net very wide. For good jobs, almost everyone gets rejected, so they need lots of interested applicants to meet their hiring needs. And the need for numbers ensures that recruiters can't spend too much time on you as a candidate, which leads to spamming everything to everyone. The less time the recruiter has for individual candidates, the more all developers look alike.
Good points, but I'm going to extend a couple ideas.
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I don't think there's any shortage of developers
I agree with you in spirit and in pure total numbers. However, what this notion misses is that in order for FANG to hire the numbers they do, they require a large long-tail. The same point is made when you say "very few decent developers are interested".
If finding great developers is a standard power law distribution, then the pool of overall developers must be large (and possibly exceedingly so) for the demand of great developers to be met. Those who find themselves in the excess will experience a lack of demand and should probably retrain in some form.
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And the need for numbers ensures that recruiters can't spend too much time on you as a candidate, which leads to spamming everything to everyone. The less time the recruiter has for individual candidates, the more all developers look alike.
Two points here:
1.
I worked at a recruiting company for exactly 1 year. (I was responsible for gaining net new accounts, not sourcing candidates, I had recruiters who did that for me and my team that I would then be the next line before sending them to the hiring manager). So my conversations with recruiters now are nuanced, to say the least, and I know many (some as friends growing up, etc.).
Regardless of how I try to explain things to them now, even being able to connect on a very good level, basically none of them really understand or care to understand technology that well. I met with a boutique vc-backed recruiting company and their "Front-end UI specialist" with React/Redux jobs was not technically literate at all.
We were having a friendly conversation and he asked me something like,
"So react is really small right, like 20 lines of code or something?"
And I replied, "huh?, what do you mean by that... yea you can write some small components/functions/etc.. but react itself is a serious library"
"Oh a recent candidate told me that React was only like 20 lines of code, I thought it was just really optimized".
So on one hand, the spam approach is truly because they do not understand the technology. Ask the next recruiter you speak with if they know the difference between Java and JavaScript (don't actually do this), and you'll see that the competence is very rarely there at all.
2.
Recruiters are just like almost everything else in the universe. They seek a more efficient/lazy way to do the same or less amount of work and achieve the same or more results.
There are recruiters who are actually technically literate in their fields and overall very competent, and they resemble speak fisherman, compared to the net approach in 1. One of the dude's at the company I worked probably sent out 10 emails a day and made 10-15 phone calls. He was the #1 producer. The #2 producer could get you 10 qualified Java developers who could work on site in 3 days lead time.
You are unlikely to interact with many of these people because the market is relatively large, but they are out there. Consider one placement is 25-45k average commission. Not hard to just do a few of those and take a lot of time off.
3.
Hiring is horrible inefficient and broken.