I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant.
>> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”.
...
>> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.
Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think "exploited" I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.
If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.
Are you in the UK? If so, I'm seriously surprised this doesn't ring true. To me it exactly matches my experience both as a contractor and as an employer.
As to who is being exploited here, it's the whole IT industry. They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they leech off our industry. They may not be sending children down mines, but that doesn't diminish the fact they are terrible companies and terrible people.
As a London based developer (VR these days), I have to say that I immediately recognise the hammed up picture this guy paints of IT recruiters in the UK.
I only ever found one recruitment company that I liked who I felt was consistently top notch when I was freelancing. They didn't ever call me unless I signaled I was looking for work and always negotiated better rates than I felt I was able to when I was first starting out. They were called Recruit Media, but they were later swallowed up by a larger company that I cannot vouch for.
Some former employees set up a new agency that continued in the same vein as Recruit Media - http://www.wearefutureheads.co.uk/. They focus on web and digital content creation specialists. They know what the acronyms mean as well as how to spell them properly. If you're looking for a no-bullshit web/digital recruiter in this in the UK then you could do a lot worse.
Disclaimer: I have never worked as a recruiter and I have no links with Futureheads beyond being placed by some of their staff and also using them to recruit freelancers for projects I have led.
Obviously it goes without saying that you're much better off developing your professional network, negotiating a good rate and going direct if you can.
Just felt compelled to write this to illustrate that not all of them are bad. Sadly I'd estimate that at least 99% of the firms here in the UK are complete time wasters.
I think it sticks out because, in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces. And in the recruitment business it seems to happen a lot.
(Omission, elision and euphemism is the British way!)
As an aside, is it not fraudulent to lie in this way? For instance, altering resumes without permission, or promising a perk and a salary which the recruiter does not know exist or apply.
It probably is and there's all sorts of Data Protection rules being broken (that's even if they've registered with the Data Protection Registrar). But it's a mammoth and futile task to report possible violations and by the time it's looked into said recruiter has folded and started some other scam. I've tried this and failed miserably.
Fortunately I've not had to look for a job since 2003, happy where I am mostly, so my old CV's are probably long gone in disk crashes, failed backups or other purges. I've not been contacted by a recruiter for ~6 years now.
> in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces
Ahem, speak for yourself. Go check out your local newsagent's daily national press shelves. Pages upon pages of lies and spin.
Hell, the Scottish versions of The Times, Express, Mail and Mirror group papers print contradicting headlines, one version for Scotland and one for England and Wales.
I hate to do the "we're less gullible in Scotland now" thing, but since the referendum we can spot bullshit from a mile off now.
As a ""cybernat"" and Wings reader, I very much agree - but that's more a sort of impersonal bulk lying, not someone calling you up personally by name and lying about job opportunities or the qualifications of candidates.
I worked in Germany and in the US.
The only time that recruiters got a tad annoying was when I was working in Germany and got 2-3 UK agencies.
By far not as bad as the post makes it seem, but some slightly annoying things such as calling me on a Sunday evening, trying to give me prep speeches and overusing my name, script reading, trying to not tell me the client name, mispronouncing the skills they were looking for, ...
In the US, the recruiter eMails are more frequent, but usually pretty civilized.
Especially the bigger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google) that have their own in-house recruiters tend to be pleasant to work with.
Generally speaking, I've never had an issue with in-house recruiters.
But I've experienced many of the things this guy is complaining about from 3rd party tech recruiters (I'm in the US), including being lied to (and not coming clean until it came up a few months into the contract), aggressively being contacted, dodging questions about company details, not providing job descriptions, lying about what the company needed so I was unprepared for interviews, not telling me anything about interviews, scheduling an interview for me for THE NEXT DAY at 7 pm that was a 3 hour drive away so I had no choice but to take a sudden personal day to go to the interview (I normally wouldn't do that, but I had two friends working there, and really wanted to check it out), etc.
One agency has been sending me emails and calling me multiple times and LinkedIn connection requests from four people in the company these past couple of weeks. They've attempted to contact me at least 12 times in two weeks, and the most they'll tell me in the messages is "an iOS Developer opportunity". With no information you are not going to make me want to get in touch with you, especially when I'm not looking for a new job.
BUUUUT.... I have had a couple good experiences with external recruiters, in fact my most recent experience was very positive and they negotiated better than I would have for the first salary in my career that I've been satisfied with.
When I was a freelancer in Germany (i.e. up to last year) most "recruiters" were scum. I can't speak about the ones that focus on permanent positions but nearly all of the "Projektvermittler" (i.e. glorified temp agencies) were trying to guilt me into lowering my rates for them (because they'd charge the client 2-3x on top of that), tried to get me to sign NCAs far beyond the scope of the project (which is legally unenforceable but backed up with serious threats that would make anyone think twice) and were about as dishonest and intransparent about the entire process as humanly possible.
Oh, and of course they would keep bombarding me with Java/XML projects just because my CV (which they doctored and redacted before sending it to the client) mentioned that I had once worked on a Java project (but specialised in something entirely different since).
The one project I actually followed through on turned out to be a total disaster. Other than that, all my work had been directly for clients without a third party -- and that worked out far better.
If you're an inexperienced solo freelancer and want to work for big corporations, sure, recruiters are the way to go. Other than that, IMO you're nearly always better off skipping the middle man and taking the entrepreneurial risk (which is fairly manageable if you don't allow the client to build up several months worth of outstanding payments).
They charged 3 times your rate? I hope that's hyperbole, because that's pretty insane. I get disgusted when a recruiter charges more than 15%. (The best stay below 5% for doing an excellent job, the worst piece of shit I've ever wasted time on turned out to charge over 30% for not doing his job.)
I live in Netherland, but I'm surprised how often I'm contacted by UK recruiters for Dutch jobs. Apparently they've been expanding their market. I don't have any terrible experiences with them as far as I recall, but I never remember their names and haven't gotten any jobs through them.
I have had some pretty awful experiences with Dutch recruiters, but also some pretty good ones.
I'm having very mixed feelings about the recruiter that got me my current gig: on the one hand, she was way too pushy and I'm pretty sure she lied to me, and their rate is higher than what the client allows (they're got some cumbersome way to work around that), but on the other hand, what I get is significantly higher than what I got the previous time I worked for the same client (though one of the best and most professional recruiters I've met), so she pushed them even harder than she pushed me, and that's paying off for me too. And it is a really nice gig. The one getting screwed here is not me, and the client is a major bank, so I'm not feeling terribly sorry for them (though I do wonder if I should inform them of the recruiter's overly high rate; is that honest or vindictive?).
Still, it'd be nice if we could do without them. Shouldn't the internet help us cut out all those middlemen?
In the UK in ~2000, the last time I was looking for a job without a reliable network, I had an awful experience due to recruiters.
I'd synched up with a recruiter, they scheduled me for a job interview at a swanky gentlemans club (not a strip bar, literally a club for men), in London. I don my old school uniform, for aged 18 I had not yet bought a suit, and printed some resumes at my Mums office and headed over to St James Place in a cab. I check in for the interview and get led into a room filled with desks, some occupied and others not. I take a seat and wait patiently for whatever comes next... ... ...
... The seats are all pretty much full now, and a man stands at the front of the room and gives a 3 slide presentation along the lines of: we can't tell you who our client is, you'll take a test, the top 10 will be offered a job with the client.
Being 18, I was great at tests! Everyone around me was in their mid 20-30's -- I'd been hacking for 3 years at this point, Linux user for ~18mo - I was ready. The test papers are laid in front of us, the presenter orders us to start, I'm done in the first 18 minutes, and sit patiently for the next 12 when the presenter says: "for those of you who have finished please walk your paper up here, for the rest you've 15 more minutes. Myself and two others rise, take our papers to the front and leave through the door and are directed to a lounge (let me tell you, gentle mans clubs are really fancy -- I don't take the gin and tonic offered to me).
Eventually the room is filled with the other test takers, probably 50 of us in total, and we mill around. I was too insecure to talk to anyone, everyone else was probably a little weirded out by the boy in the school uniform!
Some 20 minutes later the presenter enters the room and announces 11 names to stay behind, I was one of them! (What kind of story would this be were I not;)) it was explained to us that we'd be given a short interview. These were conducted three at a time, the presenter and his two associates would take an interview each.
I was in the second three and I had observed that the first three had short conversations, signed some papers, shook hands with their interviewer and then left the room. My interviewer was the presenter. I can't recall the questions, they were about my test paper, but after a couple of them he laid the paper down and looked at me and asked: "did you cheat?", I answered: "no", and he went on to explain that I got a perfect score, the next highest had received about 80% (if memory serves there were ~50 multiple choice questions and ~5 questions where we had to write out commands: how to compile Linux kernels, etc). He shook my hand and led me out, no papers were signed.
And that was it.
I went back to the legal office my mum worked at, recounted the story, and she became so furious -- she believed I'd been subjected to ageism.
I certainly do not mean to suggest all recruiters are this short sighted, and I'm
very proud of where my life has taken me thus far (early yc alum, early leader at twitch, amongst other things), but this experience was so negative that I reasoned to avoid recruiters at all costs. Now, I know the way you find a job is to watch the companies you think are doing a great job, working on tech you care about, and reach out directly to them to find out how you can help.
We can kill the predatory recruiters by starving them!
I would suspect more "we don't want to hire someone who thinks it's appropriate to show up in a literal school uniform to a professional interview" more than ageism, per se.
It's easier to train a professional and prepared candidate in some fraction of job skills than is it to train a very skilled candidate in business proprieties, especially for an interview that starts with a multiple-choice test.
Actually your CV can be hijacked by a recruiter, effectively keeping you out of a job.
Imagine this scenario: You get a call from a recruiter. They seem to have an interesting position/client/network so you send over your CV. A couple of months later you are actively looking for a job, so you make a list of cool startups in your area and send your CV and a customized cover letter. They all answer that they got your CV from the recruiter and that they can't afford the recruiter's fee. They can't hire you for 6 months/2 years/indefinitely, depending on the recruiters terms.
Every place I've ever worked where I had any visibility into hiring, at the start of the search the company makes a decision as to who they want to deal with: hire an inside recruiter, retain a single outside recruiter (or several), or accept referrals from all outside recruiters. Once they've made that decision, when a recruiter sends them a resume, either the recruiter they're willing to work with and whose fee they've already decided they're willing to pay, or it isn't. In the latter case, they respond saying "we've got our own recruiting arrangements, thanks" and toss the resume. In that case, if the same resume comes in through a different channel later, they're under no obligation to the recruiter, and they'd be perfectly happy to hire you.
I suppose if they were working with a recruiter, and later ended the relationship, that could cause the problem you describe, but I haven't seen it happen (as a job seeker, a member of many interview panels, and as a hiring manager a couple times).
In theory, the recruiter isn't supposed to send resumes without the job seeker's approval, which means that when they do so, they've probably broken any agreement they have with the hiring company, so the company probably isn't bound by that agreement any longer. Whether you'd be able to convince the hiring company to take the risk of a lawsuit (that they'd presumably win) is another question, of course.
That scenario could easily play out. However, if the employer genuinely has no connection to the candidate (other than having received their CV a couple of times, in different incarnations) then I don't see why they wouldn't pursue the candidate without the recruiter being in the loop.
I can tell you why...at my
Last firm, the "first submitting agency" was tied to your name on FieldGlass. You could not get around it. It was the only system you could hire thru firmwide.
The firm that said they had already received the CV and couldn't contract has all the evidence that is needed. Surely a firm would unite with a potential candidate to bring down scum recruiters?
1. Job advertised doesn't have the name of the company
2. Recruiter is CV harvesting with fake job ads - experienced that
3. Recruiter bait and switches - job is real but is an excuse to get you for something else
4. Recruiter gets wind of big company or gov organisation recruiting via competition, posts the same job spec then uses it to try and undercut while passing themselves off as the "official" recruiter. Had this with a NHS development role where the job I responded to turns out they had no business advertising for.
5. If the company is named then it's usually because said company only wants to use a recruiter. I've had this a couple of times where I've contacted a company directly but been asked to file my application with their official outsourced recruitment service.
6. Recruiter threatens "you'll never work in this town again" if you do somehow get to know who the company is simply because you ask.
Ninety nine percent of all recruiters I have dealt with have been the scum of the earth, even the so called reputable ones.
I truly hope Stackoverflow Careers destroys these businesses.
The same nothing that does not stop the companies actually seeking their own employees also does not stop 300 recruiters from copying their posted text, stripping out the original company-identifying information, and re-posting.
The noise added to the signal does make it significantly more difficult.
So rather than searching a central repository of job ads for opportunities specifically relevant to you, you have to visit individual company websites, find the "careers" or "jobs" section, and look for leads in a thousand different places.
I consider a no-recruiters policy to be absolutely essential for a job advertisements boards now. Everywhere else, you have to filter out key phrases like "recruiting", "our client", or "resume in Word format" just to find anything useful.
Actually if the company hired a recruiter there may indeed be reasons you can't apply directly and they can't post job ads themselves. I've seen companies make the mistake of accepting absurd NCAs giving recruiting agencies a quasi-exclusive right to applicants. It's not universally common but depending on the kind of contract you enter (and for some of them it's possible to do so informally just by giving them the go-ahead via e-mail) you can tie your hands.
Do you know how agencies work? You do understand that employers contact them and ask them to find people, to organise their payroll, do relevant checks e.g. confirm right to work, security, skills etc. And these companies know they will be paying a % to the agency and this is because they dont want to do that work themselves they just want a competent worker in place asap.
Those same employers could spend their time searching job boards for suitable candidates but they don't want to so they outsource.
As for the OP saying they are taking 15% of his money. That's not the case. In most cases the Employer will agree a rate with the agency, so they will be a maximum of e.g £250 a day for the contractor and a 15% fee to the agency. So they are paying out around £290 per day to the agency. If the contractor was located directly do you think they would pay him/her £290 per day? No they would pay £250 as they know that is the going rate. they pay the agency fee so they dont have to go through the recruitment process e.g. post adverts, interview people (phone), interview (in person) skill check, right to work check etc.
It's funny to read complaints about rent-seeking and someone taking a percentage off the top on a tech forum, where that is the business model of a large portion of tech companies themselves. When authors complain about Amazon being rent-seekers "stealing" a percentage of authors' income, they don't tend to get a lot of sympathy here.
Rent seeking means taking a percentage without bringing any value. I'm on board with many of the complaints about Amazon, but it's clearly not the case to say they don't add value.
Of course many/most recruiters will also bring value, but it's a question of degree. If someone is recruiting for a technical position and they don't have the technical understanding to make any meaningful judgment of the candidate, it's reasonable to ask whether they are worth their fee. Obviously the extent to which that applies depends on the individual, the company, and the local business culture.
Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all.
To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write.
The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
He's obviously very hyperbolic, but when you leave the sphere of elite IT (Google/Facebook) and head into the folks who are in other geographic locations (and not willing to move to tech hotspots) suddenly the skills in demand and the positions available become overwhelmingly large enterprise type IT jobs.
The recruiters who are working for these companies are, to some extent, as the author describes. The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Never mind that the C-level management at large, established companies is, for the most part, hopelessly disconnected from what it takes to have an effective technology capability at a company. If you don't agree with me on this, then ask yourself why SAP and Oracle continue to make so much money selling huge software implementations that are known to never work and always go over budget.
> The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay.
Absolutely true.
Simplifying a little, there are companies here that everybody wants to leave and companies that everybody wants to join. It's difficult to leave the first category since the employee's skills have atrophied (see https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/).
This is absolutely on point. As I said in another comment, often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters.
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr.
So perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people. If the skill-set is worth more than 100/hr, then the company cant recruit the right talent, and complains of "shortages" whereas in reality, the "shortage" is because too many third parties have their hand in the cookie-jar leaving too little to pay the actual market wage.
You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an incredible opportunity to move to London and the result was:
- £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer
- No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc)
- No free food/snacks/bevare at the company
- No perks (equipment, etc)
When questioned about this, the recruiter said: hey! impossible to get this, this is were I make my money you know!.
How is this a "fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions"?
This is why I dislike them - I get sent jobs from recruiters and it irks me to not know the cut they are taking (and I can only guess it is above their actual value). If they were completely open about it, maybe it would improve the state of the industry?
To be fair your friend got fucked over but predominantly because he didn't read the contract. If he was offered £40k and then a contract came and he signed it without checking, his fuck up. If he didnt sign a contract and moved cities on the word of an individual he fucked up.
If he didnt attend and interview or discuss these perks prior to signing a contract he fucked up.
If he was genuinely misled then he can actually make a complaint and pursue it but it sounds like he didnt do much checking at all.
Holy god, that's a job in technology? Sounds like your typical retail wage slave situation here in the US. Even entry level tech jobs are in the $40-$50k range generally.
Not in London it isnt. £15k is below average wage, way below for London. Unless this IT job was excel monkey or perhaps keyboard cleaner original commenter is full of shit.
I know trainee developers (no education but some skills) who have started off on £21k and that is low for IT in London. I find it hard to believe that any IT role in London was filled for £15k by anyone other than the most junior of people.
That low, in London?! I was under the impression that London was a very expensive city, and I'd expect salaries to reflect that. £21k in a city like that sounds bizarre. Or is it after taxes, including tons of secondary benefits?
I certainly hope you meant to type £30k/year (~$45k/year).
If you're only getting $30k (~£20k/year) as a software programmer of any kind, anywhere in the world, you should seriously consider finding a new employer, even if it requires emigrating. And remote jobs still exist.
Canada has the 3rd largest video games industry in the world--after the US and Japan--and its growth has strained the available talent pool. So you might consider Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or Montreal. I have heard that UK-to-Canada emigration is more easily done than UK-to-US, though I had never had any particular motive to investigate the claim.
The "games" jobs earn less on average than the less-specific category of "software" jobs, and "programmer" earns less on average than "developer" and "engineer". So if you don't move, maybe you could pad out your resume to be a "software developer" instead.
I am biased somewhat by working in the US, where software writers are legion, and paid more than elsewhere, but if you have any skill at all, you can probably be paid more for work similar to what you do now.
£20k/year is exactly what I'm on. My problem at the moment is that I've been working just a bit more than 2 years now, and I absolutely love what I'm doing. I'm part of the engine team on a game that will be one of the biggest releases of 2016, and learning a tonne every day. I got very flexible hours, private health insurance and 30 days of paid vacation days a year. It's just the pay that's abysmal. I've got two computer science degrees and everyone I know in IT makes almost twice as much as I do. But at the same time, everyone I know works for a bank or a financial institution of some kind and they hate their jobs, their bosses, and everything that I on the other hand really like. So yeah, I could quit tomorrow and probably make 2x as much straight away. Do I want to? I'm not sure, and that's my problem at the moment.
So... Pitbull Studio (Epic UK) for something using Unreal Engine 4?
We don't have an international union, so I don't exactly have any leverage here, but I want you to be paid more. Do you seriously think that you are so far below the median level of skill for a C++ programmer with a degree and two years of experience, that you should be paid so little?
Go. Look for another job, and find out just what they would be willing to pay you. With an offer in hand that you could accept on its own merits, go to your current employer and, without mentioning anything about your other offer, ask that your pay rate be reevaluated, to match your skills in the current market. If you don't get a significant payrise, then at that point, you can decide whether it is worth more to have extra cash in your hand, or to keep a job that you know you like, but pays peanuts--stale peanuts at that. Remember, you don't have to accept any offer you don't like.
For now, you seem to have decided that you like your current job £15-20k/year more than anything else you think you could possibly get.
Will you at least get a portion of the sales on the game? If the game really will be one of the biggest releases next year, a 20k salary is likely nothing compared to residuals/bonuses that might accrue to you.
There's very likely going to be a profitability bonus, but at the most it's going to be half of my salary. Pretty good for a bonus,but it's not making up for the low salary over all.
If you have 2 years experience in programming, you should be looking elsewhere in the game industry. The first couple of years are rough, but after "paying your dues" for a couple years, you'll find you can jump into another game dev job without much difficulty. This is a bit more problematic if you're not willing to relocate, since UK is one of the lower-paying game dev markets. However 30k usd is far too low even for the UK for a fresh-out-of-college junior programmer.
Absolutely none of that makes up for the abysmal pay, though. You can easily get a software development job making much, much more than that, with most, if not all of the same benefits.
I disagree. A job you love is a lot better than a job you hate. I agree $30k is ridiculously low, but if it pays enough to live the life you want, why should you get more if that would make you hate your life? There's no bigger blessing in life than to get paid for doing something you love.
The most important thing though is that he's learning: that means he will still be able to get better opportunities later. Once the learning stops, it's time to get out.
You're getting fucked. Hard. But that's what the games industry is all about. Fucking developers over, and then replacing them with fresh faced new grads who think it'd be just spiffy to work in games.
The NHS provides mostly excellent free health care. (Some non-urgent but unplanned stuff can be frustrating).
But you can also pay privately for treatment. I'm not sure why you would chose to do so - you get a private room but not much else. (There's a possibility you get slightly worse outcomes)
Dental isn't free even on the NHS (although many people get exemptions) so paying gets you better dentists, with better wait times, and more cosmetic options.
Recruiters sometimes lie or exaggerate. That's nothing new. Actually, they have to do it, to show their bosses that they're getting warm bodies into interviews.
Did your co-worker actually take this job, without doing the due diligence of reading the contract and the offer letter?
I think the author being deliberately hyperbolic for humour's sake, playing up lots of British stereotypes etc for laughs or a bit of catharsis. It's a Friday afternoon "I've had a shit week" blog post and it wasn't to my tastes, but I wouldn't necessarily assume the author has some problems.
Exactly. His post is rather long to be only an outburst of angriness. I think he is pretty pissed off by the recruitement process and decided to take it up a notch in order to make it grotesque.
Since it wasn't stressed yet to you: The article talks about recruiters from outside of tech companies, not recruiters at FB or Google. I have to say I'm doubtful you "know" hundreds of recruiters (inside or outside the companies), unless you mean you got an email from hundreds of recruiters. If you just reject the emails, you probably won't get the experience described in the article.
> I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all.
Congrats. That must be how the entire industry works then </sarcasm>
> a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions
Yeah, bull-shit, if you think every engineering job is in a comfy office with great pay and great working conditions, you are seriously delusional. I've worked at places where this wasn't the case.
If everything was all sunshine and rainbows all the time, companies wouldn't have bad reputations, or have a hard time hiring new people. But plenty do have a bad reputation, and plenty do scare off new recruits. That's kind of the entire point of sites like GlassDoor.
> The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
First off, it's his opinion, and his blog, totally his right to have unsupported claims. But considering how many comments actually support his claims, it's my belief you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry.
I'm impressed at your infinite snark and sarcasm to actual arguments ratio. When you START your post with a combination of intentionally misunderstanding my point with the sarcasm tag than it is literally impossible to take you seriously.
To end the post with saying "you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry." is just like, jesus man, are you going for some sort of insufferability award? Go outside. Perhaps there is something more rewarding there than grasping at straws to get mad at a stranger on the internet...
He's not commenting on the in-house recruiting staffs at the major corporations, he's commenting on the third-party (usually contract) recruitment industry. They're not the same; the lack of knowledge and perverse incentives are much less an issue with direct recruitment.
It's my experience that the third-party recruiting business is almost as terrible in the US as the author describes in the UK, though sans the oddball Brit dialect. There also doesn't seem to be as much of the third-party contract scam going; if the recruiter is a contracting agency, they'll tell you that up front. But the incoherent and misspelled emails, the rampant spam, the lack of knowledge of the roles they're recruiting for, yes that all rings true in the US too.
Firstly, Google tells me outright they do not source from outside recruiters, which the OP is speaking about. Perhaps it is different at executive levels or outside the US.
Secondly, Google is a world-class, forward-thinking company so they are probably not representative of the rest of the millions of companies out there. That is like saying..."of course 100% of companies provide free lunch, after all hundreds of departments at Google provide free lunch." It is just silly.
Finally, the OP is not upset about ending up with "a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office." How many engineers even have offices these days? Which company do you even work for?
The OP is upset about rent-seeking behavior of outside recruiters. Often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters.
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. OK, perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people.
I've been fine with recruiters until i came to berlin and somehow let my phone number slip to the uk recruiters. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to block all uk numbers, nothing I can say will make them stop cold calling me, and they're so aggressive it's hard to escape a call without being rude. I really don't get why uk recruiters in particular are so awful, the German ones are fine.
My theory is probably wrong, but it is possible that this article is a way for the author to signal his skills/worth/value. Someone with low skills and who's desperate to find a job is highly unlikely to publicly complain about the amount of attention he gets from recruiters, so by actually doing it, he signals that he has high value.
But I do believe the more likely explanation remains that this guy got angry after getting harassed repeatedly by recruiters and decided to do something about it.
"To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write."
It was at this point that you lost me. You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job.
"You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job."
I'm getting a lot of REALLY bizarre straw men responses to my posts but this one has to take the cake.
You managed to turn me saying that people should stop bitching about IT recruiters calling them for offices jobs that pay well and have great conditions ito a conclusion that I have CLEARLY never had a crappy job? I...what? How? How does a human brain take my input and produce your output? I'm blown away.
I'll give you a hint. No recruiter called me for my crappy jobs. I went and applied for them. Sorry this doesn't fit into your projection that you were clearly qualified to make from that single thing I said.
Once again, you've clearly never experienced a recruiter trying to get you for a crappy job. Consider yourself lucky.
And since you haven't, you really need to stop telling other people what they can and cannot complain about. Seriously, at what salary level are people not allowed to complain about work conditions any more? What exactly are the conditions that an office has to have before one can no longer complain? Free soda? A snack machine?
> If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.
Yet this article instead of getting flagged into oblivion got upvoted to #1 as of now. Could that be that HN readers' experience with recruiters mirrors the author's experience?
I think the complaint is that the author could have instead made this argument in a rational, not irate, not mean spirited and substantiated way. What would have been so bad about that?
I think you've completely missed the humour in this post. It describes in a funny, sarcastic and sardonic article just about every experience I and my dev/IT pals have had with IT recruitment agencies.
It's not about in-house recruiters like you have at FB/Google, it's about the scumbags that hold potential employees to ransom and act as self appointed gatekeepers to jobs that might or might not exist. As an experiment why not hit up jobserve and try applying for some of these agency advertised jobs (under a fake persona), I don't think you've ever experienced the humiliation and frustration of dealing with these wankers.
It's Friday, go have a beer, relax and rediscover your sense of humour.
> Oh good, the "you didn't think this was funny therefore your sense of humor sucks" logic.
That's taking it quite personally. We can agree that Mocko's sardonic style isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you don't like it, accept that others do and that he's really not going to change it for you. He makes it abundantly clear that he is in a position to ignore (at best) or belittle (at worst) people who disagree with him. So move on.
Its an over-the-top, funny rant in prototypical UK style on the state of outsourced recruiting - not in house recruiting (which has its own, different issues).
A lot of the behavior mentioned here is awfully familiar in the US.
Are you in the UK and have you dealt with a large number of recruiters? I would be super surprised to meet someone who has a good sample size of working with UK recruiters who doesn't have similar thoughts on the subject.
I'm in the US, actively looking for work, and this rang VERY true. These guys can be relentless, with ethics and tactics a professional spammer would admire.
Maybe things are different in the UK, but in Canada I've never had to rely on a recruiter to find good work. I've interacted with them a few times and yes, it wasn't pleasant, but they hardly had the market cornered. My impression has been that those who rely on recruiters are unable to navigate the job market well themselves. It's not a forced reliance.
In London these days you don't have to depend on third-party recruiters, but they will contact you anyway. Wayyyyy more than I saw in either Toronto or Vancouver.
Agreed, at first I thought they were trying to make a point, then it seems to lapse into some sort of cartoonish straw man just-for-entertainment depiction, but then it veers back to a serious conclusion along the lines "and this is why these companies shouldn't exist. The End". It's a bit confusing.
I don't think you should comment on articles you haven't read. Also, I suspect your knowledge of sex workers in Southeast Asia is entirely theoretical or, at best, as a client.
There are a lot of people who are not happy with their informatics jobs, especially in the UK, and I think recruiters are a significant part of the reason. As you can probably guess from the slang, the particular situation the author is describing is much worse there.
>> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.
Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think "exploited" I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.
If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.