An Archetypical Tech Recruiter

I’m almost of sick of these people as I am of self-righteous terminally-online types.

I have phone calls like this at least once a month. They usually go something like this.

tech recruiter
“We need a developer with 10 years experience with $NEW_TECH1 for an unnamed company at an unspecified wage.2”
me
Saitama from One Punch Man saying, “OK,” with an impassive expression

I was having this conversation about Microsoft’s .NET Framework back in 2009; hiring managers always seem to want people possessed of a decade of experience with technology that only came out that year.

They never learn. I’ll be taking maintenance contracts when I’m 70 because Social Security combined with my 401k and IRA aren’t enough and they’ll still be bullshitting people like this.

I’m not the only one who gets this, either. The creator of FastAPI, Sebastián Ramírez wasn’t “qualified” for a job working with tech he created because the job ad wanted 4 years of experience when he had created the fucking thing only 1.5 years ago.

self-pitying rant

Why did I get into the tech industry? It seemed a better idea at the time than joining the Navy, and I had nothing better to do with my life. After all, I was supposedly a “genius”, and “geniuses” didn’t go to trade school and become plumbers, electricians, carpenters, or HVAC techs.

I should have been a rent boy when I was still young, slim, and pretty — but I didn’t have the balls. Now that I’ve got the balls to whore out my ass instead of my intellect, I don’t have the youth or the looks. This is irony of a sort.

If you’re a tech recruiter or HR type reading this, cut the crap. Figure out a better way to gauge proficiency than years of experience. Cling to this metric and you’ll keep embarrassing yourselves and exposing firms to charlatans who will game your applicant tracking systems by claiming years of experience they don’t necessarily possess.

  1. In this case, $NEW_TECH is the Carbon programming language. According to Wikipedia this language won’t hit version 1.0 until 2024 or 2025; it’s still in fucking beta testing and recruiters/HR people expect developers to be ready to use this shit in production.↩︎

  2. Don’t even get me started on the inability of recruiters to tell people who’s offering the job and how much they’re prepared to pay. I’m getting to the point where if I wanted to find work I’d start with a “situation wanted” post detailing my requirements, and pointing recruiters to it when they send cold emails.↩︎