
What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates - lynnetye
https://www.keyvalues.com/blog/what-tech-recruiters-want-from-engineering-candidates
======
alkonaut
If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound
like sales pitches with vague language?

“You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy”

“You’ll work close to the systems”

“You’ll have a central role”

What systems? What is the company even _doing_? What about fundamental things
like

\- where is this?

\- exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here?

\- What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs?

\- What tech is used, ie what is it about my skill set that makes me a good
fit?

These questions are literally _never_ answered in first contacts from
recruiters. And of course I’m not willing to compose a response or have even a
15 minute phone conversation or a lunch meeting with a recruiter for a job
that might turn out to be in the wrong city.

Is this some secret to the recruiting industry that it’s bad to give away
details in the initial contact, so that the candidate doesn’t just apply
directly to the company? Or do I have to high expectations on these contacts?
Or do I have unusual bad luck with terrible recruiters.

This is obviously the opposite of what recruiters want from candidates, it’s
what candidates want from recruiters. But seeing as there is obviously a gap
there - does anyone have _any_ insight in this?

~~~
gervase
Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring. For
example, the people who are writing the job descriptions got a 1-line email,
"We need to expand the engineering team; could you take care of it? Thanks!",
and so they're basically having to come up with all this on their own.

Their first stop is probably a Google search: "example job description
software engineering"

Then, they replace the buzzwords with their own buzzwords, which they probably
already know, and they're done. This takes much less time than scheduling time
with the engineering team, and since they'll be doing the interviews anyway,
what's the harm? Their part of the job is already done.

The second part is that companies are doing the same thing that applicants are
doing with their resumes; they don't want to put any red flags out there, in
order to keep their possible pool of matches as large as possible. There's a
_chance_ they can persuade you to ignore a red flag if they talk to you; if
they list it in the job description, there's a 0% chance.

Examples of information that might be excluded:

> where is this?

\- It's in the suburbs outside Reno, NV.

> exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here?

\- You'll be maintaining our undocumented, 12-year old legacy backend.

> What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs?

\- I literally have no idea, I was just given a budget and a number of slots
to fill.

> What tech is used

\- Something you've never heard of, running on top of PHP 4.

> what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit?

\- We will literally take anyone who can FizzBuzz.

Finally, there are some dog-whistle/shibboleth phrasing that seems perfectly
clear to the person who wrote the description, but might not be clear to you.
Examples:

> “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy”

\- You'll be working on our product that is the closest to making money (or
actually makes some! who knows).

> “You’ll work close to the systems”

\- You'll be doing some DevOps as well.

> “You’ll have a central role”

\- We have a small team.

And so on.

~~~
dx034
> Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring.

I have the feeling many see this as malicious by employers. But it's already
hard to find good developers, employing them as recruiters is a waste of
resources. You'll try to find recruiters who have some idea what to look for
and then only include engineers in the last stage. Having every application
for a senior dev scanned by other senior devs won't work.

As for the recruiter, they can only learn so much about the job because the
company probably has 20+ roles to fill where they need to know the basics for
all. They can't be expert in all domains.

~~~
jtmcmc
at larger companies you often have recruiters focused on specific areas - so
they can know more. At places I've worked we've had just an engineering
recruiter and just a sales recruiter and etc...

------
falcolas
In my opinion:

\- designing your resume

\- EQ

\- having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the
company

\- Think of your resume like a poem

\- visual representation of their experience/resume

These are great criteria for hiring a designer or marketing personnel, but
these are TERRIBLE criteria for hiring a _technical_ person.

In my fantasy world, a _technical_ resume is in a monospaced font and is
eminently readable; I would expect the resume to look good in a code editor.

My fantasy applicant would be very precise in the tech they list, and when
asked questions, they would gripe about that technology all day long; if they
can't complain about its shortcomings and pitfalls, they didn't use it.

They would not match the job criteria on the posting exactly, because the
criteria on the job posting is for some fantasy developer that doesn't
actually exist. I would instead expect them to have figured out the core of
the actual stack and list it instead.

Sadly, my fantasy world doesn't exist, and we have to pretend we're designers
to work around people like this who have no idea how to hire actual technical
people.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
A good balance between highly technical and creatively designed is to write
your resume with TeX.

~~~
dabockster
Is that more of a recommendation or a hard requirement? I've been using a
bland resume that I thought would check all the boxes inside an ATS.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Just a recommendation. TeX is a very engineer-oriented design tool. An
interesting way to spruce up your resume.

------
ken
> It may seem like common sense, but having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine
> interest in some aspect of the company (whether it’s the company’s mission,
> product, technical challenges, or its work environment) is important.

This frustrates me so much. What if I can't find a company that offers any
such thing? This seems like anti-common sense to me.

If you have skills at carpentry, and do a professional job, you can get a job
at any construction site. Nobody cares if you have a "deep, enthusiastic,
genuine interest" in the type of structure, or the challenges of woodworking,
or the layout of the job site.

If you have skills at programming, though, you might not even get a job these
days if you can't demonstrate that you're sufficiently passionate about what
exactly the company does and how they do it.

This isn't a blue/white-collar distinction. I once talked to the industrial
design lead at Fluke, and asked if he ended up there because he had a
particular interest in test and measurement. He laughed at me and said no, not
at all. He just liked industrial design, and didn't much care where he did it,
or what he was designing.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say it sounds like you're searching for
people with passion so you can get them to work unpaid overtime for you. I
don't know why else it would matter.

~~~
amorphid
The way I think of it is that we haven't yet figured out concrete ways to
assess whether someone can or can't be an effective developer on a team. So if
you want me to hire you, and I can't directly measure your skills (because I'm
a suboptimal interviewer?), then I need data points that increase my
confidence that you are more likely to work out.

This is a 100% contrived, but here's an example...

\- I run a dev team largely using Microsoft tech

\- You are a Java developer

\- I had a Java developer try out the Microsoft stuff, and quit because they
decided they didn't wanna go all in on C#

\- If you're work experience in largely in Java, but I see you spending a lot
of time writing C# in your personal time, or somehow demonstrating a passion
for you, I'm more likely to think you'll be a fit.

Maybe asking people to demonstrate a passion for tech is related to feeling
defensive about that tech. Plenty of back-end-y developers trash talk CSS and
JavaScript. Someone who works on front-end stuff all day long might not like
that trend, so they filter for people excited about JavaScript, and I can't
say I'd blame them for that.

~~~
ken
I agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph! As an industry, we still
don't have the first clue how to hire. It's not just you.

Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed
dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any
correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity.

I think "Hiring for passion" is the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying
IBM". It's the CYA response. We have no clue if a hire is going to work out,
but if they spend their weekends writing C# for fun, and they don't work out
at our company, we can at least tell our bosses "They came across as so
_passionate_ during the interview -- we couldn't have known they would turn
out to be a bad hire!"

~~~
amorphid
> Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed
> dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any
> correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity.

Makes sense. I think I was trying to say we come up with seemingly arbitrary
reasons to hire & reject people. Before getting into software, I had expected
the opposite. As far as I can tell, hiring would be more effective if we asked
candidates to roll a d20 to make a charisma check w/ a difficulty modified by
how we're feeling that day.

~~~
ken
Great point. The word "science" appears in the name of the field that I
studied, yet I haven't seen any evidence that our current hiring processes in
this field are better than random (i.e., the null hypothesis).

If I made a software company who openly declared that their hiring process was
purely random, would it work as a company? Would it be legal? For that matter,
is a standard tech interview legally valid[1]? What if there is no known valid
method?

[1]: [https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/facts-about-
validation](https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/facts-about-validation)

~~~
amorphid
I'm imagining an overly academic interview question that goes something like
this...

"It's been determined that our CS interviews are both random and unscientific,
and we'd like to reverse that trend. To give us more control of the outcome,
and to help us be more science-y, how would you design a random number
generator which can be made deterministic by giving it a seed value? We need
one for our hiring process."

------
CryoLogic
TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met.

I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert
coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with
SPA experience AND was able to build REST API's. I spent thirty minutes trying
to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end
JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and back-end services. He was
convinced JavaScript only runs on browsers and I was full of shit.

That was at a big-name tech startup (one of: Lyft, AirBnB, Uber, Github).

Other times I've been told by recruiters things like "Sorry, we want someone
with at least 5 years of Ember3 experience, not Ember2". Stupid stuff like
that.

I don't know if the talent shortage is real, or if companies still haven't
figured out recruiting. I think it's probably actually a combo of both.

I now write my resumes full of fluffy buzzwords, my GitHub is full of animated
GIFS and pretty pictures and I adjust the buzzwords based on the job posting.
Much higher conversion rate.

~~~
qohen
_TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I 've met._

You know what is impressive about (at least some) technical recruiters I've
met? Despite not knowing much about tech, they can pull down $300K/yr (and
this is not in SF or NYC).

~~~
goldenManatee
It's perception. They network, get lucky sometimes, and don't stop preaching
about it until everyone around starts believing they're valuable authorities
in their profession. Snow ball rolls from there and they start attracting
candidates based on perceived connection to the top company/people/teams.

~~~
qohen
The $300K/yr. recruiters I'm thinking of are not people who have some out-
sized reputation, at least not as far as I'm aware -- I think the economics of
the business simply allow them to make a lot of money if they can regularly
place a small number of candidates each month -- see my reply below to another
comment about how I figure that might work.

*

I do know one recruiter who truly does have a good reputation, but not for the
reasons you suggest -- I met her years ago and while I haven't seen her for a
while, every so often over the years, I'd be talking to someone about job-
hunting and they'd say they knew a good recruiter I should talk to and,
inevitably, the name they'd then mention was hers.

And I don't think she did this by networking or attempting to create a higher
profile or becoming an authority or by convincing people she had access to top
people at top companies. I think she's just done a good job for people and so
those people feel good about her and therefore about recommending her to
others. Someone like that might be worth paying a lot to -- for all that good
will in addition to her skill and experience.

*

BTW, it occurs to me that the first $300K recruiter I met told me he ran a
Python user-group out of his offices -- and perhaps that wasn't the only group
he did this for. That kind of thing, obviously, can help a recruiter become
known to developers, but, again, not because of having an out-sized reputation
-- rather, by just being around when developers congregate, giving him a
chance to introduce himself to them, face-to-face. (I don't know how much
business hosting such groups actually brought to his firm, but it obviously
couldn't hurt).

------
andrewstuart
I fired one of my biggest clients because they appointed an HR manager who
cared most about things like whether or not the career history timeline
perfectly lined up and left nothing unaccounted for - like _really_ cared -
would knock someone back after 3 tech interviews if there was a glitch in the
resume.

I felt it was because she really had nothing tangible to contribute to the
technical assessment process so felt she must do _something_.

I can tell you this - I'm not wasting my time recruiting for a company that
does that sort of thing.

Why I point this out is that many of the things that these people say they
want are things that are not really very important when trying to find very
scarce technical talent, but such recruiting people are happy to throw away a
great developer because some unimportant thing was not present.

------
danesparza
I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful 'what engineers want from
technical recruiters' post.

~~~
alxlaz
Here is what I love to see:

1\. An understanding of the _fields_ of work and of their evolution. Don't
look for candidates based on languages and libraries -- those might be OK to
get an initial shortlist, but:

a) Any programmer past junior level should be able to pick up a library (from
a field he understands) in ~1 week and become minimally productive with a
language in 2-3 weeks.

b) It's the idioms of each _field_ that are difficult to teach, not the tech
tools. Someone who did Java ME programming back in 2003 is probably better
suited for an embedded software engineering position than someone who has 5
years of writing C++ code in the banking industry.

2\. Erring on the side of inclusiveness. If you have doubts about whether I
should see a candidate or not, send me the resume and we'll figure it out.

3\. Valuing listening over "established patterns". Case in point: short job
tenures. I've given favourable feedback for kids who, early in their careers,
hand changed two or three jobs in a row. They were brilliant programmers who
ended up in large companies, where managers many layers above them assigned
them tasks way below their skill level, based on their title of "Junior
Software Engineers" rather than on reading their CVs. They did the _smart_
thing and left jobs that _hampered_ their professional development. So far, I
have not been wrong about this a single time.

That's not to say short job tenures are always something to ignore. Some
people have them because they're assholes -- but okay, we won't hire them
_because they 're assholes_, not because they spent less than an year in two
places.

4\. Valuing honesty over "right" answers. I know people who left their jobs
because their boss was a dick, HR wouldn't handle it, their boss's boss was an
even _bigger dick_ and they had no access to _that_ boss's boss. These people
should be able to say why they're leaving their jobs, not invent reasons about
company culture and looking for new challenges and self-deprecating comments
about how they just don't think they belong in that team.

5\. Appreciating competence, thoroughness and professionalism, not things like
enthusiasm. Some of the best engineers I know work on a strictly 9-5 basis and
go home to their kids and don't touch computers _by choice_ because their kids
are the world to them. Professionalism and competence are hard to fake.
Enthusiasm isn't.

If you want to appreciate enthusiasm, take real, falsifiable cues. Don't look
for broad smiles and "I'm _so_ super enthusiastic about <this company culture
item>". For example, look for relevant hobbies, like ham radio or restoring
old computers. Any idiot can fake being enthusiastic about programming in an
interview, but faking it by writing m68k on a Friday evening for fun is above
and beyond what most people would do in order to look like they love their
profession.

~~~
sanderjd
I'm surprised I didn't find this higher up the thread: I'm soooooo sick of
people hiring based on languages. It's right there in the first response in
this article: "make sure you’ve included the same language as the job
description if at all possible". This is so ridiculous. Either you're hiring a
junior person and you're going to have to invest in ramping them up anyway, or
you're hiring a senior person who will quickly figure out whatever language
you use.

The exception to this is if you're hiring the lead for a project, who will be
setting the idioms and mentoring the rest of the team. But even then, why are
you dictating technology to that person rather than letting them choose?

It is worth asking people whether they are interested / willing to learn the
tools you're building on, but it doesn't make sense as a filter.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The exception to this is if you're hiring the lead for a project, who will
> be setting the idioms and mentoring the rest of the team. But even then, why
> are you dictating technology to that person rather than letting them choose?

Just because you are hiring a lead doesn't mean it's a greenfield project with
nothing established; even if the lead has freedom to migrate over time, that
doesn't mean that it isn't important for them to be able to guide and mentor
on the existing stack very quickly.

I generally agree the I industry overemphasized experience in using particular
tools rather than skill in engineering systems, but it is not the case that
specific tool (including language) skill is completely irrelevant.

~~~
sanderjd
I see that what I said wasn't clear at all: I meant the specific kind of lead
who will be setting everything up, ie. on a greenfield project. I think a lead
on an established project falls into the camp of experienced people who can
figure things out.

Another exception: contractors. In this case, you do want someone who is
immediately productive in the language you're using because you do not reap
any of the benefits of them ramping up like you do with permanent employees.
For contractors, familiarity with the language and ecosystem is the more
important part of their job; for employees, familiarity with the business is
more important and the language stuff can be picked up.

------
bitwize
Crooters never seem to be asking a whole lot, as they always seem to think I'm
a "great fit" for any company currently waving money under their nose. Of
course it usually takes some prodding to discover that the crooter actually
knows nothing about my background, is ill qualified to determine who is a fit,
and I wouldn't want to work for their client anyway.

~~~
EADGBE
Upvote for "crooter"

------
nlstitch
I think recruiters should actually start giving a shit about the lives of
engineers before making demands.

\- Actually try to get to know and understand a person

\- Dont use fill-in templates

\- Have some actual knowledge of tech (java != .net)

\- Dont make offerings for positions I worked on 10 years ago during college.

\- Dont be greedy.

To just name a few...

~~~
lynnetye
To be completely honest, I also felt a lot of frustration towards recruiters
when I first started working on Key Values. (It might be one of the reasons
why I built it...)

In the last year though, I've met a wide variety of people with a wide variety
of responsibilities, approaches, and backgrounds, yet they all share the same
job title. There are certainly awful recruiters out there, but there are also
some really fantastic ones! (Just like how there are both awful and fantastic
devs out there.)

I've gotten to see both sides of job searching/hiring and it has been eye
opening. Both sides have similar complaints of the other, which is why the
process looks so darn similar to dating.

My guess is that founders, CTOs, and recruiters would all probably make a list
similar to yours:

\- Actually try to get to know and understand our company

\- Don't use fill-in templates

\- Have some actual knowledge of our industry/product

\- Don't focus on positions you worked on 10 years ago during college

\- Don't be greedy

~~~
learc83
>Don't be greedy

That is hilarious. If the representative of a multi-billion dollar company (or
a startup trying to become a multi-billion dollar company) every said
something like that to me I'd probably laugh and walk out.

~~~
lynnetye
I don't think many candidates tell the recruiter they're working with to be
less greedy, nor do many employers tell candidates this. My point is that
there's an extremely wide range of scenarios that both parties see, and most
people on one side of it have a hard time considering the perspective of the
other.

There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year
salaries at Google and expect similar comp packages from startups. (Are they
being too greedy? Meh, they're just misinformed or need to take some time to
recalibrate their expectations.)

There are also plenty of companies guilty of the same thing. Their
expectations are too high as they turn away great candidates because they
don't have a CS degree from a top school or have an impressive track record of
open source contributions.

The OP listed "don't be greedy," which sounds familiar to me. It's easy to
have a few bad experiences and then draw a blanket conclusion that every tech
company is trying to squeeze me. My point is only that it's frustrating on
both sides, and whether you're an applicant or a hiring manager, understanding
what the process feels like to the other party will make the process that much
easier for you.

~~~
ummonk
>There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year
salaries at Google and expect similar comp packages from startups. (Are they
being too greedy? Meh, they're just misinformed or need to take some time to
recalibrate their expectations.)

If they're choosing between working at a company like Google or that startup,
it's not greedy to expect competitive compensation.

~~~
repolfx
I think it was implied by context that they weren't. Obviously if you need
advice of "don't be greedy" then such a person isn't simultaneously weighing
up an offer from the top of Google's pay tier, otherwise that wouldn't be
greed, it'd just be realism.

~~~
learc83
I don't think that was implied by the context at all.

>that wouldn't be greed, it'd just be realism.

I think that's the point. Startups routinely want to convince people to work
for them for less than established companies. They often talk about wanting to
hire people who care about solving the problems they are working more than
money.

When someone is being realistic by pointing out that they can make more money
elsewhere, they say they are just "being greedy."

~~~
repolfx
_When someone is being realistic by pointing out that they can make more money
elsewhere, they say they are just "being greedy."_

You're assuming the big paying tech firms will hire any programmer who applies
to any startup. They won't.

~~~
learc83
I'm not assuming that all "by pointing out that _they_ can make more money
elsewhere". In this case I'm talking about someone who can make more money
elsewhere.

I've often heard variations on "don't be greedy" from startups and recruiters
when I was working as a consultant.

I'd tell them "We'll I'm making X now, so you're going to need to at least
meet that in total comp before I'll consider it."

The response is almost always something like "We're interested in programmers
who are really passionate about Y and aren't primarily salary driven, so we
only pay X/2 here."

------
cuddlypsycho
"EQ and self awareness"

What a crock of sh*t!! This is what happens when you pack HR departments with
humanities and gender studies majors.

Personally I do not read any resumes, all the hiring I've done was either by
referral or through online websites like angelList.

This is my process:

\- Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools
and companies is good BUT also that you are not a branch hopper (2 months
there, 3 moths here etc)

\- Check your github for samples of your code and your work ethic. (If you
don't know proper git branch management you are no good to us). Opensource
contributions are a major +++

\- Check your StackOverflow to see how good a communicator you are (best
engineers are the best teachers)

\- Don't bother with social media .. unless I am looking for a good excuse not
to hire you.

If you don't have any of the above, I will not even spend 10 seconds on you.

~~~
expertentipp
Meaningfull github profile AND stack overflow profile AND able to do full time
job?! I understand you pay people to work on their GH and SO reputation during
office hours?

~~~
cuddlypsycho
Yes and No. A great GH and SO reputation is something you build over a period
of time. It shows passion and consistency. That's what separates people who
love to code from the ones who just want the paycheck.

Also, what is "office hours"? We are plugged in 24/7.

~~~
rfrey
If only all hiring managers were this honest during the process, everyone
would be better off.

The candidate, for example, could just walk out of the interview and go for a
beer, while the hiring manager could get on with the business of finding a
gullible new grad to hire.

~~~
cuddlypsycho
I'm not the hiring manager. We are a startup, we don't have any bureaucracy.

------
kyberias
"Our hiring philosophy at Alto leans on hiring for experience as opposed to
potential."

Wow! Refreshing.

------
ohazi
I don't want weekly updates about key values in my inbox every week, I want
the bottom quarter of my phone's screen back.

------
jaredhansen
Note that what "technical recruiters" want is not guaranteed to match what the
hiring firms themselves want.

There may not be a great solution to this problem from an applicant's
perspective (because if you fail to impress the recruiter, you may forfeit the
opportunity to impress a manager in subsequent practice). Still, it's worth
keeping in mind, not least because your ultimate success at the company
depends more on what happens after the hire than before.

------
alxlaz
I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these
things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me
sum up the recruiting industry in a single quote from this material:

> Watch for spelling and grammar. [..] After conducting my own A/B tests on
> this matter, the data showed that candidates who had untidy resumes faired
> less (sic!) than those with well written ones.

Edit: I was going to write a longer post about what I am more interested in
seeing as an engineer who does the interviewing. But most of it was obvious
stuff. Instead, here's what I _don 't_ look at:

\- What libraries you used. Languages, maybe -- libraries? If you're past
junior level, I expect you'll be able to pick up a complex one, in a field
you're familiar with, in a week or two.

\- Length of past tenures. I gave favourable feedback for a lot of kids who,
early in their careers, left from two or three jobs in a row because they were
hired by large companies who then proceeded to give them completely
uninteresting work that was entirely below their programming skills, without
any mentoring, any meaningful source of professional growth and any timeframe
for when they'll get to do some _actual_ programming. I'm talking kids who,
fresh out of school, could write a decent kernel driver, but were asked to
write automated tests for REST APIs. I was never wrong about this.

\- Hackatons, coding competitions and the like. The former are entirely
unverifiable. I've seen plenty of people _claiming_ they went to this
hackathon and wrote this application that could potentially solve the problem
of water crisis in Africa, using advanced GIS algorithms and numerical
optimization and machine learning and whatnot. One of them even showed me the
app on their phone. Then they don't know how to iterate through a list or find
the race condition in three lines of code which contain literally nothing but
a function name, an initialization, and a race condition. Copy-pasting from
Stack Overflow is a useful skill to have when it sits _on top_ of other
skills. The latter tend to be completely unrelated to programming in the real
world.

\- The length of the resume. If you have enough relevant experience to fill
four pages of resume, then _write four damn pages of resume_. A one-page
resume that drops three pages of relevant stuff will put you in the same
basket as someone who can barely fill that page. It's not ballast, it's stuff
I can ask you about in an interview.

\- Layout creativity, cleanliness, typography, visual identity and the like.
Pick a CV template for Word (or, if you want me to instantly like you, LaTeX).
This is Andrew S. Tanenbaum's resume:
[https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf](https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf)
. When you can sport one that's more impressive than his in terms of content,
look into making it pretty, too.

~~~
Androider
As someone who has done a lot of hiring, I've observed a strong correlation
between spelling/grammar and the best programmers I've worked with. Details
matter, and by failing to even read over your own submission you're showing
you don't care about such details. Your commit messages and code isn't likely
to impress anyone either.

Being able to write really well can also make you stand out and do wonders for
your career, especially if everyone else on the team is likewise a high
performer (Jeff Dean style). The best people I've worked with have also all
been really nice and kind to a fault.

~~~
alxlaz
I absolutely agree. Every single good programmer I know is also exceptionally
adept at written communication (and, indeed, really nice). They tend to be
good at oral communication, too, but it's a little hard to get an accurate
reading of that in an interview.

The part I quoted is representative of the recruiting industry because _it has
a spelling mistake_. It's "fared", not "faired", and unless "fared less" is
some strange idiom that I'm not familiar with (I'm not a native English
speaker, and I'm more familiar with British English than with American
English), I could swear it's fared _worse_ (or _less well_ , if you must).

This is... very representative of the recruiting industry, in my experience.

------
edem
How do I dismiss that subscribe box that takes uo a quarter of the screen on
mobile?

------
nikanj
I'm surprised none of them mentioned the abominable "culture match". I've
heard repeated complaints that it's much more important to be a brogrammer who
likes craft beers, than it is to be any good at the actual programming.

~~~
chatmasta
I’ve been consulting the past year and a half. Recently I decided to contact
some companies just to see what the landscape was like, and if I could maybe
find an interesting opportunity that also paid well.

On one of the first calls I had, the recruiter heavily implied that I was “not
a culture fit” after I explained that I’m only interested in a job if it pays
more than I currently make consulting (this particular job paid about half
that). I’m not socially inept, I know how to speak politely and it was
definitely polite. I mentioned it on the first call because I didn’t want to
waste anyone’s time (mine included) interviewing for a job that I wouldn’t
take.

The HR lady seemed completely taken aback and offended... says “we’re looking
for people passionate about the problems we’re solving, even if it means
taking a pay cut.”

Get the f- out of here with that BS. That really grinds my gears. The company
is allowed to be profit seeking but the employees are not? No thanks.

I’ll stick with consulting... I like having multiple clients over one
employer. I like that there are no “interviews,” just my own confidence and
sales skills to pitch proposals to clients. I like the respect that clients
show me that no employer ever has. I like the autonomy, the lifestyle. And yes
I like getting paid more than I would at a local job. There’s nothing wrong
with that.

~~~
john_moscow
I think it's actually kinda straight-forward:

* If you have sales/negotiation skills, but no technical skills, you do sales/HR/whatnot.

* If you have both sales/negotiation AND technical skills, you do consulting or start your own business.

* If you have good technical skills, but poor negotiation skills, you go work as a software developer.

So yeah, an unwritten requirement for many technical positions is having poor
negotiation skills. And no recruiter will obviously tell you outright that
"you know, we're just looking for a sucker to take a crappy deal and you don't
look like one, so move on", so instead they will use the politically correct
"culture fit" to make themselves feel better.

~~~
oceanghost
There's a lot of wisdom here.

Regarding negotiation for engineers-- a few years back, I had been happily
employed at a company for ten years. The CEO of some company calls me up and
says I'd be PERFECT for a job opening he has. He says its C2H for 6 months to
make sure I'm a good "culture fit". I politely decline, and he was incensed.

I said, "Why in gods name would I leave a position I've been in for 10 years
for a contract position?"

------
sparrish
"Think of your resume like a poem."

Roses are red, Violets are blue, I need a job, You're hiring, right?

~~~
falcolas
"... I need a job, and you're hiring, too."

~~~
devmunchies
I need a job, `isHired = true`

------
whataretensors
These are all half-truths meant to avoid the real answer. They want high IQ
ambitious people who don't suffer from mental illness. They will put you
through strenuous interview processes as a makeshift filter for high IQ.

No technical interview question I've ever been asked has anything to do with
"self awareness" as Tammy pointed out. In fact self-awareness for the hyper-
productive is a negative for the organization, as that individual eventually
realizes they deserve a significant share of what they create and aren't
getting it.

------
cleansy
I love how they have a "share on hackernews" button on the side. As if hn
let's you submit more than one url at a time.

So the other way around: I would love to see tech recruiters with actual
technical understanding.

~~~
a_lifters_life
These aren't "technical recruiters" they're recruiter's of technical
professionals.

~~~
cleansy
They used this term for themselves.

> Greg Banks: Recruiting Manager at Digit, previously a _technical recruiter_
> at CourseHero.

> Lana Herzig: Technical Recruiter at Dia&Co, previously at Quartet.

~~~
a_lifters_life
Yeah, well its a misnomer. Lol.

