This is my spicy response to a recruiter. I don't need to play the "saving face" game anymore. Therefore, it's time for honesty. I got this invitation and want to provide feedback. JoshuaFluke style.

Recruiters: Please use this as partly constructive and partly spicy feedback.
Junior devs and those considering this industry: Please use this for awareness on the amount of BS you have to deal with in this industry.

---

> URGENT - Sr. Software Engineer (Golang / Python / SQL / Kafka) - Permanent

Marking something urgent just tells me that you or your client didn't plan ahead. Yellow flag.

> Hi Ravi,

> I hope all is well.

> My name is BOB BOBBINGTON, I am a Senior Consultant at COMPANY Leadership Search Team.

So your client is searching for a "leader" urgently? Yeah, super lack of planning. But I know that most businesses are reactive, so it's a "meh". Yellow flag.

> I am working on an assignment and looking for an experienced Software Engineer to design and develop applications for exciting Energy Management solutions.

Good intro, but "exciting" doesn't work at all. Everything is "exciting" these days. Urgh. If I want excitement, I'll go watch tiktok.

Hobbies should be exciting. Businesses should be boring, predictable, and reliable.

I'm a Toyota Corolla kind of guy. I want no part of some vroom-vroom leased-ferrari business.

> The focus is on Go/Python, with heavy exposure to SQL databases and REST APIs.

Nice. Sounds like a basic stack that doesn't have random fancy shit. I actually like this. Green flag.

> This is a great opportunity to work

And it goes back to "meh". Everything is a "great opportunity". Urgh. If you are hiring at a senior level, anyone you talk to about this has heard [ exciting, great, amazing, cutting-edge ] for years. We know the packaging is a lie. Let us not start the relationship with a lie. Using the superlatives is just noise at this point.

> with a technical and dynamic team 

What?! Why is it a "dynamic" team? Why is the team regularly changing? Are people regularly quitting? What's going on here?

> using cutting-edge technologies.

"Cutting-edge tech" is over-engineered resume-driven development by devs that want to pad their resume with the latest shiny, before they leave the company in the next 2 years. Using cutting-edge tech means you are using tech that hasn't been battle-tested over years, but gets all the airtime on hckrnews. When I read this all I think is "Oh, so 3 years from now I'm going to be the programmer with the greatest tenure and I'll be dealing with the BS of maintaining a program in some abandoned framework that stopped being the sexy new thing 2 years ago". No thank you.

Automatic red flag.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe:
- C-beams off the shoulder of Orion.
- 50 shades of Jira for a team of 5. Yes, 5 people in the whole company, because "viral scale hockey-stick, bro".
- Expensive GCP image-management because "patching Ubuntu servers is too difficult".
- AWS elastic beanstalk for a production of 50 servers when Ansible would have been the boring solution that just works.
- Building our [ custom, bespoke, artisanal ] talk-to-the-db layer, because "ORMs don't scale". Yup, an actual CTO told me this with a completely straight face. While their 8-core 32GB-ram postgresql prod instance was maxing out on CPU usage with 30 active users per day. I quit that job within 5 weeks, and don't even put that on my resume.
- All those moments lost in company time, like time-theft.
- Time to declare bankruptcy because we ran out of runway on fancy shit.

> This position offers a competitive base + extensive benefits

Oh, so you've already figured out the compensation package you want to start negotiations with? Seems like this is a great time to share that info. How difficult is it to say "Base is 100k CAD, 4 weeks vacation, you can remote in from worldwide, but need CA tax residency because we don't want to deal with figuring out payroll taxes in Turkey". It's not difficult to say this. But you don't say it. Suspicious.

Automatic red flag.

If I wanted to play mind-games and guessing-games about pricing, I'd go start a food-processing business and negotiate daily purchase prices from fishermen at a Macchi Market in India. Save these mind-games for the business-folk that live for the art of the deal and the negotiation and get off on bargaining down to 10% lower than market rate. I'm a programmer; we're built different.

Actually, even the macchi-market fish sellers would take a look at me, know that I'm a noob at their game, and shout out a 2-4x price (the tourist price) and try to scam me. They'll say "my brother come look. very good fish. 5 dollar fish.". They wouldn't yell out "very good competitive price". At least they'll give a starting number to "pin" the negotiation right off the bat. You couldn't even get that tactic right.

Automatic double-plus red flag.

> and room for leadership-level promotion

I don't even know what this means. I've worked at enough companies in Toronto tech to know that "leadership" is a lie.
- All decisions about _what_ to build are made by the business side, and
- All decisions about _how_ to build have to go through a committee of programmers, most of who are pick "cutting-edge technologies" for resume-driven-development.

"Leadership" is just a translation layer in the orgs. It's responsibility without authority.

> by joining one of North America’s fastest-growing SaaS innovators.

Oh you represent a "fastest-growing SaaS"? I'll never find someone like you.

> I have a deadline, which is tomorrow at 5 pm. If interested, please feel free to share your updated profile accordingly.

This is the thing that triggered me make to this reaction. I've been around the block enough times. No you don't have a deadline. I'm old enough to know the "create urgency" tactic. This is not how you form a trusting relationship. You want me to jump ship and sign up to work for your client for (ideally) the next 10 years, and you want to start the relationship with these tactics?! Have some shame.

> Much appreciated,
> BOB

> BOB's EMAIL, BOB's phone number

> BOB Bobbington
> Senior Recruitment Consultant @ COMPANY | Certified Diversity Co.

Wait what? You can't say shit like this, man. Diversity!? Did you contact me just because I tick a checkbox, and not because of merit? GTFO. I'm a professional, and I've earned my stripes in programming. Now I'm wondering if I'm here due to my checkboxes. Or worse, if I'm contacted because of merit and then others on the team are there due to checkboxes. Either way, I now know that checkboxes are involved in this process, and I'll always wonder. There's no need for this. Save that for the EULA-type disclaimers that all job postings have these days. The lawyers require it; we get it. All you have to say is "I checked your profile. I think we might be a good fit. Let's learn more about each other and figure out if we are actually a good fit.". Done. Easy.

OTOH, I am a professional and everyone's got a price. If all you are looking for is someone to pad your quotas, I'm listening. My rate is $300 USD per month to be on your payroll and you'll be able to check off 3 different diversity dimensions. $100 / month / checkbox seems like a good rate to keep legal off your back.

---
Now for the constructive part. This is the kind of invitation that will have a good impression on me.

Hi Ravi,

I'm BOB at BOBRECRUITINGCORP. We are looking for a senior programmer. The high-level info is:
- Company size: 50
- Dev team size: 10
- Compensation: 100k CAD, 2 weeks vacation/yr
- Bonuses: 10-15% of base pay per year based on metrics like daily-active-users/weekday / cost of running production, etc. TBD after you cross probation, and you have had time to learn our business needs. This addendum to your employment agreement will be in writing. We need someone senior to figure this out with us, since we don't have this in our growing business atm. This will serve as a template for our existing devs too, to align incentives for the whole team.
- Industry: Energy management company that provides IoT devices for manufacturing businesses that track [ temperature, usage, noise-levels ] , aggregates that data using Kafka into a Python/Golang backend. The data is then displayed to customers in the form of a web dashboard. We also provide alerting, something like PagerDuty for manufacturing processes. Our reps talk a lot with our clients and we eventually want to build out an early warning system that helps our clients catch issues and call in maintenance teams before their production lines break down.
- Current pain point: Our biggest pain point at the moment is [ server costs, dropped events, prod keeps breaking, takes too long to translate business needs to programming tasks, etc ]. We need a senior to come in and fix this. You'll be in charge and will be evaluated on this during the probation period. We'll discuss the secondary pain points during probation, for ongoing work. This way we get to see how well our work-style gels while also giving you focus for your probation.

I hope this interests you. No worries if you aren't looking for a change atm. I'd like to still send an update to you every quarter, just to keep this line of communication going. Let me know if you don't want this, and I'll put you on our do-not-contact list.

Thank you for your time,
Bob Bobbington, BobCorp