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Clueless Recruiters, Issue #4

Clueless Recruiters854 words5 minutes to read

Do I look like a cow? It’s the hair, isn’t it? I need a haircut — all in this week’s issue of Clueless Recruiters. (Cue theme music!)

Explanation

Recruiter Schlock

Here’s one I got this morning from a clueless recruiter. For reference, here is my résumé.

Hope all is well. I wanted to reach out to you in regards to an opportunity I’m working on with [company] located in San Jose.

Hello [name], I am doing well. It’s good to put a face to a name (http://[domain-name].com/about/team). I’m curious, however as to why you’re emailing me about a position in California since I haven’t lived in that state for a few years.

A company led by a team of experienced executives, designers, and engineers from TiVo, Netflix, Vudu, Disney, MTV, MGM, Apple, Best Buy, E!, eBay, Yahoo!, and WebTV. I’m working with [name], VP of Engineering and he is looking for a solid Ruby Developer. The company is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms including NEA, Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital, LA angel investor [name], and independent investors from the entertainment and technology industries. Please let me know if this is something you would be interested in. I have included the job req below.

When you leave Silicon Valley behind, you realize that people find the strangest things enticing about positions. Personally, I’m not even remotely interested in “status” as much as whether or not the work I’m doing will have a positive impact on the world.

[Description of company and their product.]

I know. I’ve played with it. It’s… meh. It tries to be too many things without actually being good at any one of them.

About the Position

We’re looking for a strong autonomous general programmer with great Ruby knowledge and with capacity and will to evolve. We’re currently using a custom Ruby stack with Rails components and a MongoDB backend, but are looking for someone with enough experience to adapt to new technologies as needed.

Well, this clearly doesn’t sound like me. You Googled my name before contacting me, right? To make sure that I was actually a reasonable fit for this position?

Since I know how awesome the overwhelming majority of technical recruiters are about doing their homework before contacting people, let me make sure you’ve seen my resume.

  1. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Ryan+Parman
  2. Click “Resume”
  3. Read the resume.

Because, I mean, I’d hate to think that a technical recruiter was making a cattle call by sending messages to anybody who had “Ruby” in their resume somewhere. I don’t look like a cow, do I? (Lie to me if you think I do. It’s the hair, right? I need a haircut, don’t I?)

Desired Skills
Ruby proficiency

Somewhat.

MongoDB

Nope.

Other distributed databases (Riak, Memcached, Redis, Cassandra, Hbase, etc.)

Nope.

Strong Traditional SQL Experience is a plus

Nope.

API Design, client-Server communication experience

Yes.

Caching techniques

Somewhat.

Testing (TDD & BDD knowledge is a plus)

Yes.

Start-up mentality

Yes.

Autonomous

Yes.

Desired Interests * Scala, Go & concurrency

No desire.

Solr & search optimization

No desire.

In memory caching and indexing

Some desire.

Fault-tolerant service architecture

Well, yes. I work for Amazon Web Services. :)

Multi-data center and distributed data

Again, yes. The whole AWS thing.

If digital entertainment is your passion, [redacted] is for you:

Oh really?

an obsession for user experience…

Clearly not. The UX of the app is arguably pretty terrible.

disruptive technology…

WTF does this even mean?

high-profile investors…

Not even a little bit.

and an experienced team of designers…

Yes.

engineers…

Yes.

and executives…

Most executives are buffoons. How are the [redacted] execs different?

from both the technology…

Awesome!

and entertainment industries.

You mean the broken industries who are attempting to destroy the United States through bogus legislation? No thank you.

[name] | Technical Recruiter | [company]
Engineering, Product, Development, Leadership
Tel: [phone] | Cell: [phone]
[email address]

You are receiving this email because you are a member of our private contact database. If you do not wish to receive similar email messages in the future and to see our contact information please click here. We respect your privacy. This email fully complies with the CAN-SPAM Act.

I’ve actually sent unsubscribe messages before on multiple occasions, and my requests keep getting ignored. I actually have Gmail filter @[domain-name].com emails directly into the Trash because of it. I only saw this message because I accidentally deleted something and needed to pull it back to my inbox.

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.