Marco.org

I got this email from a “Senior Recruiter” (spammer) at Robert Half Technology today:

Hello Marco,

I hope this email finds you well. Your qualifications match a PHP Developer position we currently have with a great company in the Columbus market area. I wanted to find out your current employment situation and inquire as to whether or not you are currently in the job market and what type of opportunities you might entertain?

PHP Web Developer

[pages of garbage removed]

Desired Candidate Profile:

• Delivering Quality code.
• Extensive knowledge of iterative development lifecycle management and tools.
• Able to direct the work of others, prioritize tasks and allocate resources.

• Must be able to lead cross-functional project teams and coordinate activities of others.

  Experience in:

• Design, develop, and management of PHP Web Applications.

• Familiarity with WAMP, LAMP environments.
• Experience with MySQL.
• Taken a team through multiple complete product development cycles.
• Agile application development.
• Experience developing and using Web Services

I look forward to hearing back from you!

Let me tell you a story about Robert Half Technology in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

Robert Half was the first place I went to interview for a job after college. They listed a specific job online, maintained that premise through a phone interview, and then asked me to come in, only to reveal in person that there wasn’t actually a specific position available — they just wanted to get me on their list of temp consultants they could rent out.

Robert Half Technology does everything that gives tech recruiters a bad name, and everything that makes looking for a tech job so incredibly difficult when you’re young and inexperienced. They do the entire industry a great disservice. Nobody who works there should be proud of what their company does, or be under the illusion that they’re helping anyone.

After looking over my resume with me in person, which was pretty light since I was applying for my first job after getting my computer science degree, they said I couldn’t and shouldn’t be a programmer, and should stick to basic IT jobs instead.

A few days later, they assigned me one awful weekend job where I, and about 50 other similar chumps, sat around and watched a huge company’s PCs upgrade to Windows 2000 and occasionally clicked buttons when necessary. I quit after two days when I got a real job offer — as a programmer.

But that was mostly luck: a friend from college had just been hired there and connected us. I narrowly escaped a career of working for cheap IT body-farms, always regretting not starting out as a programmer like I wanted to.

So, Robert Half Technology, kindly fuck off.¹