I don't know, maybe I have been lucky, but I don't get that so much. I get very infrequent recruiter contact, but when they do contact me, they seem to have at least done a little homework. Usually they have the domain/technologies right, and they have made an effort to match skills with the role. My biggest complaint is that once in a while they get the job level way wrong. I've got nearly 20 years under my belt, and I still get approached for individual contributor "seventh engineer from the left" type roles. But that's not a huge deal, just politely decline. I also get a lot of "I see you are doing $ROLE at $COMPANY_1. How would you like to do the exact same $ROLE at $COMPANY_2?" which are not interesting to me but how are they supposed to know that?

I've never been called or harassed by a recruiter, and I try to get back to every one, if only for politeness sake. No reason to burn bridges. If they got the match a little wrong, no big deal--they're not wizards and mind readers.

It depends a lot on what job-searching sites you use and what information you give them. I got on Dice to apply for a particular job, and had to take my phone number off my account there to get the pushy recruiter calls to stop. LinkedIn mostly isn't too bad, but I still wouldn't put a phone number on there.

It's not the type of roles that gets irritating, but the pushiness and desperation of some recruiters. Like they've read too many books on sales and think that they can get any engineer into any job if only they say the right words and are persistent enough.

Do you have LinkedIn? I'm considering ditching it because I'm so sick of recruiter spam and that seems to be their main avenue of contact.

I did it when Microsoft bought them. Not because of it, it was just the moment when I realized that nothing good ever came out via LinkedIn.

Github and Stackoverflow supplied me with all of my decent leads and networking necessary in the past years. For the only two exceptions of people that expected me to have an account there, I told them I could send an up-to-date CV with references, if needed.

Yea, that's pretty much the only channel through which recruiters contact me. Nobody cold-calls or E-mails anymore, and I don't post my resume anywhere.

when someone disrupts recruiting enough to make all that wasted energy uncompetitive.

It stops when you delete your LinkedIn account. Seriously - I get no headhunter spam anymore. Recruiters only call when someone I know makes an internal referral, and I don't mind that.

never