"All I did was miss three calls because I left my phone at my friend's and when I called they'd given the job to someone else, how unprofessional"
What you have described is very different from:
"Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight;"
I doubt you'd leave your phone at your friend's for a month, and if you were uncontactable daily for a month then, yeah, I can understand them giving the job to someone else.
Let me tell you about my first experience with a recruiter. I realise this is only one anecdote, but it sums up their usefulness.
As a fresh graduate I sent a recruiter my CV and he sent me two job specs. I applied for one and the company ended up making an offer. The salary was well below normal, the company's office was in the middle of nowhere in another part of the country, and I'd had to have moved out there and bought a car in order to do the commute. The deal was not a good one, but through the recruiter I negotiated higher pay. During this process I was warned about coming across as 'mercenary', and he made real efforts to get me to take the job quickly ('stop delaying', 'this kind of job won't come up again').
At the same time as having this offer on the table, I received a separate offer from a company I'd applied to independently, with a salary ~25% higher, great benefits etc, which I accepted, to the annoyance of my recruiter.
Once you get talking to a recruiter, they really do put you through the booking.com experience.
I accept their value. But it is limited.
"They are just doing their job" is a weak excuse. Most of the recruiters are doing such a bad job in matching the workforce with companies that they end up wasting everyone's time. The only reason why these brute-force approaches work is the surplus of demand in the current SE labour market.
This reminds me of the people that think women (or men) that don't want to go out with them owe them some kind of explanation. No, dude. Get some social awareness and move the fuck on.
Wait till you're a grownup and you realize how not true that is.
No, that's being a child. Being a grown up means not only thinking about yourself
Goes both ways.
Being an adult means you get to own many of your choices, but also their consequences.
Giving the recruiter a direct "no" would be far more professional. OTOH, I've dissed more than my share of recruiters myself, though generally only after an initial clear and unambiguous communication wasn't respected.
With regards to their testing procedures, the way I understand it is that they’re focusing on mitigation using clever monitoring/automated rollbacks. They pride themselves in their data analytics abilities, and this is part of that.
Source: live/work in Amsterdam and know many people that work/worked there.
Caveat here is that I'm not referring to all Indian devs, only the few I'm acquainted with.
If these engineers want to move abroad, they'd usually prefer the US because salaries there are significantly higher.
But even if you have good skill set, but don't want too much pressure and would like a fairly stable at some Indian consulting company, you might only be drawing around 30k USD. But you get to earn if you are sent for an onsite assignment.
According to Glassdoor for example the average salaries for Software Engineer are:
- US: $103k
- NL: €45k
For somebody who's moving halfway across the world anyway, I can imagine they'd prefer to look for a job in the US.
Edit: The comments below are all correct. I didn't mention any of the secondary benefits since the internet hardly ever mentions those. To somebody from a country where things like health insurance and paid sick/vacation days hardly exist, there's a much smaller chance they look into those things.
Also in the US a lot is dependent on employer (health care, vacation days, etc.), whereas in the Netherlands many things are set by law.
My point was that people who look at salaries on the internet and compare those, will often choose the highest and dismiss the lowest.
A much better metric is to look at net disposable income after tax, if you're focusing on the "making money" aspect.
If you're focusing on the life quality aspect you'll also have to consider mortgage, car ownership and time off.
Example:
- In Netherlands you have 24 business days of time off, where you can take them from the moment your contract begins (not after 1 year working), and you can take them however you want.
- Taking a mortgage in Netherlands is currently cheaper than renting and most houses in the "sweet spot" cost around 300k euros, which is ridiculously cheap. Monthly payments are subsidized by the government (for some years) which makes it cheaper than renting.
To summarise, every country has a lot to offer, and at the end of the day life is not just about money.
In Italy we have 28 days off plus national holidays
Mortgage are cheap as in other European countries and if you avoid the city center you can buy a very decent apartment for less than 250k
20km from city center you can buy a villa for the same amount
Rents are generally a bit high in larger cities (Rome, Milan, Bologna)
Salaries in tech are not that great, but there's little if no competition, if you're good you can find good deals
Banks and insurances are investing in innovation and new technologies
You get to live the Italian life style
CONS
Nobody is actually investing a lot in Italy, roughly 150.000 people are leaving every year
That leaves a lot of jobs vacant but it can't honestly be considered a plus
It's not yet a startup ready country, things are changing, but it'll take time
Developer market rate in pretty much every country in the world (except maybe Switzerland and Norway) is pretty low compared to the US. Just saying.
Also booking employers refused to let their YAPC conference talks being recorded. https://web.archive.org/web/20111116162105/http://blogs.perl...
It's a lot less stressful if something goes wrong, because you can go to a previous release in a couple of minutes.
Compared to Python and Ruby, Perl might be getting a little long in the tooth but there's probably stuff that's less of a hassle to in Perl than in any of its decendants.
Certainly no red flag.
Virtually every calendar control for booking a date range sucks. Airlines, Airbnb, hotels, whatever.
Having someone work full time on making an intuitive calendar control makes sense to me, and I personally have spent months on single components, and we are just a tiny company...
https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/...
You keep the 30% rule after you apply for citizenship though. It even applies to native residents who haven't lived in NL for more than 10 or 20 years.
I'd be interested to know how your buddy's doing there. Seems like they still post a lot on job websites, and their growth isn't exactly mindboggling, so it would seem they have really high turnover and/or trouble filling positions to begin with.
Not suddenly, but when Centos 5 released in 2007 with 5.8.8 (from 2006), and Centos 6 in 2011 with 5.10.1 (2009). That froze the language environment for a lot of people and they couldn't benefit from the new features. Then they would publish posts explaining how to do things that 5.12 onwards had better solutions for, and new devs would get stuck in a whirlpool of trash.
Those versions worked fine with '1998 perl' (the year the codebase started & also the last time best practices were checked). Newer versions of perl are way better, but for a lot of devs, that 7 year period of weird perl + the halo around it (search for 'perl hit counter') is what they used to get their impression of perl.
Like I say with all recruiters, I said I was interested. I thought about it and everything was a red flag. Sure I'd get to live in Amsterdam and stay in Europe with my girlfriend, but ... that sounds like the ultimate shit job. I'd have to endure that until I worked out whatever visa contract they'd have or find someone else to sponsor me with a non-shit job.
So I just ignore the recruiter when he calls .. and ignore him .. and ignore him. Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight; after I had already moved back to America. Most recruiters would take the hint after three failed calls. I can't imagine how desperate they must be. Then I heard from a former co-worker one of our other buddies, a Kiwi, had taken a job with them .. leaving NZ to go work there. He's still there ... hope it's not shit.