Could I have been wrong? Of course. All I said was I was dis-interested, I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
That's really lucky.
There are a lot of people who don't value my skillset who I thought should, and it isn't clear if people reach out to me because they like something I brought to the world that has caught on now, or if it is a totally random recruitment bot sending transactional messages.
All while the things I was working on over the last decade were not respected at the time I was working on them.
For employment, seems better for me to use variations of my name and more generic experience. Otherwise people just seem to want to have me in the room but not really interested in hiring me, or like they expect a more mythical and profound experience.
Really? Because I've seen them copy/paste job requirements and just spitball the "years exp" number. They're just trying to fill as many roles as possible, and getting IT folks to put together job requirements is time consuming, so they often re-use old requirement and only update the language/tech on it.
I've seen multiple job postings for my teams where somewhere in the HR->recruiting pipeline the (correct) job requirements were replaced with "standard" requirements.
Having been both a manager and an IC I strongly believe that hiring is of the utmost importance. The same thoughtfulness, care, and responsibility that goes into leading engineering teams that are in charge of mission critical systems must extend to the hiring process or else everything else is at risk. A single bad or even just not great hire can be devastating to a team. A company with a culture that is just recruiters funneling candidates thoughtlessly is guaranteed to fail over time.
Sure if you need a job or aren’t in an employees market you might have to suck it up and take that job. I get that. I would advise saving a lot more than usual as that charade of hoop jumping is going to result in layoffs/bankruptcy in the mid to long term. Also, don’t expect them to be any more thoughtful in the layoffs than they were in the hiring.
Sure a lot of big companies do thoughtless hiring and that might work for awhile when you just need to scale thoughtlessly but a lot of big companies also get their lunch eaten by smaller companies with more thoughtful managers (ex. IBM, MSFT pre Nadella, possibly Google now)
they churn out these job requirements daily
the person you speak with on the phone wasn't involved with writing it, just correct them and get to the first technical person as soon as possible.
this is done at companies of all sizes, whether it is IBM, Google, Uber, Pinterest, as well as expected in non-tech companies.
you guys are in for a rude awakening if you think this is still an employees market in choosing companies based on the smallest, most irrelevant and nuanced signals of operational efficiency