Unfortunately often, I've found that being kind to recruiters and generous with my time pays off in consuming more of my time.

I'd very much like to believe that being kind to people on my way up will pay off, be paid back, or otherwise come back to me. So far it mostly gets me treated as a soft touch.

I don't want to feel important. I want people to have some base amount of respect for my time, energy, and attention. Instead I get calls at random hours and generic sales emails from people who don't even have basic information about the job they want me to be excited for. I just wanted to be treated with a little basic respect, rather than feeling like I'm being taken advantage of for human kindness.

Sure - there’s no need to reply to 90% of recruiter emails (I don’t), but that doesn’t mean people need to talk so dismissively and condescendingly of them “recruiter spam” and such.

Just don’t reply and be happy we don’t need to.

How else should we discuss the emails and cold calls? Perhaps in terms of how sincere and how hard-working they are or how much effort the recruiters we don't want to talk to put into reaching us? Or should we simply remain silent, tolerating this behavior stoically because being displeased is a cruel status display?

I increasingly don't reply, but I'm also aware that greeting outreach with silence is a far cry from kindness. I have trouble believing that this is really the best option. I'm really not sure what to tell my juniors - nobody really wants to hear that being bothered frequently by self-interested parties is just part of the burden of privilege.

> [snip] that doesn’t mean people need to talk so dismissively and condescendingly of them “recruiter spam” and such.

What else would you call an unsolicited, undesired, insincere, largely irrelevant, automated message if not "spam"?

Unsolicited Bulk Recruiting, perhaps?

Perhaps some of specifically what the parent mentions is about status, but the recruiter hate starts from recruiters sucking. Recruiters doing something useful for me is actually far less likely than just having a successful application randomly on the internet. At worst through much more of my time is wasted talking to them, because they don't help, and often intentionally obscure details that should be available.