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Today, web developers are probably not mobile developers, and inverse might be true as well. I remember when I first started writing software professionally, this was just after smartphones were really getting popular and everyone was making iOS and Android apps. Up until that point I had been doing LAMP stack - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (and of course, JavaScript on the UI), which is plain…
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Java Vs JavaScript is something people outside of tech mix up all of the time and it is especially disconcerting as a developer to hear your prospective recruiter confuse these technologies since they are so different. I surveyed developers about why they don't respond to recruiters, I'll give you a direct quote here: Recruiters probably should have industry experience. There’s too much of a…
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One big dividing line between developers that I'm not sure all tech recruiters have a full grasp of is the difference between frontend and backend web developers. Generally speaking this is a divide between responsibilities that defines the type of work a developer is doing. There is also the concept of a "fullstack" developer (which I consider myself to be, with some caveats), which I will…
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Last month I surveyed 24 Tech Recruiters in preparation to build ITeach Recruiters (which will be an online video course, and no, it's not finished yet). A big part of even deciding to go ahead and build the site and course was reading the responses in this survey and seeing that I could help solve a real problem. Most of the respondents here were recruiters who had previously contacted me on…
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I did a survey and about 60% of the developers who responded said they had never gotten a job through a recruiter. What does this mean? The first conclusion is that developers are hesitant to work with tech recruiters when searching for a job. On this same survey I asked developers to tell me about their experiences with recruiters and I’ll share the unedited responses with you and go through some…
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It seems like when speaking to developers about recruiters I often hear the same thing: developers feel like they are being spammed constantly with jobs that have little to do with their experience or interests. However, I wanted to really understand a bit more what developers actually think (instead of just collecting anecdotes) so I decided to do a survey and try to look at numbers. I asked r…
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I know recruiting is hard because as a programmer I am on the receiving end of attempts to get my attention for jobs every single day and the majority of these are just not a good match. The messages I get range on a spectrum from outright spam to thoughtful and highly personal, but 95% of the time what I get is just stuff that doesn’t match skill-set, or professional level very well. I decided I…
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