I get approached a lot by recruiters. Like most modern algorithm powered things, it suggests more of the same. This poses a challenge for me as I want to do things differently.
In the past I’ve had a lot of success working around the big expensive buzzwords in world leading environments: cyber, cloud, infrastructure, blockchain, and fintech. I still love and live most of these things with a passion, for fun. I have done since I could I was a child, and will do probably until I die (or reach some robot-hybrid-immortality state.)
However, in my life, I want to make sure I’m adding legitimate value in an environment that has a plan to be legitimately valuable. And whilst I feel I’m doing that fine right now without traditional full time employment, I’m ashamed to admit I still struggle with temptation of the weekly LinkedIn recruiter approaches I get.
Typically, they’re offering me basically anything I want, typically variations of fully flexible remote work, with full package health, pension, equity and other standard benefits, as well as regular all expenses paid travel around the world for team building, fridges of beer, merchandise, shiniest newest tech, and typically anywhere from £100k - £300k salary.
The trouble these offers face is that I’ve already taken them and/or worked in and around those environments, multiple times now. I know from from theory and experience that they often don’t lead to great tech or even any real value in some cases.
Here is my copy/paste recruiter response:
I’m not really looking for full time work at the moment. I would also really need to understand the financial plan of any company I’m going to work for.
To put it bluntly, unless they are transparent with a clear and sensible path to profit, then I’m not really interested. I don’t think it’s sustainable to offer packages like that whilst still so early phase. I think it will create a lot of churn amongst engineers, which doesn’t lead to long term great tech.
Having said that, I’m also prepared to be wrong. If someone at your client reads the above and thinks they’re different and can convince me, then I’m happy to chat :)
Fortunately, I don’t need the work right now, and I suspect if I ever do, I might have to tweak this response.
The responses I get to this message are about 75/25, where 75% don’t respond at all, and 25% respond with “thanks” or “understood”. So far, nobody has tried to convince me that they’re different.
This leaves me feeling like it’s serving its purpose: communicating my eccentricity, whilst weeding out the sort of environments too close to ones I’ve learned to avoid.