After reading a few hundred emails from recruiters, I see a couple of trends popping up. I’m being contacted for job offers that really aren’t relevant or interesting for me. Some of them may be attributed to automatic keyword scanning. But still. If possible, I would kindly ask everyone not to contact me for any of the following:
- Freelance: I have never done freelance before. Working freelance means that I would first have to start all the paperwork to become self-employed, and at this moment I’m not interested in doing all that. Maybe that could change in the faraway future, but at this point in my life I prefer permanent positions.
- C/C++ embedded development: At one of my previous jobs, I did testing on the embedded software of a smart printer. Testing. Not development. I have never written a single line of C or C++ in my life. I would probably be able to read and understand other people’s code, but I’m sure that there are plenty of people who are really fluent in C/C++.
- Drupal development: A long, long time ago, I made and maintained a few small Drupal sites. I have also been to one or two Drupal Dev Days in the early 2000s. I think I still have a T-shirt somewhere. But in all that time, I only did Drupal admin, I never went into the itty-gritty PHP to write custom Drupal code. And I’m pretty sure that my Drupal skills are quite rusty now.
Node.js development: Oh dear. I did a few tiny Node.js projects: some “glue code”, some rapid prototyping. Nothing fancy, nothing production quality, never more than 100 lines of code. Let’s not do that.
EDIT 2021-10-25: I may have changed my opinion on this one! More about this in an upcoming blogpost.
EDIT 2021-10-29: it’s online: What are my preferred roles.- SharePoint development: With the eternal words of William Shakespeare:
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
- Quality Control Operator: This is typically a case of blindly searching for keywords and not verifying the results. I have worked as a Software Quality Engineer, so if you search only for “quality”, you’ll end up with jobs where you do actual physical inspection of physical products. Rule of thumb: if I can’t test it with an Assert-statement in some kind of programming language, then it’s probably not the kind of “quality” that I’m looking for.
- Production / “blue collar jobs”: Yeah well let’s not do that at all, shall we? With all due respect for the people who do this type of work, and some of it is really essential work, but I don’t think that this would ever make me happy.
- First line tech support: Been there, done that, got the battle scars. Never again, thank you very much.
Benefits for not contacting me for any of these: you don’t waste time chasing a dead-end lead, and I can spend more time on reading and reacting to job offers that actually are relevant, interesting and even exciting. Everybody happy! 🙂