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Comment by whamlastxmas | Hacker News Reader

I have much more patience for unanswered applications than I do for recruiters. I have had some extremely negative experiences with them and I'd rather be underpaid in my job than deal with being abused by recruiters.

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A lot of recruiters are horrible people with questionable ethics, but a lot of them are great too. The problem is that the bad ones are often more visible because a lot of what makes them bad makes them stand out.

Try again, and make clear demands (for starters: That they should not present you to potential employers without asking first) about how you want to interact with them. The slightest transgression: Move on.

You'll find a good one soon enough, and it'll be worth it sooner or later.

I'm at a similar level of experience as you at roughly the same place in my career. I've only interacted with one recruiter and it worked out very well for me, leading to my first full-time "real" position at a company with some other fairly talented developers from whom I gleaned a ton of knowledge. I guess it's a YMMV kind of thing. They didn't ask me to sign or pay anything, they just asked for technical qualifications(languages, tools) just lined up multiple interviews in one day for me that were a rough match.

There are different types of recruiters. Some are junk. Some are good. But for better or worse, many many jobs are going to hire through them, so you'll want to get past this distaste for them.

What kind of negative experiences have you had with recruiters? I don't know much about them...

It boils to down lying like crazy and saying/giving private information to the potential employer I didn't consent to.

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