Tech Recruiter here at a SF startup. Maybe it helps, but I have engineers constantly tell me that I am the best at what I do that they have ever met. However, I am 100% aware that most of my colleagues are bottom-feeding dickheads who know nothing about tech or recruiting and almost everyday I wake up embarrassed to be doing what I am doing to some degree.
However, I got into the field basically by chance. I was an intern at NASA, working as a researcher who wrote a bit of python. The day they were making me a full time offer there were a bunch of funding cuts and the only open role left over was a recruiter, so that was the job I got. Since then I have worked for Facebook, Google and a startup in SF, where I currently am. I feel like I excel at what I do because I legitimately care and understand technology, but I also understand that most people in the field have zero experience with tech and have decided that this is pretty profitable and enough like sales they will do okay :\.
I guess at this point I am coming off a bit like the Christian guy on reddit who apologizes to everyone for the people in his religion being kind of insane and awful, but if it helps, there are some of us who legitimately try really hard and really do understand the technology. Unfortunately, as the OP hypothesized, the bad ones are more noticeable because they are louder, send more emails and say stupider things. In my typical day I try to reach out to around 10, super elite people for a role after I have researched them on Github and and their blog. At some of the more sweatshoppey recruiting firms they are calling 40-50 people a day based on one word like "java" being in a resume and then hoping everything works out. This is shitty recruiting and it needs to end. We have a lot of kids straight out of school making 80k/yr to cold call spam people all day and it is seriously embarrassing to the profession. I guess this is a long way of apologizing for the rest of my colleagues.
I've been thinking about this alot lately. I some ideas and would like to bounce them off of you. Email me if you're interested (bloggingarrow at gmail dot com). You can check out my blog at expertdisruption dot com if you want to get a bit of an idea, although my thinking has been evolving and I haven't been able to keep completely updated.
However, I got into the field basically by chance. I was an intern at NASA, working as a researcher who wrote a bit of python. The day they were making me a full time offer there were a bunch of funding cuts and the only open role left over was a recruiter, so that was the job I got. Since then I have worked for Facebook, Google and a startup in SF, where I currently am. I feel like I excel at what I do because I legitimately care and understand technology, but I also understand that most people in the field have zero experience with tech and have decided that this is pretty profitable and enough like sales they will do okay :\.
I guess at this point I am coming off a bit like the Christian guy on reddit who apologizes to everyone for the people in his religion being kind of insane and awful, but if it helps, there are some of us who legitimately try really hard and really do understand the technology. Unfortunately, as the OP hypothesized, the bad ones are more noticeable because they are louder, send more emails and say stupider things. In my typical day I try to reach out to around 10, super elite people for a role after I have researched them on Github and and their blog. At some of the more sweatshoppey recruiting firms they are calling 40-50 people a day based on one word like "java" being in a resume and then hoping everything works out. This is shitty recruiting and it needs to end. We have a lot of kids straight out of school making 80k/yr to cold call spam people all day and it is seriously embarrassing to the profession. I guess this is a long way of apologizing for the rest of my colleagues.