Shit recruiters say

Just today, I got my 1,000th recruiter email in the last ~4 years. I know this is the number because I'm slightly obsessed with organization and have added a specific label to each and every recruiter email I've gotten in my gmail account. Let's see: 365 days per year, minus 104 weekend days and, say, 10 vacation days, gives us roughly 250 working days per year.

That means that, on average, 1 recruiter emails me every single business day ^[1].

There are a few take aways from this:

1. Being a software engineer is awesome ^[2]. We don't apply to jobs, they apply to us. 
2. If you are a recruiter, you're up against some serious competition.
3. I've seen recruiter emails from every tech company you can think of. Some are comically bad.

In this blog post, I'm going to share snippets from a few of the bad ones. Enjoy!



[1] This doesn't even include the sketchy recruiters who track down my phone number and call me. If you do this, everything you say is shit.

[2] I suspect that if kids had any idea how amazing it is to be a programmer in Silicon Valley, all of the problems US schools have with math and science would vanish overnight.

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Subject: Follow up

Hi Yevgeniy,

I’m not assuming you’re looking for a new roll right now but I wanted to follow up and gather your feedback.

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Wrong! I could totally go for some sushi.

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Subject: Opportunities at XXX

Hi Yevgeniy,

[...]

We are challenged every day, moving very quickly, and recruit only rock stars.

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Man, I really wish I could join your band.

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Subject: Quick question (Developer opportunities)

Yevgeniy,

Good day. Hope all is well.

I am reaching out to you because of the recent severe reorg and layoffs at your company I read about.

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Wow, that escalated quickly.

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Subject: Hello from XXX

Hello <name>,

My name is XXX -- I'm the Director, Engineering of the Growth Team at XXX.

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Yes, this email literally said <name>. Umm, no thanks <company>.

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Subject: Full time Scala opportunity

Hi Yevgeniy,

Currently, we are looking for an, "Engineer" to help deliver a range of new products. High-performance, high-scalability, high-traffic, heavy Scala, etc. Any interest in having a casual chat about this role...a few minutes...you have an interesting background?

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This email from a, "recruiter", has, an interesting... way, with words?

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Subject: principal java software engineer


Hi Yevgeniy,

happy valentine's day!
hope this new year has provided time for some fun activities.
our family started off the new year attending a terrific concert a couple of weeks ago. the performance reinforced the experience of music as a true combination of four creative forces (composer, conductor, musician and audience) in communicating ideas, thoughts & feeling. we were fortunate to hear pieces from Wagner, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Leonard Bernstein to Holst. an awesome introduction to the symphony for kids!

if you might have time for a quick chat, i'd like to share a principal-level swe opportunity:

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Worst valentines day card ever.

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Subject: looking for a great technical dev manager!


Hi Yevgeniy,

I think this role may not be exactly up your ally, but I am hoping you can recommend some great folks for us!

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I don't want anything up my ally, thank you.

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Subject: Getting back in touch. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia portfolio companies.

The portfolio company that I'm most excited about is financed by Greylock and Reid Hoffman who founded PayPal and LinkedIn, which as you know is one of the high-profile IPOs of 2011.

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Ah, yes, Link-ed-in... I may have heard of it.

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Subject: Stealth startup

[..]
The service will be disruptive and impact billions of technology users.

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Billions!

Ikea furniture: some assembly required

I recently moved to a new apartment and had to buy a whole bunch of furniture, including a bed frame, bookshelf, dresser, and couch. I had to do the move in a bit of a hurry, so I did one rapid fire furniture shopping session at Ikea, taking advantage of their shipping policy: $59 for delivery within 30 miles regardless of how many items you bought and same-day delivery if you order by 2pm.

I had this grand vision of ordering furniture Friday morning and relaxing in it Friday night. Not being a seasoned furniture shopper, I forgot one very important detail: all Ikea furniture requires assembly. And lots of it.

It's not exactly hard, but it takes a lot of time and requires you to have the patience to read and understand Ikea's word-less manuals. That's right, the instructions don't include a single word: they are entirely composed of images and symbols, presumably to save on translation costs.

A typical page of Ikea instructions

Taking a page from the lego instruction manuals, the folks at Ikea generally do a pretty good job of visually conveying each step. Having said that, the graphics - especially the "best practices" images at the beginning of each instruction pamphlet - can be fairly amusing.

The "best practices" section on the first page of each instruction pamphlet

And occasionally, some of the images are downright incomprehensible. So, for those of you who've spent some quality time with "Billy", "Ektorp", and a hex wrench, here is some entertainment:

Flatland and my adventures in Stanford's libraries

I almost forgot to post this tale, but I recently ran across the relevant photos on my phone and knew I had to write something.

A few months ago, in preparation for a trip up to Sonoma, Molly and I were at the Stanford Library to pick out a few books. Susan's house in Healdsburg is one of the few places I actually take the time to read, as opposed to listening to audiobooks; after a day of biking, wine tasting and swimming, there is nothing better than relaxing by the pool with a good story. Except the massages. But that's a different story.

The pool

I keep track of all the books I read - and all the books I want to read - on Visual Bookshelf, so I had my list ready when we got to the library. I found the nearest computer and began to search. First up was Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. They had a copy, but it seemed to be on hold. Next up: The Pragmatic Programmer. Somebody already had it out. I then tried Xenocide, the 3rd book in the Ender's Game series. They had it! I wrote down the call number and headed down to the stacks with Molly.

20 minutes later, we came back to the terminal empty handed. The book was nowhere to be found. I continued searching. The Island? Out. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest? Lost. I tried a few more and finally got a hit for One Hundred Years of Solitude in another library. We wandered over there and, sure enough, it was missing from the shelves. How could this be? A world class library and I can't find a single thing to read? Close to giving up, I decided to look up one final book: Flatland. It was available, but hidden away somewhere in the basement. Expecting more failure, we headed down.

We found ourselves in a large room with a dark red carpet, low ceilings with exposed pipes jutting out and sliding stacks. We followed the call number to the proper shelf and, to our great astonishment, the book was there!

Success! I was just about to head out when one of the pages caught my attention. I opened the book up to take a closer look and this is what I found:

Scribbles. I flipped the page and found more scribbles. I flipped through the whole thing and it was nothing but jagged lines. Every. Single. Page. At this point, I was sure that I had lost my mind. Perchance to Dream anyone?

Molly captured on camera the split second when I totally, utterly cracked.

As it turns out, instead of the real Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, I had stumbled across some modern art/poetry thing with the exact same title. The "author" explains on his webpage:

For each page of Abbott’s novel I have traced, by hand, a representation of each letter’s occurrence across every page of text. The generated result is a series of superimposed seismographic images which reduce the text in question into a  two-dimensional schematic reminiscent of EKG results or stock reports.

How the hell does this crap get published? Why did Stanford buy it? WHY?

I left the library that day without a book and quite shaken by the experience. Fortunately, time heals all wounds. Time, and a nice bottle of wine.

Title goes here

This is an essay I wrote during an all-nighter for a Freshmen Writing Seminar at Cornell in 2002. The professor was not impressed, but I got a kick out of re-reading it today and thought others might enjoy it too. This thing really brings me back to freshmen year in Court Hall...

Title Goes Here

As I sit here, at 2:00AM, with nothing but the sound of my keyboard keys clicking, and the cool breeze blowing across my neck, I begin to wonder how much more pleasant my night would’ve been had I not decided that a karate match with two of my suitemates would be the appropriate activity at 9:00PM. Granted, blasting "Everybody Loves Kung Fu Fighting" and jumping around the study lounge throwing wild kicks was far more amusing, but the difficulty I’m now having in keeping my eyes open gives me an inkling that maybe my time could have been used a bit more wisely.

If there’s something every student learns the hard way, it’s that time management consists of more than writing out "lists," creatively doodling in the day planner and sticking yellow post it notes all over the monitor; it’s actually carrying through that’s the hard part. As my friend George – having spent another four ungodly hours doing Latin, uttering all the random declensions: "amicus… amici… amico… amicum… ami… a, who am I kidding" – comes in and collapses, face down on my floor, I begin to wonder if maybe we’re doing something wrong. It then slowly dawns on me that it’s what we’re not doing that is wrong: that is, homework, studying, sleeping, eating, and all the good stuff my mom yelled at me for.

Speaking of yelling, some hall mates a few doors down are now having their game of "penis" (where the goal is to have 2 people, one at a time, say the word "penis" slightly louder than the previous until they’re too embarrassed to continue) culminate to a screaming finally; ah, the nighttime sounds of Court Hall. Err, right, back to the topic on hand. Actually, perhaps that’s the problem – every little thing, whether it be study lounge kick boxing, a thought provoking game of "penis," or simply ignoring the collapsed Latin student on your floor to see which one of you will crack first and start laughing – just about everything seems more interesting than homework. 

Maybe it’s that my door is open… always open; at least the "Cornell Policy Book" is being put to good use as my doorstop. Or maybe it’s that I can’t stop making three dimensional structures out of the collection of pennies on my desk; I am an engineer after all. Anita adds "maybe it’s just me, standing here and talking, watching you type this essay." Yeah, that’s got to be it. It’s all Anita’s fault. Everything. 

Or perhaps it’s that I keep conducting "research" of procrastinology; a few minutes in the study lounge talking to Adrienne, Nabil and Ian has given me much useful data: for example, 10 minutes can vanish in just a single blink; Nabil can be exceptionally funny at 2:30AM; clocks put fascinating thoughts in my head, such as "this essay is due 11 hours and 55 minutes." Jeremy informs me that, "your arithmetic sucks – you have 10 hours and 55 minutes."

And that’s the main symptom of procrastinitis – not until some critical time limit is hit, for some 1 day, for others 1 hour, do the diseased show any visible signs. Then, all at once, the panicking and frantic rush to do everything begins. Side effects include sweaty palms, trembling hands, extreme irritability, lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of bathroom breaks, lack of synonyms and, of course, the caffeine addiction. But if you order now, we’ll not only double your order of ProcrastiNot, we’ll even include the caffeine IV for free!

Sounds of drunks, wandering the streets at night, filter into my room; some guy, singing "You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling" much akin to the sounds of a dying cat, prompts me to get up and shut the windows. As I do so, I can’t help but notice the picture of modern art lying on my desk – the famous Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol. Nothing more than the red and white can with black text reading "Campbell’s Condensed Soup – old fashioned vegetable made with beef stock," but revered nonetheless by critics of modern art. Perhaps, procrastination is an art form too – knowing exactly how much time you can waste to put yourself in the perfect situation, where the pressure is on, the clock ticking, but the work is getting done – that can be classified as nothing other than the work of a master, even if considered as nothing but ordinary laziness by those who can’t appreciate our talent. 

What everyone can appreciate, however, is that procrastination, in moderation, does allow us to maintain at least a small level of sanity. Few things are as relaxing as sitting down in the middle of the day, taking a deep breath, and realizing that you have to do absolutely nothing. A kind of mental clarity arises, much akin to the feeling of taking a deep breath after swimming underwater for a long time, that truly rests the soul and calms the mind. Granted, it’s almost always ruined by the sad realization that if there’s nothing due tomorrow, then there’s surely twice as much due the day after, but for that one moment, life is sweet.

Democritus told us that "actions always planned are never completed." For example, I planned to do this essay Wednesday; now, it’s technically Friday. Provided the Sobe Green Tea has as much caffeine as my twitching eye would suggest, I’ll hopefully have this done before sunrise. But how did I get here? What earth shattering event could’ve prevented me from carrying out my well devised plan?

That would be sin number 5, sloth. By nature humans are lazy; or, perhaps more specifically, everything in nature is lazy. Lightning always takes the shortest path to the ground, objects at rest will remain at rest, there are even whole branches of mathematics devoted to researching optimum control – in other words, the quickest and easiest way to do anything. Human beings will do everything to avoid doing anything – which is why procrastination may be the most contagious disease known to man. As of today, there is no known cure.

And perhaps the most ironic part of all is that laziness can often make one do more work: we’ll spend hours searching the entire house for the remote, just so we don’t have to get up to change the channel; we’ll contort our body in every direction to reach a dropped item on the floor, but would never dare to get up and pick it up; and we’ll always wait till the last minute to do anything, consequently taking twice as long due to sheer exhaustion and being over whelmed. And sadly, procrastinitis does have one more serious side effect: extreme nearsightedness. Once infected, we live only in the present, being able to see but a few feet beyond our noses. As the brain attempts to block out the assignment at hand, every little detail around us becomes vibrant and engulfs our attention; even turning the dial on my watch and listening to the therapeutic clicks as the titanium bezel rotates manages to steal my attention for a few minutes. The real decision with procrastination, if we ever get around to actually figuring it out, is whether the pleasure of now is worth the headache of later.

If I hadn’t been so "busy" watching the movie "Swingers" on Wednesday but had instead even written half of this essay, three interesting things would’ve happened: first, I probably would’ve picked a totally different topic. Second, I might’ve had a more fun night, perhaps even performing a duet of "You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling." And third, I might not have been too lazy to write a conclusion.