Because there are developers like him that were beating on the door to get in, the function of recruiters is a joke at widely known companies. The needed function would have been called secretarial work a few decades ago but grifters have flocked into most companies and built empires completely outside the line of business and common sense. He needed to talk to hiring managers and find a good team fit and be placed at a level that reflected his capabilities on that team. Only hiring managers can do that unless recruiters start putting in a decade of building software and managing development teams and somehow intimately know a manager's personality. A hiring manager might occasionally need a search firm to find people outside their own network, but that is a completely different function and the manager should start the interviewing after receiving lightly screened resumes. Bottom line if you want to be a leader you need to step up and do your job, and that means recruiting and building your team.

There are good recruiters, who do tend to act this way.

But then there are also bad recruiters, who seem to think that blindly generating as many candidates as possible and throwing against the wall as many resumes as possible, is a good way to do business.

I’ve learned enough in this business that I have been able to avoid bad recruiters for a long time, but not everyone has that kind of luxury — or luck.

Of course, even if you do get a good recruiter who has contacted you about a position, it’s entirely possible that it might be for a shitty company, or maybe just not a company or position you are well suited to.

There’s lots of things that can go wrong in this process.