Isn’t this effectively just a mirror of the real corporate problem? The recruiters are acting in exactly the way they are incentivized to act.

Really bad recruiter e-mails are coming from bad companies. Bad companies generally spend more of their time recruiting because they have bad turnover pushing the vicious cycle of constant hiring.

While I too am annoyed by bad recruiter e-mails, I think this is really a symptom of bad companies, not bad recruiters specifically. The bad recruiters exist, because that’s exactly what many companies want.

And in their defense, I get it. Big companies don’t want “special snowflake” developers. If you need a team of 200 people to get complete a contract, you can’t afford to have “special” people on the team. You want as many “plug-and-play” team members as possible because your output is decidedly not special, it’s just an assembly line.

You and I, we don’t want to work on those assembly lines. Frankly, I think such an assembly line runs directly counter to the way good software is built. But that might be the vast majority of the available jobs.

End of the day, I think we and the recruiters want very different things. They want low-paid cogs and they treat us in exactly that way. Most of us specifically don’t want to be low-paid cogs.