2015/12/09

Don't call me. Why I hate phone calls and I won't be answering yours.

This post was created after another recruiter insisted that he absolutely must speak with me over the phone to even present me details of his offer. I am not going to do this and here is why:

First of all, software development is very specific type of job and it attracts certain type of people, very different from recruiters or managers. Those people, me included, absolutely hate phone calls. The main reason are:

1. I am spending significant portion of the day dealing with written text. As a result I read 10 times faster then most people speak. So spending 10 minutes on discussing thing I could read in 1 is just waste of my time. I consider this to be disrespectful.

2. I prefer asynchronous forms of communication and I organize my life using them. I certainly will have time to read you email, but giving you guaranteed timeframe for being available for speaking may be tricky and is inconvenient for me. It forces me to spend additional time for finding right time and place for talking, while I could read an email anytime, anywhere. Also your job is organized in a way that makes talking to people convenient, my is exactly on the opposite side of that.

3. It takes me time to think things through and I don't cope very well with pressure to respond immediately to you questions or to come up with my own ones. This makes me stressed and it doesn't help any of us. I don't expect you to fully understand, but my introverted nature makes dealing with phone calls extremely unpleasant experience for me.

4. You are most likely 64th person in a row that want's to know the exact same thing about me as 63 recruiters before and I hate to repeat myself. I have website, cv, linkedin profile and many other places that I am happy to provide you with that contain all relevant informations about me. If you need anything more, I will write it to you.

Lack of understanding of those things puts you in very bad light and keep in mind that there are recruiters who don't have problems with emails, so I'd rather use their service then yours.

I realize that at some point direct communication is required, but I wan't to delay this point as far as possible. I also won't claim to speak in the name of all developers, but certainly many are sharing my attitude.

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