Any software engineer with two or more years of experience will be inundated with low effort message requests from recruiters on LinkedIn. These messages mostly read the same:

Hi Engineer, My name is Billy-Bob and I’m working with a high velocity fintech company and I think you would be a great fit for our Senior Java Developer role. Just let me know you are available and we can set up a time to talk. Thank you for your time, Billy-Bob The Recruiter

    The message seems nice, so what’s wrong with this?

  1. I don’t know the name of the company that I’d be interviewing for.
  2. I don’t know pay of the position I’m being solicited
  3. Fintech startups are generally kind of stupid in my opinion
  4. “Senior Java Developer” is not a selling point for me.

    If there’s nothing to interest me, why the hell would I jump ship from my current position or waste my time interviewing for some shadow position because of a shallow introduction from someone who clearly has taken 0 time to read my bio or the things I’m interested in? All these propositions are ridiculous on their own but I’d like to focus on the final point, the “Senior Java Developer” bait.

    The Senior Java Developer moniker is not interesting to me because Java is not interesting to me, and Java is the primary selling point of a lot of recruitment attempts I receive. I’m already a “Senior Java Developer,” so in absence of other things to catch my attention there’s no reason for me to bite. I actually made a post on LinkedIn expressing this by effectively saying, “don’t contact me if that is the primary selling point”. People took this as me taking a shot at the language, and while that is partially true, I was more so criticizing the low effort recruitment messages I receive by saying “unless you have something else to offer other than java, don’t talk to me.” What I said did not quite come across that way, but I don’t really care.

    Alas I still arrive at the question of whether or not I like Java. The answer is still no, but I think it’s worth exploring if a language can be a selling point, and to me the answer is yes.

    I’ve often been told that the problems you are working on are more important than language choice, and languages can always be swapped out if necessary. I generally agree with that statement, however language is strongly indicative of the kind of problems you will be working on because different languages better suit different problems. For example, if you are working on machine learning problems Python is a strong choice. Likewise if you are working on a system that requires very low level memory management for system services you will likely choose C++ or Rust. By contrast, JavaScript is very generally used as a programming language for web interfaces. If don’t like creating websites, there is no reason for me to jump at a position where someone lists JavaScript or React as their main selling point.

    Secondly a language is a tool, and if you’ve had bad experiences with a tool or genuinely don’t enjoy using it then there is no reason to continue working with it. If I don’t like needles, then I probably shouldn’t be a doctor or nurse. By that same token, if I don’t like writing a particular language then I probably should not search for new positions where I would work primarily in that language. Now that doesn’t outright omit me from pursuing either of those occupations, it just means that I might not enjoy it as much as someone who is not bothered by a said tool. In the case of programming languages I don’t like the boilerplate heavy syntax of Java’s excessively class based architecture, and I particularly don’t like Maven’s approach to modifying dependency trees. Again, this doesn’t preclude me from liking Java for some uses or from obtaining those positions, but I’m not likely to actively pursue something in a manner that I have had my share of gripes with.

    There are other reasons why language may be a selling point, but those two are the most important and obvious to me. If some recruiter wants to talk then it is in their interest to give me enough information to change my preconceptions. Otherwise I’m going to stick with my previous assumptions and probably not answer based on the experience and knowledge I have about the buzzwords they throw at me.