The problem is that in recruiting, it's not "a few jerks". It's 99.99% utterly incompetent recent business grads. The 00.01% of recruiters that are labeled "competent" are actually still pretty bad, but they at least know that you won't find 15 years of Go experience and can at least half-tell when someone is BSing (perhaps because they actually spent a small amount of time coding themselves).
Out of the dozens of recruiters I've dealt with over my career, there was only one who was semi-competent. The article makes it sound like it's even worse across the pond; instead of incompetent doofuses, the tech recruitment industry populated by out-and-out fraudsters. I've met a few of those here in the US, but they're by no means the majority. Though I have noticed a trend among tech recruiters in the US that has really exploded in the last few years: hire traditionally attractive young women and call them "tech recruiters". The more recently they've departed their cheerleading squad, the better. This seems to be the primary qualification at a lot of US tech recruiting firms recently.
Probably the reason the competence of recruiters is so low is because almost anyone with the skills necessary to discern a good coder from a bad one can probably at least kinda code himself, and would rather do that than sales.
Out of the dozens of recruiters I've dealt with over my career, there was only one who was semi-competent. The article makes it sound like it's even worse across the pond; instead of incompetent doofuses, the tech recruitment industry populated by out-and-out fraudsters. I've met a few of those here in the US, but they're by no means the majority. Though I have noticed a trend among tech recruiters in the US that has really exploded in the last few years: hire traditionally attractive young women and call them "tech recruiters". The more recently they've departed their cheerleading squad, the better. This seems to be the primary qualification at a lot of US tech recruiting firms recently.
Probably the reason the competence of recruiters is so low is because almost anyone with the skills necessary to discern a good coder from a bad one can probably at least kinda code himself, and would rather do that than sales.