[commandlinefan]

I've honestly only ever had positive interactions with recruiters, and negative experiences finding jobs any other way. I know I'm just a single data point, but I'm a data point that's been programming professionally now for 23 years across 10 different employers. About half of the jobs I've gotten have been through recruiters and the other half through my "personal network" which conventional wisdom suggests is the best way to find a job; yet by far the walking nightmare jobs I've had have all been the personal network type. As best I can tell, there's a reason for that: when somebody who I knew from a past job wants to bring me in as one of his underlings, he has to make a relatively hard sell to management to get me on board, so they (apparently) end up misrepresenting my abilities by a bit. So the first time they expect a miracle, I fail to deliver, and things get... tense. On the other hand, whenever I'm brought in through a recruiter, the expectations on me are mostly in line with what I put on my resume and nobody's personal and professional reputation is on the line if it takes me a few days to get up to speed with the codebase.