One benefit of while male privilege in technology is that you get a lot of attention from recruiters. For jobs you don’t want. At companies that are stupid. But this one, broke me. It’s probably also white privilege to be able to say this to a recruiter, so hopefully others can live vicariously.

Cold email outreach from Jake the recruiter

Hey Matt,

I'm exclusively working with the founders of a team that consist of a former DOGE operator and a seasoned health-tech CTO who just closed some funding (2 years of runway!) and building the core infrastructure behind federal benefits—starting with a modern, scalable stack for fraud detection and national program integrity. This is truly foundational infrastructure, operating at national scale and touching systems that matter.

They’re assembling a small founding engineering team and are looking for a senior back-end engineer who enjoys building systems at scale. You’ll design and support high-throughput for real-time APIs.  

The impact here is significant, with real ownership from day one.

Happy to discuss further, just let me know!

Thanks,
Jake

My reply

It demanded a response that hopefully doesn’t unfairly target the messenger:

Hi, Jake!

Listen, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. You have bills to pay. Your skin crawls as you type the words in this email. You'd much rather be matching folks to jobs that have good people behind them and do good for the world. If that's the case, I'm sorry, I'm in solidarity with you, and I hope you find something that truly makes you happy soon. Maybe you'll share this with your friends and get a laugh out of it, or figure out how to share it with the founders to highlight how much the world is against them right now.

Or maybe you chose to work on this role and really thought this would actually appeal to me. In that case, you can fuck right off alongside the founders. So here it goes:

No, I don't want to talk to you about this job. I'd rather be coated in honey and sit on a fire ant hill. I'd rather crawl through a field of broken glass. I'd rather run on a track built on an unremediated minefield.

I usually reply to these with some non-committal, mealymouthed nonsense about how I'm not currently looking even when the company ideas are fucking stupid, and the backgrounds or mission of the companies make me want to vomit. Who knows what connections will help in the future. Why burn bridges? Maybe I can get a more junior engineer placed somewhere in the future by maintaining the relationship.

But this goes beyond the pale. There are not enough varieties of the word Fuck in the English language to express how I feel about these founders and this company. DOGE operator? You mean a tech-bro douchebag who decided to hurt their neighbors and destroy our already tattered safety nets to try to get Head Fuck Boy Musk to hang out with them? A shit brained teenager who thought they knew more about government programs and technology than people who have dedicated their entire lives to the problem? Calling someone a DOGE operator is a derogatory term. It's cute they're trying to reclaim it, but it's not going to fucking happen. It will hang like a millstone around their neck for the rest of their shitty and pointless career.

Those of us who have worked in public good spaces know exactly what fraud means when used in the context of benefits. It means making our most vulnerable neighbors jump through humiliating hoops to justify the fact that they need help. It means endless red tape designed to get people to give up, rather than get help. It means the recipients of our minuscule and embarrassing economic supports are blamed for why they can't get more instead of taxing the corporations and rich asshole chucklefucks who don't pay their employees a living wage and talk about paying taxes like you're asking them to amputate a limb.

So no, I have no interest in hearing about this. Unless they are looking for people to testify at the DOGE fucker's trial for all of the federal laws they violated and all of our data they stole to feed into Elon's CSAM and propaganda machine. 

Get out while you still can, Jake.

Matt

Either way, I think this outreach will stick with Jake for a while.