Every once in a while, I'll put my resume up on Dice.com just to see what types of offers come my way.  I'm beginning to think I might be a masochist. Perhaps the thing that peeves me the most is when recruiters/headhunters call me and kind of nonchalantly ask my graduation year.

Yes, I'm 24.  But I've been doing web work since I was 18.  At 20, I was better than a lot of the guys I've worked with in the last few years who've been doing development "professionally" for 5+ years (I use that term loosely).  At 22, my knowledge of XML, ASP, and SQL were strong enough that a sizeable engineering company would hire me as a consultant to do the work that their internal developers couldn't do.

"So when exactly did you graduate?".  I despise this question.  It's a ludicrous question to ask, of course.  I've been doing the same type of work (and getting paid) since I was in college.  So what's the difference between the for-money work I did the day before I graduated and all the work I've done since I've graduated?  Nothing.  Not only that, in fact, the work that I did for my high level computer science classes?  Leaps and bounds above the typical work that most developers do in their careers.

What annoys me even more is that most of these recruiters have no idea about the technologies they're dealing with in their requirements.  I constantly have to explain that DTS is not much more than T-SQL + VBScript, how VB.Net and C# are pretty much identical, and JavaScript is not the same thing as Java.  Not only that, many don't seem to be able to read.  I get calls, not automated emails, about positions in California.  I could swear that I wrote it clearly in my resume (the HTML version posted on dice) that I'm only interested in positions in metro NY area and NJ.

Oy.  It makes the whole exprience so frustrating.

I had enough of it today when Renee called and started asking me to doctor my resume.  I've never hung up on any recruiter (I've been hung up on a few times).  I just couldn't handle it any more.