Less recruiter and more recruiting company.
Specifially: Robert Half.

t;ldr version:
Robert Half is scammy as hell, and they 'fired' me for quitting when my girlfriend got raped. Really.

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Robert Half took half of my paychecks for the entire duration of my contracts with them. I didn't know right away because, as a policy, they hide how much the hiring company is paying for you, and they also forbid the company from telling you. (The company pays RHI, RHI pays you). Makes sense why they hide it because it certainly pissed me off.

Long story short, I worked for a php dev shop through them (after telling them to lower their fees or i'd walk), worked there for awhile (while remote moonlighting because why not!), and quit. I quit because my girlfriend at the time had just gotten raped, and with the emotionall fallout from that, there was no way I could focus on two jobs and be there for her. My boss understood and let me leave, though it put him in a bind.

The next day, I got a call from the regional manager of Robert Half. He was a total tool. He demanded to know if I quit, didn't care why I quit, proceeded to "educate" me in the finer points of why that was unprofessional and why i'm unemployable, accused me of lying about idr what, and finally switched into legalese to say "I regret to inform you that you can no longer consider Robert Half as a means of employment." (or something along those lines) and hung up on me. Asshole. I hope various large someones rape him so he has an inkling what it's like to be objectified and thrown away like trash.

Guy was an asshole; probably still is.
RHI was awful and scammy; probably still is, too.
Wasn't really a fan of the job either.

So at the end of it, I wasn't out anything but some patience and serenity (a lot of serenity). I kept the first (remote) job, was there for my girlfriend, and helped her through everything.

But yeah, Robert Half?
They can fucking go to hell.

Paycom is utter dogshit.

Clunky, error prone, junior mistakes on every page, and filled to the brim with HR doublespeak and legalese.

A roving gang of quadriplegic interns could do a better job if the requirements were written in cuneiform and they were paid, up front, in cocaine and whiskey.

GDPR: great law, except for those who use technology (JS blockers, tracking protection, etc etc) to fight other technology (cookies, trackers, etc etc). Welcomed by the general public, but for content publishers it is a royal pain in the ass. Because did the EU provide non-legalese explanations as to how to become compliant? Of course they didn't. Why would they? But of course lawyers jumped on it like it's the best thing in the world. "GDPR-experts".

Now, article 11 and 13 again. Copyright law taken to ridiculous levels, impossible to implement, except for maybe Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Anyone else? Of course not. Again, a lot of money has to be involved with it. Does anyone want this thing? Of course not. And why the fuck is this still a thing even?! Did direct lobbying to the EU Parliament members a few months ago not teach them anything?! Senile pieces of shit. Should those old fucks really be able to decide about the future of the internet?

Added our new Terms of service and privacy policy to website today, copy and paste from word doc....15 pages of legalese with formatting. BLergh!!

The license for assets on epics new asset store is insane:

For any Content licensed to you under a Standard License, you may not:
i. attempt to reverse engineer, decompile, translate, disassemble, or derive source code or data from the Content;

HOW IN GODS NAME AM I SUPPOSED TO USE ASSETS I BOUGHT WHEN I CAN'T EVEN DERIVE FUCKING DATA FROM THEM???? Like how in hell am I supposed to load textures and meshes when the only thing I'm allowed to do is to maybe look at them

They DO know graphics cards can do sweet fuck all with a JPG texture, right? Like I /genuinely/ have to translate that thing into a proper format for it to have any use

Least successful...

In a nutshell, an multi version http client for a elasticsearch.

It supported ES 1.7 up to v7.

With an reduced future set, but all in all it allowed doing everything ES offered - just not for one version, rather the whole monty.

For various reasons I wasn't allowed to opensource that...

Which brings me to the least successful part. The client is a beast and would be a blessing for a lot of people I'd guess, but it's sadly covered by more legalese than one could imagine.

Think of legalese as in "Angel - Wolfram and Heart" legalese. I wouldn't be surprised if some part of the contract was written in blood.

... And least successful as in: Nope. Never gonna do that again.

Abstractions necessary for supporting multiple versions are are really painful.

Having an E2E test suite consuming > 64 Gigabyte of RAM for testing against several ES docker instances in parallel isn't fun.

Nothing of that project was fun.

Still gives me nightmares.

(NDA expired short time ago)

Dumbest project for me was separating a company into four different companies (four different phone systems) because they were under legal fire.

They wanted it separated but still function the same. There is still the possibility that the companies will merge back together.

Those. Fucking. Asshats.

Privacy policy legalese is cancer