Which is another way of saying that, as the web encourages us to become ever more public and performative about our daily doings, it also functions as a kind of de facto resume—for coders as for the rest of us. “You have GitHub, you have Stack Overflow,” Hrivnak says, “where they're going onto these websites and building out and showing projects publicly.” The programmers she’s targeting are “out there on the web, with their information, engaging with people about their Meetup groups or whatever the case might be.”

At first, from the developers’ perspective, all this attention can be nicely flattering. Who, after all, doesn’t like being courted? But the emails (and the calls, and even, yes, the text messages that Hrivnak occasionally resorts to) add up. Aaron Patterson, the prolific Rails contributor, got two emails a day, over the course of three days, from the same recruiter. Shannon Rush, apparently, got one or more notes from the same recruiter “just about every day for weeks” before adding an email filter for the recruiter’s address. Patterson created a website, recruiterspam.com, that attempts to collect the recruitment emails coders and their colleagues have received in order to discern trends (and one day, he laughs, “generate our own recruiter emails”).

Patterson is onto something: There’s a cycle to these emails. LinkedIn’s keen tracking of job-holder milestones means that recruiters can search for candidates who have been at their jobs for a year or more—and are thus, ostensibly, plum for the poaching. Olex Ponomarenko is a full stack developer, which means he’s nimble with both backend (database) and front-end (design) web development. That combination of skills, not to mention a 14-month stint at Google, makes him particularly sought after—especially by startups, whose mandates for leanness give them an incentive to hire people with as many skill sets as possible.

Ponomarenko has kept track of the recruitment emails he’s received through LinkedIn alone. He shared them with me. They look, over time, like this:

You can essentially track Ponomarenko’s career movements, in other words, through the ebbs and flows of recruitment emails he’s received as he's made them. He joined Google in July 2011. He hit his one-year mark there in 2012. He joined a new firm, Big Human, in September 2012. He hit his one-year mark there, of course, in September 2013. “It looks like the number of emails is lowest about two to three months after starting a new job, and peaks around the one-year mark,” he notes.

Social networks' ease of use, Ponomarenko thinks, can make it easy—too easy—for recruiters to pursue him. Mark Rickert agrees. The iOS developer, who has been programming recreationally for 26 years and professionally for 12, is similarly sought-after by recruiters. To the extent that he has put the following note on his LinkedIn page:

This message, its ALL CAPS notwithstanding, generally goes ignored, Rickert told me. The emails still arrive—some of them without a mention of the LinkedIn line, others with an off-handed reference to it. And "some people have been really unapologetic,” Rickert says. The flood of messages has reached such an extreme, at this point, that “I've actually been thinking about deleting my LinkedIn profile.” Rickert currently has a senior development role at a boutique firm in North Carolina, where he gets to do side projects that include both skydiving and developing a skydiving-themed iPhone app. He is not looking to be poached. The opposite, in fact. “I don't anticipate going anywhere else, ever,” he says. If he leaves his current job, it will be to start his own company—no recruiter necessary.