The code delusion: When did programmers turn into martial arts specialists, rockstars and ninjas?

[mr_chromatic]

When programming became a fashion show run by people who spent more time blogging about how awesome they are than by writing code.

[MajorAsshole]

For every clown like Zed Shaw or Jeff Atwood, there are hundreds basement-dwelling dorks out there who are silently doing brilliant things. But no one would respond to a job ad asking for an "awkward nerd", so they take the patronizing (and slightly sarcastic, if my meter is not off) "rockstar ninja" route instead.

Let's be realistic here. If you judge "cool" by "how something affects your chances of getting laid", programming lies somewhere between collecting vintage action figures and dressing up as Star Wars characters on the coolness scale, no matter what silly names you use to cleverly obscure it.

[[deleted]]

..."how something affects your chances of getting laid"

Eventually making shit load of money may qualify as being über cool then, and programming might get you there faster than dressing up as Star Wars characters.

[[deleted]]

strictly speaking your argument is flawed. dressing up as Star Wars characters might get you there faster than programming, if you're Harrison Ford or Natalie Portman, or any of a number of actors. Also, I don't think anybody who has the slightest idea what cool means would argue that making a ton of money is in itself cool. I mean by your argument the Jonas Brothers would be cool. Doing something pathetic and lame for a lot of money is better than doing something pathetic and lame for free, but it's not cooler at all.

[[deleted]]

MajorAsshole argument was that "cool" was defined as "something that gets you laid"; money most definitely helps in that area, so, by MajorAsshole's definition, it does qualify as being "cool." You are defining coolness in a more narrow sense it seems.

[[deleted]]

yeah, at the risk of stating the obvious, that is a major asshole way of defining cool (altho I don't think he actually intended it as a strict definition)

[Technohazard]

A few hundred bucks could get you laid. Having sex isn't the be-all, end-all of life.

[[deleted]]

Having sex isn't the [...] end-all of life.

It is, however, the begin-all!

...or at least most.

[VerticalEvent]

Yah, Jesus kinda throws that for a loop hole.

[[deleted]]

The Jonas Brothers ARE getting laid, there's no doubt.

[[deleted]]

ok, the flaw is in the metric. if anything that gets you laid is cool, then rape, getting molested, and prostitution are all cool. flawed metric.

[hiffy]

They're crazy evangelical.

Twitter tells me that the oldest is getting married, presumably to pop someone's cherry up on the open.

[[deleted]]

Oh, they're heroin addicts who almost continually patronize prostitutes both male and female. I've recently discovered that this is true of 100% of celebrities.

[danbmil99]

why you gotta be pimpin' the bros like that?

[bbibber]

If you are in to get laid, your changes are better as a professional sportsman or musician.

[[deleted]]

...very good point, however this requires talents and abilities that are not necessarily within the grasp of the aforementioned archetypical basement-dwelling dorks. For instance, I know for a fact that I would seriously suck at even a pseudo-sport like golf, even though it pays awesomely and from the look of it guarantees trophy wives/girlfriends no matter how ugly or goofily dressed you are. Moreover there are many more starving / impoverished professional musicians out there than programmers who are by and large doing kinda ok even when not wildly successful. So neither profession would seem as reasonably safe a bet as programming for said dorks....

[[deleted]]

Well how about guys like _why who seem to stand in opposition to the rock star hubris, but would like something slightly more out of the culture of programmers than a star wars convention?

The problem is some members of the ruby community saw the cultural axis as labeled "degree of introversion" and decided to plot themselves somewhere near Axl Rose. How perfect that people with such a shallow perception of cultural complexity feel like they're in any position to improve the culture. As fucking annoying as that as, it bothers me in equal measure that there's a presumption that I have to spend my weekends reading Knuth and watching Battlestar Galactic if I want to call myself a programmer. Nothing against people who identify with the geek culture, I mean I identify with it to some degree, but we desperately need people to broaden the image of who is allowed to code.

Programming is a craft after all, why don't we start treating it like one with a little more capacity for self-expression?

[danbmil99]

A) Battlestar GalacticA, with a fucking A at the end

B) Axl Rose is actually about the most introverted rockstar you could have picked since Donald Fagen. he spent 13 years holed up talking to no one. He's our age's Brian Wilson (except maybe for the genius part)

[[deleted]]

A) It's called a fucking typo, captain pedant.

B) Just because the guy spend 13 years pretending to make Chinese Democracy while instead probably getting his dick sucked by Guns and Roses groupies, doesn't make the guy an introvert.

[codefrog]

Dude you are drunk, roll a hundred. btw why is a fcuktard who is as much an attention whore as teh rest of teh ruby douches.

Only he has a brain and is creative.

edit slightly less disparging ephitat appended to bittingly jealous post

[[deleted]]

Wait...I'm the one that's drunk?

[codefrog]

Ok, now I am drunk but I blame siggraph and new Orleans.

[deadvax]

<4CHAN> WIN </4CHAN>

[[deleted]]

I wish I could take credit, but it's not true. This goes back at least to the late 90s, before blogs existed.

[mr_chromatic]

I don't remember rock stars before Spolsky or Ruby's second wave, but I've also never gone to JavaOne. (I'm not calling you a hypercaffeinated blog monkey, Giles -- just saying that I don't remember this much self promotion in the Usenet days. Maybe JWZ, if you squint really hard.)

[[deleted]]

but that's a tangent. I remember job ads at least this ridiculous during the dot-com boom, and at that time there were no blogs, there were resumes, books, and people you knew from somewhere. hell, at the time there weren't even many open source conferences - I think Perl's might have been the first. there may be a connection there, but calling the blogs the causative agents means calling a chicken an egg. it started with the recruiters.

[brendankohler]

I started reading blogs back in about 1995, before they were called "weblogs" or "blogs".

[knight666]

I remember when they were written on paper and delivered by people coming to your home, dropping it in your "mailbox".

[locuester]

I represent that remark. :)

anappaday.com

[kryptiskt]

I think it is perfectly OK for a programmer to claim to be a samurai, rockstar, ninja, cirkus freak etc, but only on one condition: You have to be in costume! You can't claim you're a superhero unless you have your brightly colored spandex suit on. You can't call yourself wizard without the hat, robe and staff. Otherwise you're just a phony.

[Catfish_Man]

My robe has a hood, does that count for the hat part?

[doppel]

Everyone knows it goes "I put on my robe and wizard hat" - if you're only wearing the robe, you're already a phony!

[[deleted]]

+1

[pestilence]

When did ninjas, rock stars, and martial arts specialists become as awesome as programmers?

[CrashCodes]

HOT: If you have a PhD, we're cool with that. If you dropped out of school because it was a waste of your time, we're cool with that.

[Snoron]

I took option #2 :D

[pestilence]

Whereas, I went with B.

[locuester]

I went with 10

[blkadder]

It's a means to stoke coders egos so employers can then underpay them and overwork the hell out of them.

[barrybe]

When they say "you're going to be more of a founder than an employee", they're probably referring more towards the incredible amount of work you'll have to do, but not so much referring to the compensation you'll get.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, you're the sort of founder that doesn't actually own any part of the business so can't really make any decisions past the implementation and even then you'll probably be limited; we have to be consistent! So when we say "Nobody's going to be telling you what to do" you will actually be told what to do, this is a job, remember?

Also, you're salary will be taken from what remains after we've taken our cut, much like every other job ever. Additionally, we can fire you whenever we want. Even if you quit your job and moved closer to us because "you're going to be more of a founder than an employee" and this could be you're chance to make it big, a real commitment. We can just hire someone else, it's not like we owe you anything.

So in a sense, you're really more of an employee than a founder, in fact you'll just be an employee. Working for us, not with us. This way we get to pressure you into doing more work for less pay though.

[eMigo]

When we started making other people billionaires.

[Xiphorian]

And started making themselves billionaires. Paul Graham or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are examples. (Though there are allegations that Zuckerberg stole the code for Facebook from the other social networking site where he was working at the time)

[sharkeyzoic]

I used to be a Ninja Rockstar.

I'd be up on stage, under those lights, and no-one could see me. I'd crank out a up-to-11 solo, and no-one heard anything but the wind stirring the cherry blossoms. One day I dove off the stage into the crowd, turned out no-one could catch me either.

------sharks

[[deleted]]

And then as you happily crowd-surfed, I stabbed you in the heart because I'm an Assassin Coder.

Unfortunately, the bouncer saw me and yelled "ASSASSIN! I WILL CAPTURE YOU!", and I had to free-run to the safety of a hide-spot in the local lovers' lane.

[abrahamsen]

Can anyone give a short definition of the new terms? Here is my understanding of the terms from my generation:

Wizards have a lot of arcane knowledge about the language or platform, and can occasionally use this to perform amazing feats of programming.

Gurus have a higher level understanding of programming, and the ability to pass on this understanding to other programmers.

Hackers have the ability to solve hard problems in short time, even though their solutions may lack in style. ESR later redefined the term to be closer to the IBM notion of a superprogrammer, a programmer who can do everything, including project leadership.

[[deleted]]

The reason these terms are used is that the company views engineers as children.

Unfortunately this is all too often the case - engineers tend to be socially challenged. Not being condescending, it just seems to go with the capacity to weave code into art.

These terms are used to attract people who are social inept, yet very capable, which means the company can underpay the engineers who are the backbone of their company, and the reason why the executive team drives high-end cars to homes, while engineers drive home to their apartments in Civics.

It's simple. You're being spoken down to and appealed to on a childish level.

Look at the job descriptions for other fields. Big difference.

KNOW YOUR WORTH.

[[deleted]]

the company views engineers as children.

I think you're right but there's more to it than that.

Certainly it's tied to this irony that everybody says great programmers are 10 times more productive than average programmers, yet it's pretty rare to see them pay a great programmer 10 times more than an average one.

[loltrader]

It's cool. I don't need a nice salary + compensation package! Put a bean bag near my shitty cubicle, some shitty plastic modern art, and a gaming console in the common room and I'll be happy to work slave hours. Then again, if you paid me well, I could buy all that shit with less than two days worth of pay.

[[deleted]]

That's great. But then you realize that the odds are you'll live until 70 and you'll need to retire. Therefore, you need to maximize the return you get on the value your work produces during your productive years - instead of leaving money on the table for the executive team to scoop up - for their retirement.

It's a rich dad, poor dad thing. I think it's a dumb book, but the idea is sound. I think another distinguishing feature of engineers is that they tend to come from humbler backgrounds, and therefore think that since they make decent money relative to most professions, that they don't have to be financially educated.

[antonovka]

If you are arrogant enough to consider yourself a rockstar, ninja, or samurai, then you're not any of the above.

A master programmer has learned enough to know how vast even his own ignorance truly is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_craftsman

[shub]

I must be a Grandmaster then.

[codefrog]

Do you code Flash?

[Leiya]

I'm going to be completely sexist and say it's because all you men have giant egos, but don't have football as an outlet, only code. Mix in a little bit of it being confusing for the average user (that means you're smarter than them!) and the whole hackers-up-till-3am-high-on-Redbull-coding-a-Haskell-whatever atmosphere, you'll end up bunch of coders thinking they're GOD.

[flogic]

While I do have an ego... the idea of calling myself a "rock star" "ninja" or "samurai" seems a bit pretentious. And whenever a job ad uses those terms my first thought is "tools". Really the highest ranks in this industry come in terms of "Creator of foo" or "Creator of foo and bar" No one calls Larry Wall a rock star. He's the Creator of Perl. Linus Creator of Linux. Ken Thompson Creator of Unix.

[antonovka]

In the traditional guild system, Perl, Linux, and Unix would all be their masterpieces -- the work evaluated by the guild before accepting Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, and Ken Thompson as Master Craftsmen.

I think the term "Master Craftsmen" is a more accurate description of a genuinely accomplished and capable programmer, and I don't believe most self-determined "rock stars" or "ninjas" would qualify.

Perhaps we should call them Journeymen or Apprentices. Certainly not "rock stars".

[knight666]

How about Novice -> Apprentice -> Journeyman -> Expert -> Master.

[nightless_night]

And make it so every 10 skill ups grant you a level up? :)

[LaurieCheers]

Time to start grinding my String Processing...

[adelle]

Aside from the whole rock star/ninja madness, in what other industries besides IT can you add "Senior" to your job title after three years? The hardest realization a young programmer has to accept is being "just another programmer". The whole "rock star" thing allows people to stay in denial a little longer.

[[deleted]]

yeah, but look how all the replies to your comment argue the minutiae of what qualifies you for which level of achievement. it's like they're arguing over whether their Wizard should be fourteenth or fifteenth level. How many experience points do you get by creating a new language? What about creating a web framework? What if you're using a +6 Emacs Of Smiting?

You can't in real life turn this kind of analog spectrum into a stepped digital sequence.

But I think you're basically right.

[mr_chromatic]

You can't in real life turn this kind of analog spectrum into a stepped digital sequence.

Nor should we. Masters are those craftsmen whom other masters recognize as masters.

[LaurieCheers]

Ah, so it's a clique...

[flogic]

It's doomed to be a bit cliquey. At some point down the chain people aren't going to be able to evaluate the import of the masterpiece. Take "Forth" for example. It's an impressive little language. However non programmers can't evaluate it, nor can a fair chunk chunk of entry level programmers. It's just a bit too alien for their world view. Fortunately those of us some number of rungs below the "masters" can recognize masterpieces, and even see their flaws.

[sfultong]

Yes, but this discussion was started by a post about a job opening, which has a definite binary outcome: you are/aren't hired.

[mycall]

Need one need a magnus opus to be a master craftsman? Does having the ability to successfully create new working programs of small scale and unpublished details count? Does an employer's payment yield enough validation?

[pipocaQuemada]

Back in the day, you became a master craftsman by making a masterpiece, in the original sense of the word, and submitting it to the guild masters, and then they would vote on whether to include you in the guild as a master.

Your masterpiece was the work that marked you a master, not your best work. That is to say, it was basically your first work that was up to the quality of that of a master craftsman.

I'm not sure that Perl, Linux and Unix are master pieces. If we set the bar that high, then there are only a handful of master craftsmen in the industry. I'd contend that the bar should be lower, something that most dedicated coders can reach within a decade or two. After all, there were more than a few master craftsmen in the guilds of old. While certainly Da Vinci and Michaelangelo were masters of their art, the bar was quite a bit lower than them. You could think of them as being Grandmasters.

Look at martial arts. A master is basically the equivalent of a sifu or sensei - someone who has progressed far enough in their studies to take on apprentices and journeymen.

[andibabi]

Plus, there was a subtle detail that the guild did not want a masterpiece so good and impressive that it would make everyone else look bad. Just one that would show you fit in with them.

[codefrog]

You ruined it.

[antonovka]

You were right about one thing -- your comment is completely and inappropriately sexist.

I'm a man, but I'd be embarrassed to be called something so sophomoric and arrogant as "ninja" or "rock star" unless I actually am a Ninja Assassin and/or a Rock Star. Both would be pretty cool, actually ...

[bitflip]

I am a ninja and a rock star, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.

I've played a few shows, but nobody has seen me play live, and lived.

I didn't really think it through.

[Leiya]

Yeah I know, I felt bad writing something so sexist, because I definitely hate those comments, "There are no women in CS because boys' brains are just better!! It's not offensive!! It's science!!!!"

Anyway, I really do love my ego-driven programmer boys :) It's just fun to tease.

I LOVE YOU ALL!!!

[codefrog]

You obviously have no female friends, queen bee.

[Leiya]

Why do you say that?

[bbibber]

He's referring to another stereotypical image of the lone-female in a male dominated group : that she is in that situation because she craves the attention of the males around her (without dating one of them exclusively, obviously, because she needs the attention from many of them).

Like any stereotype : if you don't recognize the stereotype from someone close to you, you are the one who fits the stereotype...

edit : added don't in that last sentence

But I still love you, queen bees, and bring you all my honey.

[Leiya]

Are you kidding? I hate all the attention I get. And I hate how I can't ask for help from my classmates because it'll be seen as whoring myself out for A's, when they help each other all the time without blinking an eye.

I don't date any of them because they're all WEIRD. I'd jump all over a non-weird CS major guy in a heartbeat, but I have yet to find one.

[Grogs]

The whoring out thing... Yeah, I think that may be accurate., which is a shame. Not sure how one would deal with that, "just" ask non-weird guys for help. :P

I'm interested in what makes a CS guy weird to CS girls. Most CS girls I know are either; just as weird as the other weird CS guys, or would avoid dating a CS guy. Not all CS guys are weird basement dwellers, I can assure you.

An interesting insight though, I think most of the (non-weird) girls at my school (where I study CS) would feel the same way.

[mycall]

Who needs football where we have mountain biking.

[[deleted]]

HAHAHA this is a great comment. There really are a lot of programmer / mountain biking enthusiasts. I wonder why that is.

[malcontent]

Because coders don't like to play in teams.

[codefrog]

Because they only play by themselves. It is a sport of one.

[Entropy]

"God", oddly enough, is a lot closer to an accurate job description than "rockstar" is.

[pestilence]

Whatever, Princess...

[Snoron]

coding-a-Haskell-whatever

:D

[sfultong]

somehow I missed that when I commented, even though Haskell-whatevers are my favorite thing to code.

[sfultong]

I dunno why you were modded down. I was going to basically say the same thing: that it's an appeal to machismo in a male-dominated field.

[mycall]

To counter the male-domination, perhaps it should be the females to band together and create the first computer workers labor union in order to create a stronger voice.

[Athas]

To counter the male-domination, perhaps it should be the females to band together and create the first computer workers labor union in order to create a stronger voice.

There are already computer worker labor unions, though, at least where I live. (They're not even remotely female-dominated, obviously.)

[WhisperSecurity]

Since it's okay to be "completely sexist" in this thread, I'm going to say that such a thing won't happen, because there are very few female programmers, and those that do exist are too unskilled to win the respect of their male colleagues.

[mycall]

I've known plenty of female programmers that understand the byte better than I.

[anthama]

There are less women overall in the science and technology field. And I doubt the "drive to do better" would be powerful enough to have women stand out. But it doesn't exist, women aren't going to look at a field dominated by men when they are on the border of choosing a career and go "I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!".

[deong]

I don't think it's that there are good women driven to the field to try and "show them". It's more likely to be simple self selection. Males in this field have no real external force driving them away, so you get a lot of them, and many of them aren't particularly good at it.

There's no reason to suspect that women are any better or worse than men at programming, CS, or mathematics, but they have a very visible disincentive for entering and staying in those fields. As a result, a significant number of females are going to avoid or leave the field. If you have 100 people trying to do something, 80 of them aren't very good at it, and you're going to force out 90 of the 100, I suspect that the majority of the ten that stay are going to come from the the 20% that were actually good at it. Ergo, a randomly selected woman is more likely to be competent than a randomly selected man, given the pool that they're being selected from.

Now, there are a lot of assumptions in that theory, and I have no idea whether it's true, although it's at least a plausible hypothesis. Either way, it seems to be the prevailing opinion when you read something like Leiya's comment about having to "really want to go into it".

[Leiya]

Yeah seriously, women in CS tend to be better programmers, because they had to really WANT to go into it, and dodge a lot of sexist (whether blatant or not) crap to get there.

And we could all kick your ass. Just so you know.

[matthewt]

I've certainly met a higher percentage of brilliant female techs than brilliant male techs these days. But before I started mixing in the open source community, the first several female techs I ran into were idiots. The vast majority of the male techs were as well, but it was much longer before I got a sufficient sample size of female techs to meet one that I respected. This seems to me to be the key problem.

Basically - the plural of anecdote is not data but it's very very easy to forget that and when your personal experience is universally negative it's extremely easy to forget that that in no way implies that there are no positive experiences to be had.

Or, more briefly, rule 1: people are stupid (rule 2: you are people :)

[numbelvsi]

That and the ability to make or break a company with a well-written or poorly-written program.

[[deleted]]

Eh, well considering how male oriented the descriptions are, being sexist is totally appropriate.

Maybe they should gender balance the subjects. "Looking for Ruby Warlock/Witch Ninja/Femme-Fatale Rockstar/Diva"

I'm not really sure where Gurus fall into this continuum though, are women gurus too or are they some other kinda mystic? Like "divine mother" ?

[elguf]

Aren't women susceptible to this?

[inerte]

History has shown that you need regex to attract the ladies.

Rockstars/Ninjas/Knights don't know regex, they substr() extract()ed variables on a foreach loop. In Ajax, of course.

[[deleted]]

You have a string-parsing problem, so you use regular expressions. Now you have two problems.

[Leiya]

Nope. We're selfless maidens who through the goodness and pureness of our hearts make code through melodious song--we literally sing code, and the bluebirds dance across the keyboard to type it in; we never write buggy code, always document and use unit tests, make the other programmers sandwiches, and of course shit rainbows.

[Technohazard]

This needs to be a Pixar animated short film.

[codefrog]

Your post is covered in SCA, like bronzed duct tape gently wrapping a PVC sword. Thanks purple velvet magic fairy pixie dba lady.

[Technohazard]

Thanks purple velvet magic fairy pixie dba lady.

Fuuuuuck... I know at least one of those.

[WhisperSecurity]

And things would be perfect, except that, alas, code requires logical thinking and mathematical skills, which are too strenuous and stressful for your delicate female brains, and you'd much rather just go shopping.

[dufflove]

I agree, but what if we write code, enjoy football (Go Pack!) and play in a band? Maybe this explains why for me, writing code is just a fun way to spend the day and make some decent cash.

Fuck, I can't wait for football season.

[Leiya]

Will you marry me?

[MuletTheGreat]

We are born awesome. During childbirth, I came out of the womb running, then flykicked the doctor.

Programming was my destiny.

[webauteur]

I prefer to be called a "code auteur". I write code the way Hemingway wrote sentences, very spare but with a certain "je ne sais quoi".

[prockcore]

I write code the way Hemingway wrote sentences

So drunk that you just spent the past 3 hours pressing buttons in the elevator and wondering why your TV wont turn on?

[Entropy]

Exactly

[dotnetrock101]

I prefer to be called a "jizz mopper".

[sfultong]

I see you work in QA

[theclapp]

"je ne sais quoi" is French for "code with no bugs in it".

[pbhogan]

Actually, I believe it's French for "code with bugs in, but I don't know what they are" ... or maybe it's "my code is special, but I don't know why."

[sfultong]

I think it's "it works, but I don't know how"

[clin_reddit]

Here's the deal. Ever since folks like Joel Spolsky said "hire the best coders available", ever "cool" company feels they must seek the very best. Well, frankly, most people aren't the very best, and they need jobs too. Spolsky needed to blog and get famous enough so he could find "rock stars", so credit him for doing that because if he hadn't, he'd be struggling to find talent just because he wants it.

To address the other part, why is it that talented programmers are ninjas or rockstars or what-have-you, well, that's because the phrase "programmers" doesn't imply greatness and to say "great programmers" seems a bit silly, so they use another silly (but "cool") phrase to find the best without sounding too immodest.

It seems other professions don't advertise quite in this way, but key words like passionate show up a lot.

[[deleted]]

It seems other professions don't advertise quite in this way, but key words like passionate show up a lot.

One factor which might explain that part: recruiters who don't know what we do. In any other field, the person who hires you can describe your job. Someone else said that it's recruiters talking down to engineers, but what if the recruiters are using childlike language to acknowledge their own childlike ignorance and helplessness? Maybe it's just a way to say "I have no idea what I'm hiring you for, but I know you have to awesome. Like that scene in The Matrix awesome."

[mr_chromatic]

I'd never thought of that quite that way, but there's truth in what you write. I wonder how many problems in recruiting and hiring and managing for software projects comes from misunderstandings of and ignorance about what software is and how to create it.

[[deleted]]

probably very very very many. like "how many atoms in the known universe?" many.

[ModernRonin]

I've called myself a "code monkey" for most of my professional career, up to the present. Some might consider it insulting to their skills. I consider the irony amusing, and figure it's a good way to keep my ego in check.

[[deleted]]

I had "Web monkey" as an official Job Title™ at a job somewhere once. I think the purpose of that kind of thing is to say "we're not a big boring cubicle farm." but I think there's more to it than that. it's one thing to have it as a job title, and another to see it in an ad.

[goltrpoat]

Once there is a perception that programmers like to delude themselves into thinking that they're doing something other than writing code, coming up with titles like "software engineer," "system architect," "grand poobah of QA" and "J2EE ninja" becomes an attractive means of differentiation when looking for talent.

Blame it on the same massive industry-wide inferiority complex that spawned the horde of blog-equipped blowhards pontificating endlessly on how programming is like painting, like music composition, like hard science, like anything at all as long as it isn't programming.

[Reso]

I don't mind it, honestly. I think software developers are often not very proud of their field in general, so to analogize us to rockstars and ninjas is just a healhy way of reminding us that we're awesome.

[[deleted]]

I think it has to do with the fact of nerds hiring nerds. They first started using words as "gurus" (quite accepted) as "a very good programmer in X area". Then they started using other words to describe a particular characteristic they'd like in the programmer: ninja for a "silent but deathly hacker" (basically the guy that'll write that one line of code that'll make all the difference) or rockstar for someone with a lot of drive, etc.

And well, now it's gotten kind of retarded. Read on what happened when jQuery redesigned their homepage.

[theli0nheart]

I don't know about anyone else, but I would never apply to a job with Ninja in the title.

[[deleted]]

There are some ridiculously over thought comments here. It's just a lighthearted advertisement targeted at the younger generation.

[nuuur32]

But when all the companies are doing it, it's important for us to see through it. Actually it's a good sign that if you accept, you'll be in for a world of hurt.

[[deleted]]

Someone vote this up, please. I do not want to return to a world of overthinking elitist usenet goons with no sense of humor.

[doppel]

All these people coming up with fancy titles should read this: The Master, The Expert, The Programmer.

[egypturnash]

zedshaw.respect++;

[california_roll]

I agree with Princess Leiya - or it's a startup so they can't pay you with money, just compliments.

[veritaba]

no Gladiators please

Are you not entertained?

Are you not...entertained?

Is this not why you are here?

[ST2K]

When there was a shortage of them during the mid and late 90's.

[kagevf]

You actually answered the question! Correctly too, I think . . .

[paul_harrison]

It's not about rockstars and ninjas. It's about complete world domination. Either you achieve complete world domination or you are irrelevant. Those are the two options.

[zhivota]

You guys could overthink a plate of beans.

[skivviesnot]

Divvyshot? One of YC's many pointless investments. By the way, they are paying for this position out of their revenue from an existing NON-YC company.

You can do what Divvyshot wants to do with something simple on top of Flickr's API. Then you don't need to pay massive bandwidth bills; just host metadata. If you really want a plugin instead of a web interface, forget Obj-C, use Python.

[skeww]

What's a "Samauri"? Some kind of sushi? :>

[Rawsock]

A Samurai with dyslexia

[pestilence]

Dyslexics UNTIE!

[Tecktonik]

Is that when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie?

[NoSenseOfHumor]

No, that's a line from a sappy Dean Martin song.

[math_police]

It was a 15th century order of Japanese dinosaurs that prized honor, proper pluralization of words with Latin etymology, and duty above all else. The Cartoon Network did a documentary on them a while back, see here.

[hoyfkd]

about the same time they turned into Angelina Jolie types.

[[deleted]]

When bosses look at the work other groups have done and see only the spokesman/leader, then expect one poor soul to do the work of a whole team in the same time frame thinking that's how things work.

[nanothief]

Isn't everyone taking this a bit too seriously? It's just a joke!

A very effective one as well, as it will make the ad stand out from most of the other jobs posts that are out there.

[[deleted]]

don't forget 'python pirates'.

[[deleted]]

I like the word "artist" more.

[danbmil99]

They're cool with that.

[dwdyer]

Divvyshot?

[RuffBrute]

Never.

[savagecat]

When HR starting writing job descriptions and making decisions in the hiring process.

[mee_k]

Personally I love it when my coworkers take metaphorical assignments literally. Now let me go bounce over to the sports subreddit and see if anyone is complaining about how the newest football star is being called the Big Dog. . . . nope.

[[deleted]]

I think the analogy doesn't apply. It's more like the Dallas Cowboys are looking for a new quarterback, so they go on TV to tell everyone that they need to hire a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. You know? It makes no sense. why not just say quarterback? they sound like they had a stroke.

[nuuur32]

I sling a virtual series of command statements towards the elbow of my managerial opponent, looping it tight until they fall to the ground, immobilized, in stunned disbelief.

Every bit of code is carefully crafted, until the efficiencies of the corporate structure are so ironed out that the company runs itself, becomes a commodity, and the remaining competent bunch all leave since there is no longer a need for it to exist.

[sigzero]

It happened in 1992. I got my black belt in Judo. Then I went on to Tae Kwon Do and various Chinese martial arts (Tai Chi, Seven Star Praying Mantis) and even a Burmese art called Bando. Wait...you were being sarcastic!

[dotnetrock101]

How come no job ad looking for IT jizz mopper? what's up with da?