Web Development Rockstar Unicorn with Ninja coding skills who moonlights as a Wizard of Data

Are you a developer?  Maybe you are a recruiter? Hiring manager?  If you are then you probably know what I'm about to write.

IT and development job descriptions can have pretty demanding skill requirements.  In order to take short cuts or make things sound 'cooler', hiring managers create job descriptions looking for Ninjas, Rock Stars, Wizards, Unicorns and other things other than programmer.

  • Ninja - a developer who codes quietly in the dark and kills any task required by his master.
  • Rock Star - a developer who stands out in a crowd and loudly codes better than everyone around them
  • Wizard - a developer who magically creates software that everyone loves without any guidance and utilizing less hardware or maybe no hardware at all
  • Unicorn - a developer who is an expert at all forms of programming.  A Unicorn (Full-stack Developer) can code the UI, API, database, virtual reality, business intelligence and everything else and do so all by themselves as equally well as any other more specialized developer
Of course, if you are actually in need of a real Ninja or Rock Star than perhaps you hate that these job descriptions.  They are in the search results of your best Ninja/Rock Star/Wizard candidates.  I'm sure the hiring managers and recruiters would apologize to you.  My guess is that the majority of the Ninja ads are for developers available to moonlight at night for little money or no credit.


Are you a developer?  The cool thing is that you can filter out these ads for Ninjas and find real work. 




The hiring managers looking for real Ninjas will appreciate you not applying accidentally.  You might be very good with a sword and can quietly assassinate heads of state, and that's nice and all.  If you want to stop killing people and just code, filters will help. 



Are you a hiring manager?

There are better words to use rather than all these listed here. "Experienced", "professional", "adaptable" are 3 better words for sure.  Tell us about the company not about something you want from us that we can not give.

Are you flexible?  Care about results instead of time cards? Do you want us to keep learning and attend conferences?  Do you want us to be professional and not get into trouble and speak technically and organize our thoughts?

We can work weird hours from anywhere with an internet connection.  We love creating working software that's ships.  We love learning.  We love preparing for demos and being ready to get in front of clients instead of embarrassing ourselves with cheap jargon.

Summary:

I really dislike the uses of Ninja, Rock star, Wizard and Unicorn in the tech industry.  It is just a bunch of crap and not very technical.  You are speaking to a bunch of the most technical people in the world.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Special Characters are Truly Special

Image
Do you remember the days before string interpolation in C#? I do. It was medieval. Those were truly the dark days of development. We would all use string formatting and concatenation and carried swords around to defend ourselves against giant beasts. Ok, maybe I'm the only one that was wearing a helmet but I'm kind of a weird guy. I think we can all agree that string concatenation is not all that fun. It might not be as dangerous as dragons, but it can still light your hair on fire when there is a bug in your code just to display some text. Classes in C# like StringBuilder helped make things safer but it wasn't all that readable. String.Format is easy but keeping the parameters in the right order isn't exactly a no brainer either. What if that code was just in a class behind a view? Can't we just put it in the view? In the code behind it was easily testable, but the context was lost, and it wasn't as simple as what we can do today. output = String.Format("
Read more

.NET Maui and VS Code

Image
  I was disappointed in the developer experience for .NET Maui and Visual Studio Code. I assumed that the popular debuggers and extensions would cover getting an app running. I am always up to date on my .NET and Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code so I just figured the tooling would be there. When the marketplace didn't really reveal a solution for me, I went searching. The best search result for me is the one that pointed me in the direction to get my .NET Maui CLI working.  That's right. I went to the CLI to get my IDE running the way I wanted it to. .NET MAUI with .NET CLI (Command Line Interface) Getting the .NET Maui workload and the maui-check command line tool installed really helped. Those installs made sure that the libraries and emulators were setup so I could run them without Visual Studio.  It also reminded me that I'll need some sort of emulator or device to connect VS Code to. dotnet new maui After running the CLI to create my solution and project, I realize
Read more

Where’s my phone update?

  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/features/update-schedule-usa.aspx   I have a Samsung Focus.  If you look at the chart and details (as of today April 4th) I should get my February update 10 days to several weeks after AT&T gets thru testing.  AT&T isn’t done with testing at the time of this blog post.  So the February update should be called the June update and the March update could be called the July update.   I’m glad I don’t have a brick.  I’m glad I don’t have an Android 2.* and need to figure out if I can spend money on an app because it might actually not work on my version on the 2.x operating system.  I’m glad I don’t have an iPhone 4 with the bigger GBs and the cracked screens.   But how much different is copy and paste on the AT&T network than another network?  The Samsung update is in network testing right?  Or maybe that is just smoke and there is a bigger fire.  Tell me there is fire and I’ll not want the update. Otherwise quick puff
Read more