Tell HN: The usage of “ninja” in Who is Hiring? comments has been increasing | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: The usage of “ninja” in Who is Hiring? comments has been increasing

35 pointsminimaxir41 comments

Per dang's unusual request (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9637459) and the fact that I have a convenient copy of the Hacker News database, I have made a chart plotting the usage of Rockstar and Ninja in comments on Who is Hiring posts:

http://i.imgur.com/heXjYTW.png

It's mostly random how many instances there are of each phrase on a month-to-month basis; however, for Ninja, the number of instances is trending upward slightly.

View on HN

Nice looking plot, but looking at May 2015 who is hiring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471287

I count 7 occurences of ninja, 2 of them is in the username/email of the poster , so the real count is 5 , here are the 5 :

- Looking for an aspiring Rails ninja, with 5+ years experience

- Why be a ninja when you can be a pirate?

- so if you don't fit the standard Bay Area "ninja rock star programmer" mold - great!

- Play - You'll want a paddle at your desk to fight off incoming table tennis balls. Ninja backhand required.

- Our team is ready to expand, and welcome a new developer with ninja-like coding skills a...

So 2 of them actually ask for a "Ninja", 2 of them specifically ask for NOT a ninja, and one of them ask for a ninja in ping-pong. So I'm not sure how accurate the plot is overall.

EDIT: Looking manually for "Ninja" in the posts from January to May 2015:

  Jan   : 0 / 334 comments
  Feb   : 1 / 643 comments
  March : 1 / 680 comments
  April : 1 / 952 comments

The only occurence is always the same post, downvoted, or asking if it is a joke, otherwise it's "No ninja / brogrammer/ rockstar" . That same post over time represents a smaller and smaller percentage of the number of comments (Assuming 1 comment = 1 job offer)

Fair enough; I did not do manual introspection for sentiment.

However, I would say that both positive and negative sentiment is still important since it reflects on whether people take silly job titles seriously. Especially since Rockstar does not follow a similar trend.

Yes, I didn't look for the rock star/rockstar, but you're right, if people feel the need to mention words such as rockstar/ninja, it's already a problem.

Thank you for answering mreskto question about what you used to draw the plots , I find this short overview of ggplot2 interesting[1] !

[1]http://minimaxir.com/2015/02/ggplot-tutorial/

Yea, seems more like a backlash against the whole ninja/guru/wizard meme.

Clickable link to chart: http://i.imgur.com/heXjYTW.png

EDIT: Data, in CSV form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zzgsV4YypiTHAg3Hj0Lc...

If I did the Mann-Kendall test correctly, we reject the no-ninja-trend hypothesis at the p=0.0002 level, and do NOT reject the no-rockstar-trend (p = .2)

Can you share the raw data of comments?

Maybe it's because I live far outside the Bay Area, in Europe, so I don' get the culture, but the whole guru/ninja nomenclature makes me nervous. Maybe it's my low self-esteem kicking in, but I find it hard to associate with things like Ruby-ninja or DevOps kung-fu when I just don't feel like a ninja, and not sure will I ever. What's wrong with regular names? Can you imagine an civil engineering mage title? :)

It really is a shame. As someone who struggles with impostor syndrome regularly, all this ninja-rockstar-10x nonsense is unsettling enough that I dread the idea of throwing myself into the Bay Area food chain. Seems like it risks selecting for bravado and bragging and pretending to be more than one really is.

They are job descriptions. Tech job descriptions often try to demonstrate the positivity of the work environment with an overly exhuberant tone of 'we're excellent, your excellent, everything's excellent.

IMHE, in day-to-day life those terms are overwhelmingly used ironically. But, then again, I have made genuinely hospitable work environments my first priority in employment opportunities.

Fortunately, there are companies who are aware of how it would make some people feel excluded.

For example, Buffer recently removed the word "hacker" from their job postings: https://open.bufferapp.com/job-descriptions-diversity

They use word ninja when nobody on the team wants to do that sort of job e.g. "JavaScript ninja" or "DevOps rockstar" or "front-end guru". Have you ever seen a job post for "CEO ninja" or a "rock-star CTO co-founder"?

I am turned off the the brogrammer connotations from using those labels. However, the idea of a civil engineering mage made me smile. It's... fun.

Sometimes we humans, especially professionally, take ourselves so seriously that we forget that some things are just fun. :)

Say you have a generator that emits random numbers in the range [0,6]. Now construct a fake timeseries by sampling that generator about 50 times. Fit a curve or moving average using the same method that you used here. What is the probability that your random series will exhibit an upward trend as great as the one you saw here?

The probability of an upward trend when sampling is pretty much nil if you are sampling from a uniform series. A [0,6] uniform distribution will follow a Normal distribution with mean = 3 and variance = 3 after enough resampling. 95% confidence interval for true mean would be (-0.3948196, 6.39482).

The LOESS regression lines do have a confidence interval to reflect the uncertainty. It's a visual aid to illustrate the trend.

Could it be that there are simply more whoishiring comments?

How about "seeking mature, responsible adults, serious about working."

That's really just replacing one bias/preference with another.

Some people consider themselves more emotionally and socially capable, and want employers to recognize them for it.

Some considers themselves to be technical virtuosos and want employers to recognize that.

HN has a left wing/collectivist bias which tends to favor the former, so it constructs a narrative where the industry has an irrational bias towards the latter.

> HN has a left wing/collectivist bias which tends to favor the former

Ha, first time I heard that. Usually we're accused of being libertarian wingnuts.

That said, it is true that there are a lot of Democrats here, though not really what I'd call "left wing" Democrats. Many of them Googlers and Apple employees, from what I can tell (and campaign finance data backs me up).

HN is stereotypically seen as very left wing on social issues and libertarian economically.

> HN is stereotypically seen as very left wing on social issues and libertarian economically.

So in a word, libertarian.

Sort of, "left libertarian" would be more accurate. Many people hear libertarian and think Rand Paul.

Any statistics on that? Or is that just a general impression?

Any chance this could be due to alliterative influence of the tech stacks du jour? Perhaps Ruby or Rails Rockstars have ceded prevalence to Node Ninjas?

Any openings for a "zen master"?

The most ridiculous one I've seen was "dragon slayer".

Clearly dragon slayers are very useful when map()ing the frontiers of big data.

Perhaps it was at Mozilla?

about:config "Here be dragons"

No, it was a posting looking for "RUBY ON RAILS DRAGON SLAYERS" if I recall correctly.

Don't worry folks. "Gurus" will have their day again. It's only a matter of time. I personally know of a large group of gurus who have been plotting their return since 2001.

"Gurus" trend on HN: http://imgur.com/7GUIFie (based on all posts, not just who is hiring - src hnwatcher.com) It's not dead yet, but clearly not as trendy as "ninja" nowadays :) http://imgur.com/ro5Tvh6

EDIT: last point for "ninja" on the last graph is June 2015.

What did you use for making the charts? They look nice.

ggplot2, although I'm still playing around with the theme/fonts. See this post for a general overview/tutorial of the theming: http://minimaxir.com/2015/02/ggplot-tutorial/

Simply replace it with "monkey" in your head, e.g.: "we are looking for an Angular ninja!" = "we are looking for an Angular monkey (because none of our backend Scala guys are willing to touch JS with 10 feet pole".

can you add "hacker" to the data too?

I do not have access to the database, but this is what I find using hnwatcher.com (based on submissions and comments, fow all HN posts)

http://imgur.com/ITgXkk1

interesting, but what would actually be the definition of a "ninja" or "guru"? Someone that codes in stealth mode and never is seen by the company?

<joke>Should the Japanese be worried?</joke>

Opportunity for shameless promotion

Wow! Our startup & product name BOTH use the word Ninja. (We'll accept USD$1M @ USD$10,000,000 pre money valuation...)

Ninja Boxing Calculator https://itunes.apple.com/PL/app/id725106405

Let's just call it growth hacking and be done ;-)

OMG! Down voted!

No ads. Free app. Retro. Sarcasm.

What gives? No revenue model?

Complete irrelevance and lame hucksterism.

I find your comment truly magnificent. The honesty & brevity combined with down votes have taught me something. Thank you!

I don't jest when I say "lame hucksterism" has been part of the image of LCD Ninja, it's been quite deliberate. But just now, I've realised something - this charade just sucks for everyone. It's not charming. It's not witty. It's not original, ironic or even amusing. Not even to myself.

Thank you all for the feedback. We all learn that way! ;-)

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