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Comment by salex89 | Hacker News Reader

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? :)

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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. :)

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