The Recruiter’s Joke
So a guru, a ninja and a rock star walk into the bar
“Hi. I am contacting you because I am searching for a JS Ninja”.
Oh please. Stop. Stop right the fuck there. This is where I draw the line, where I look at my LinkedIn inbox and wait patiently for it to self-destruct.
A ninja. A ninja skilled in the fine and historic arts of JS, trained by Douglas Crockford to perform acts of espionage, arson and sabotage. Silent assassins that can come in and steal your obfuscated code base from right under your pillow while you sleep.
Let us humor the recruiter and imagine what it would be like to work with a ninja. You’d never know where that person is. Fire drills would be a complete shit show because you could never account for everyone. It’s monday morning, and you are having the first of many coffees of the day, wondering if the acidity is because the coffee is acidic, if the sugar was switched for arsenic, or if maybe you are just hung over from a weekend of unspeakable indulgence.
It’s time for a status meeting and you start to wonder where the fuck is your co-worker. Well, your co-worker is a ninja, he could be walking right behind you, pointing a blow dart at the back of your hot dog neck as you head towards the conference room. You sit down, and again look around, trying to find the stealthy son of a bitch. Finally you look up and there the asshole is, doing his own impression of the ceiling cat meme, gracefully propping himself up from his omniscient position.
“Dude, come sit down”, you say. He just silently shakes his head, he’s comfortable where he is. Again, you feel uneasy, bring your coffee to your nose to see if you can detect anything, wondering if this is the day you will die and if you will go quietly, slumped over in your Aeron chair while the weight of your head types out a tweet that many assume was written by a cat walking across your keyboard. Noooooooope, but it will be a cat that will eat your face as you sit there, dead. There will be no drama, because that is not the Ninja way. People will have no idea that you are actually dead, that the JS Ninja they hired took your life while you were trying to apply a Git stash. Rhianna keeps popping up in your Spotify followers updates, but they don’t think much of it, you have been known to listen to much worse and for much longer.
It’s 95 degrees out, and the JS Ninja is fully clothed, from head to toe in the blackest of black. He’s sporting a perpetual case of swass. It has been reported to HR but personal hygiene is just such a touchy topic and the fear of imminent death keeps anyone from say anything.
You find yourself in the bathroom which has a few stalls to choose from. You bend down and look under the stalls to make sure no one is in there before you can dump out in peace. Slowly, you open a stall, walk in, turn around to close the door,and the JS Ninja is standing there, sparing a square of toilet paper.
At some point, later in the afternoon, someone hits them self squarely in the head with the newly named numbchucks the JS Ninja left on the uncleaned counter in the kitchen. This was right before that same person used those same nunchucks to marshall the landing of many human aircrafts into the landing pad of the kitchen. That was right after someone used one of the nunchucks for a stir stick because its 5 o’clock somewhere, and somewhere is at someone’s desk.
It’s the end of the day and the office has started to clear out. You look around and realize you never even saw him leave. Again, you look in all the ceiling corners to make sure the dick hasn’t gone all spideyman on your ass. You start to log off, think about locking your computer and realize its pointless as the JS Ninja has everyone’s passwords anyway.
I think I’d rather work with an average, every day developer than a JS Ninja. At least if I become a target, I’ll have a better chance of avoiding the hit.
