This got a chuckle out of me yesterday, both for the content and for the (apparent) applicability to myself.
The point of the article is valid - the people who do the hiring in most companies are also the least likely to be able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, so the development teams have to come up with some other way to get the good people interviewed.
But the comments against it seem equally valid - putting some cool non-corporate (for now) title in the job description glorifies the superficial aspects of our profession (and elicits stories of the good ol' Dot-Com boom), and sets into motion another round of the euphemism treadmill, where "hacker" has been replaced by "guru" has been replaced by "rockstar" et cetera, ad nauseum, and the wannabees will eventually fill in all the spaces, and we will be calling the best programmers something else.
It also trivializes us - making us look far to concerned with what we are called instead of what we do.
So let's all be programmers again, mkay?
And for the record - Ninja Software Development is not about "l33t n1nj4 skillz", but about working to develop better software disguised as an otherwise undistinguished programmer, even if the company doesn't want to let you make good software.
