herder

As a geek herder, just because my HPs are worth more, it doesn't mean I value my plodders less.

Any vulnerable server will do for a spammer or botnet herder (they use hijacked servers to control the bots).

Taking the IBM courses to fully qualify as a dinosaur herder costs as much as a computer science degree.

Actually, for that matter, 420k bots could launch a pretty nasty DDoS were the herder so inclined.

Always from teams with small budgets; nobody has figured out how to justify an AAA herder.

Or mobile phones (and network of 1000s of towers) for everyone up to and including a goat herder in botswana.

Amazon can now let me hire a goat herder[0] to get my lawn eaten down.

Lichtenberg is an example of the former class, Herder certainly belongs to the latter.

There's at least one I know of who's customized his code and sold it to a botnet herder.

A bot doesn't necessarily only scan port 22 in a range - nothing stops the bot herder making it scan 1-1024 instead.

It feels like I see a Lemmings-like (side view herder, probably without any avatar of the player) every few years.

Good, healthy life as a goat herder somewhere up in the mountains.

You might want to end up managing other developers, being a "nerd herder", which presents an whole new set of fantastically non-deterministic challenges.

Mostly "oh, how brave we are, suffering a few casualties when fighting some goat herder enemies with 1/100 our capacity".

Being indispensable is great but it doesn't take many 2 AM "email emergencies" from the management types to make you want to become a goat herder.

I put "Vim Wielder / Cat Herder" on my business card.