Hey job seekers. I'm level 45 in starfighter with a power VI blaster in C++ and IX in Python. $100 to get you to level 30, x1.5 per level above that (though obviously I can't get you above 45, but I know a guy so I can subcontract up to 52.) You just have to set up a port forward from your machine and I'll take care of the rest. Contact info is in my profile.
Don't get suckered into using a bot. They may be cheaper in the short run but you know you're going to get lifebanned. My prices are nothing compared to your future earnings.
I don't think you understand their business. Contingency recruiters' fees can reach 30% or more of an engineer's first year of salary, which could work out to $50k or more per engineer. You can bet they will be looking closely at each candidate's solutions, plus automated code plagiarism detection is pretty easy.
It also depends on the type of problem. If you just need one weird trick to pass the level (e.x. use this SQL injection) then that's easy to game. If you have to write a bunch of distributed systems code (e.x. Stripe's last CTF) that's a lot harder to cheat.
I like this idea, but I also like the one proposed here http://ortask.com/a-better-way-to-hire-developers-and-tester....
I fear that starfighter will overlook goood candidates simply because they are not good at gaming, which makes the second approach by ortask more interesting and maybe balanced.
I'm not sure that cheating on this would be unethical. Programming is about getting things done. As a hiring metric, nothing can beat open source.
The open source portfolio really is kind of a golden standard. It is real work that you have done, that has (hopefully) advanced the commons, because you love programming and have something unique to add to the world. Some fake video game programming may indicate something, but is simply not as strong an indicator.
Who are you going to hire- TJ Holowaychuk, who wrote Express, or the guy who placed 3rd on TopCoder in 2012?
Oh awesome, all I have to do is pay you a bunch of money, then I can get a job I'm not qualified for, fail, get fired, and maybe have my reputation ruined? :)
The scam you've described may be possible, but it's not very rational for someone to use it, IMHO.
I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess.
Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here:
"CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doing (without the whole game dynamic), check out MICROCORRUPTION.COM, which is a more conventional CTF we ran last year.
Security is one of two problem domains we're starting with. But this isn't a "security recruiting" service, and our take on security uses it as a venue for systems and network programming, not for the minutia of SQL query quoting rules.
Thank you for running a long-term CTF ! I've always been interested in those "improve your coding skills by playing" challenges but from my inexistent experience most of them fall in a combination of:
- They are timeboxed
- They are mostly (if not only) about cracking security
- They are targeted towards low-level languages
You've already stated that it won't be timeboxed (which totally makes sense as a hiring "middleman": you're interested in applicants at all times). You already said that security will not be the single domain. Now, will I be able to use Starfighter as an excuse to finally stop procrastinating and learn that shiny new language I've had on my to-learn list for far too long ? (Patrick more or less hinted it shouldn't be the case, but I'd like to know)
I'm really looking forward to this. On the overall point of breaking the interview standard we have, I'd like to say a huge "Thank you". The points you've made in your blog post really resonate with what I can see (the interview process is a joke if you want to hire actual programming engineers). I really hope we can move towards a model where applicants can show skills through a portfolio, of which Starfighter should be a part if I understand things correctly.
As someone who plays in a lot of "conventional" CTFs (e.g. DEFCON, Codegate, GitS, etc.), this sounds very cool, even if my participation in those already gets me some job offers :)
One question: for a less "just for fun" site like this, with no time barriers, how do you plan on dealing with people just following write-ups? You can randomly generate the flags, but people could still follow the steps. You can say "don't write write-ups," but write-ups will still be written ;)
While this might indeed help employers find better employees, I am concerned about hidden (or not so hidden) bias. Games like this (and the way this one is described confirms it) select for competitive people. Other talented programmers might prefer expressing their creativity and talent in less competitive ways. While competitiveness might be a desirable quality, sometimes it is not. It might also appeal to men more than women, and so might be inadvertently sexist. I think you should very carefully analyze player demographics to make sure you're not making matters worse in terms of diversity.
When you design a test -- any test -- you should make sure that 1/ score correlates with success (i.e. full bivariate correlation), and 2/ if the test is voluntary, that there are no prior biases which would select candidates prior to taking the test.
My first thought when reading the blurb on your site was 'oh great... they're going to make a CTF where you have to participate in a team, and all other members of your 'team' are actually AI programmed to be as distracting and abrasive as possible and you will have to work on a 25 year old PL/SQL system designed by a prima donna so you can show your ability to work in hostile environments.' I am sure that's not what you're doing, but that's what comes to mind when I hear 'real systems' and 'real challenges'...
On your "About Us" page, you say "We're especially interested in talking to you if you will be hiring 10+ engineers in the next year, as we may be able to help you out with that. Get in touch with any of us."
Does a company need to be hiring 10 or more engineers to make it worth it to talk to you?
I'm at a small company, that has been trying to hire engineers for the last couple of years, and not having much success; we've hired a couple, had a couple take other offers, lost a few to attrition.
We would love to be able to get some candidates who have already passed a technical screen; less time for us, scheduling an hour with a bunch of candidates who don't pan out, less time for them, only focusing on one more in-depth set of problems rather than a whole bunch of different phone screens.
But we're not hiring 10+ developers any time soon; that would double the worldwide size of our dev team. We're looking for maybe 3 or so at this point.
Would you consider working with smaller companies as well?
This looks great. Looking forward to trying it. Good on all of you for trying to change the tech hiring status quo.
I know this whole thing is still in flux, but does it look like there are going to be any remote work opportunities in the early days? I'm probably in the minority but given my personal circumstances (living in a non-tech-rated US city and not considering moving) I'm really only available for remote.
What do you expect will be the effect of this on hiring women? Do you have any relevant data from microcorruption (what % players were women)? It'd be great if Erin could also chime in.
if you're monitoring everything players do, doesn't that create an incentive for them to write their own tests locally and only interact with your servers when they have stuff already working? so they look like a genius instead of a guy who made a bunch of mistakes. "look i never make any syntax errors, hire me". but seriously whatever you monitor, players will have incentive to try to figure out and game it. and that incentive messes up the regular experience, it's an incentive to do something other than beat the level.
Your last post on hiring definitely found its legs and I am sure will cited for some time to come. You mentioned that you used to send a sampling of key text books to potential Matasano candidates and was wondering if you could share some references. I imagine Applied Crypto might be on there. Any any other important resources for mastering CTFs you might pass along would be obliged ;)
Do you have a wishlist of all the problem domains you'd like to tackle? (I'm thinking web, mobile, and desktop applications above the system level when I ask this, but any other areas are wonderful. Databases. etc.)
By this I mean, the article uses some creepy language as only a company enthusiastic about its power to broker reputation can.
>>We can tell you exactly what happened when your candidates tried to implement a REST API.
What, are you going to keep a record of the time I fiddled with it for an afternoon and then use that to disqualify me from a job?
You say elsewhere about MicroCorruption:
>Microcorruption player identities were totally private. There's no way for a recruiter to look someone up, unless they used a very-identifiable username.
Sounds like a good starting point, but what if I don't want my report card stored and used to compare with other people? What if I don't want to feel like my performance is owned by you?
>>We assess for skill first, passively as players play our games and then actively. Our founders — talented technologists — personally reconstruct candidates’ solutions and evaluate them.
If I don't have any control over how and when my information is going to be monitored, I'm forced into an ugly position where I have to treat the whole thing as part of my career and perform competitively. The sense of relaxed exploration is killed, the idea of treating it like a college course or project isn't viable, and honestly I begin to resent the project.
Alternatively, I play on an anonymous account, and then if I decide to use my information about me in a professional setting, I'm best served by creating a new account and just redoing everything.
Edit: I should say that the idea really excites me and I'd love to learn in this format.
I’m curious as to how much this will select for people with free time. Many of the CTFs I’ve played in required a quite non-trivial amount of investment of time (which I didn’t mind, as they’ve been quite enjoyable), but there are certainly people who can’t afford n dozen hours to solve problems due to family/work/other obligations.
I do think this is significantly better than the alternative, but I’m also concerned that it will just create a new class of people who do unfairly poorly in the hiring process.
One of the conventional complaints against CS-algorithm-heavy interviewing is that companies ask all these tough questions about distributed cache latency in red-black tree optimizations, then once they hire people, they're just bashing out PHP and MySQL. How do you make sure that the companies hiring your services have challenges that live up to the skills you're selecting for?
Wonderful, let me add this to the list of things I need to do in my spare time to remain a hire-able resource .... GitHub, Meetups, reading hacker news, preparing for puzzle interviews, , HackerRank, conquering a CTF. Jeez, can we say dance monkey dance.
I find this announcement fascinatingly incomprehensible; it clearly emerges from a slice of the software universe quite distant from mine. The use of the acronym "CTF" suggests that the authors are very familiar with this genre of game; but how exactly does it work? What does it have to do with programming? I guess they are making programming into a game (?) and this somehow has something to do with hiring?
I get what they're trying to do, but did this read like a rant from a crazy person to anyone else?
Just the first header block read like they were creating some kind of videogame company... and then finally at the bottom of that text block, "Oh, it has something to do with interviews..." and then halfway down the next section, "oh, it's that kind of CTF".
Anyway, seems cool if they can make applying for jobs more interesting.
> We’re not here to fix the technical interview: we’re here to destroy it, and create something new and better in its place.
That sounds pretty bold - some of us are kind of happy to go in and do an interview and talk about our experience and not spend a lot of time playing a game. I could see the game as more likely to work for people with lots of time and not as much experience or proficiency with the typical process. I could see it working very well indeed to find people who might otherwise have been ignored.
In any event, it sounds cool, and I wish you guys the best of luck with it!
If the only reason you'd mess around with Starfighter is to get a job, we've done something wrong. This isn't one of those sites where you solve discrete programming puzzles for badges, or in lieu of a whiteboard interview.
1) Is this a Stripe-like CTF that happens over some caffeine-fueled weekend? Or is it more of an ongoing Project Euler-style drop-in-and-solve type process? I don't think I could handle the former, but the latter sounds quite enjoyable and something I might do in my free time just to learn. I did that with PE for a while since it was fun to earn completion points.
2) You mention "Let's Play" style videos. How do you make it so that the solutions aren't given away? Does each player have a customized CTF somehow?
I am surprised that Patrick is moving onto yet a different project.
After leaving his job he works as a freelance online marketing expert. Then quits that despite implying making a lot of money. Instead wants to create online marketing courses to reach bigger audience, but takes forever to produce any content and is now abandoning that track. Creates AppointmentReminder with some good initial success but reading between the lines that is going to be sold/abandoned as well.
Now moving onto yet another project. Seems you have created several great opportunities for yourself but cannot stick and focus on any one thing?
I am curious about a biz dev kind of thing, and it may be entirely too early to answer, but here goes:
"Contingent recruiting" has an extremely negative connotation to me. Quite literally, I have to constrain my bias when designing hiring pipelines to not throw recruiter backed resumes away. I understand that you are only taking the payment model, and are trying to undermine the business model, but have you run into any problems associating with the industry?
Or, more interestingly, have you encountered anyone on the consumer side (HR, C-Suite management, etc) that has pointed out a non-obvious advantage to typical contingent recruiting. I for one would love to hear why companies keep going back to that obviously terrible well.
Another attempt to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being.
How utterly irrational.
It's ideas like this that make me question why I bother being a programmer for anything more than leisure these days... except that I have no idea what else I could do to keep a roof over my family's head this late in my life.
You call yourselves, "engineers," but I've yet to work for any company that treated you like one or even invested in your future. You're offered a salary well above average for most working adults. They lure you with frivolous perks and stock options. They never send you to school for training, offer you a pension to keep you secure in your golden years, and I've never seen any unions you could join to demand these things from your employers. Your career is probably not going to be on the line if you merge a patch that degrades performance or introduces a timing error. But don't think they'll care about you when it comes to the bottom line. Someone else seeks to profit off of your talents and abilities and nothing else. If they can hire someone to automate you away, they will.
>Unfortunately, the technology industry is fundamentally unserious as to how it presently identifies and employs engineers.
Ok, so lets replace whiteboarding ancient algorithms and useless trick questions with a capture the flag game!! That'll make the industry seem less "unserious."
This is so unfathomably ridiculous. I can't believe you're marketing this as an interview replacement. If I get asked what my "Starfighter score" is before a job interview, I will be running as fast as I can in the other direction before they finish their sentence.
There will be people who become great at this game, and if (god help us) this gains momentum, they will get jobs.
I can only hope the rest who are developing applications and actually writing programs will come out on top, and employers will recognize that some people want to build things and not just improve their ranking in a game.
Awesome, I've been waiting for something like this
That being said, I've got a couple questions
Will all the CTFs be security focused?
One of the most common problems coursera ran into was people copying the assignments of other people. How do you intend to prevent copying for the CTFs? I see that you mentioned you're not going to DMCA tutorials or Let's Plays and instead track their every iteration on the code. I guess you can get rid of outright copying that way but I'd love to hear your other strategies.
Other than that this seems like a really interesting way to do recruiting. I can't wait to see the actual CTFs.
Also you've got a tiny typo in the WHY IS STARFIGHTER THE RIGHT TEAM FOR THIS? section:
"I have a folder in Gmail saving messages from geeks who used by career advice or salary negotiation tips to their advantage."
I think the by should be my
I'm sure you've got your own ideas for your CTFs, but if you haven't heard of them before I would recommend you check out the Matasano Crypto Challenges (cryptopals.com). They ran them privately for awhile, you just emailed them and said you wanted in and they sent you the challenges, once you emailed the answers for one batch they gave you another, etc. I've tried various 'code gaming' things before, and the Matasano challenges were, in my opinion, the best ones I've come across. (I am exempting things like Stepic's bioinformatics challenges since their main goal is to expand your knowledge of bioinformatics rather than of programming, though they do get into some advanced data structures later on)
Sounds very competitive, achiever-focused. Do all organizations want programmers who are viciously determined to win? Does that lead to society-efficient solutions?
(To elaborate a little, Richard Bartle noticed four types of players of MUD. Achievers are just one.)
Very cool guys. As a long time HN reader, I have a lot of respect for what you guys are doing. I also spent the last two years of my life building CodeCombat, which started life with a very similar mission ("a game that finds developer hiring leads"). We were YC W14 and roundly failed at that business model. I just sent Patrick an email at his Kalzumeus email, but I'd be happy to chat with you guys about we learned and potentially connect you to others who can help you avoid the most common mistakes. My email is in my profile.
Hum, Thomas and Patrick working together... That by itself is worth keeping an eye on.
I didn't do so well on the microcorruption game. I'm curious to see what else they can come up with, hopefully both less specialized, more generic, but also more advanced...
[+] [-] sfink|11 years ago|reply
Don't get suckered into using a bot. They may be cheaper in the short run but you know you're going to get lifebanned. My prices are nothing compared to your future earnings.
[+] [-] tlrobinson|11 years ago|reply
It also depends on the type of problem. If you just need one weird trick to pass the level (e.x. use this SQL injection) then that's easy to game. If you have to write a bunch of distributed systems code (e.x. Stripe's last CTF) that's a lot harder to cheat.
[+] [-] olivercreashe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woah|11 years ago|reply
The open source portfolio really is kind of a golden standard. It is real work that you have done, that has (hopefully) advanced the commons, because you love programming and have something unique to add to the world. Some fake video game programming may indicate something, but is simply not as strong an indicator.
Who are you going to hire- TJ Holowaychuk, who wrote Express, or the guy who placed 3rd on TopCoder in 2012?
[+] [-] nathan_long|11 years ago|reply
The scam you've described may be possible, but it's not very rational for someone to use it, IMHO.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here:
"CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doing (without the whole game dynamic), check out MICROCORRUPTION.COM, which is a more conventional CTF we ran last year.
Security is one of two problem domains we're starting with. But this isn't a "security recruiting" service, and our take on security uses it as a venue for systems and network programming, not for the minutia of SQL query quoting rules.
[+] [-] rakoo|11 years ago|reply
- They are timeboxed
- They are mostly (if not only) about cracking security
- They are targeted towards low-level languages
You've already stated that it won't be timeboxed (which totally makes sense as a hiring "middleman": you're interested in applicants at all times). You already said that security will not be the single domain. Now, will I be able to use Starfighter as an excuse to finally stop procrastinating and learn that shiny new language I've had on my to-learn list for far too long ? (Patrick more or less hinted it shouldn't be the case, but I'd like to know)
I'm really looking forward to this. On the overall point of breaking the interview standard we have, I'd like to say a huge "Thank you". The points you've made in your blog post really resonate with what I can see (the interview process is a joke if you want to hire actual programming engineers). I really hope we can move towards a model where applicants can show skills through a portfolio, of which Starfighter should be a part if I understand things correctly.
[+] [-] jmgrosen|11 years ago|reply
One question: for a less "just for fun" site like this, with no time barriers, how do you plan on dealing with people just following write-ups? You can randomly generate the flags, but people could still follow the steps. You can say "don't write write-ups," but write-ups will still be written ;)
[+] [-] pron|11 years ago|reply
When you design a test -- any test -- you should make sure that 1/ score correlates with success (i.e. full bivariate correlation), and 2/ if the test is voluntary, that there are no prior biases which would select candidates prior to taking the test.
[+] [-] otakucode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambda|11 years ago|reply
Does a company need to be hiring 10 or more engineers to make it worth it to talk to you?
I'm at a small company, that has been trying to hire engineers for the last couple of years, and not having much success; we've hired a couple, had a couple take other offers, lost a few to attrition.
We would love to be able to get some candidates who have already passed a technical screen; less time for us, scheduling an hour with a bunch of candidates who don't pan out, less time for them, only focusing on one more in-depth set of problems rather than a whole bunch of different phone screens.
But we're not hiring 10+ developers any time soon; that would double the worldwide size of our dev team. We're looking for maybe 3 or so at this point.
Would you consider working with smaller companies as well?
[+] [-] steveklabnik|11 years ago|reply
I'm excited to see this develop.
[+] [-] blackRust|11 years ago|reply
Apart from the gameplay mechanism with code challenges, how is this better / different to HackerRank for a) "programmers" b) companies?
[+] [-] Scramblejams|11 years ago|reply
I know this whole thing is still in flux, but does it look like there are going to be any remote work opportunities in the early days? I'm probably in the minority but given my personal circumstances (living in a non-tech-rated US city and not considering moving) I'm really only available for remote.
[+] [-] careersuicide|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revorad|11 years ago|reply
What do you expect will be the effect of this on hiring women? Do you have any relevant data from microcorruption (what % players were women)? It'd be great if Erin could also chime in.
[+] [-] voltagex_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkwjeklrzz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eugeneionesco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fitzwatermellow|11 years ago|reply
Your last post on hiring definitely found its legs and I am sure will cited for some time to come. You mentioned that you used to send a sampling of key text books to potential Matasano candidates and was wondering if you could share some references. I imagine Applied Crypto might be on there. Any any other important resources for mastering CTFs you might pass along would be obliged ;)
[+] [-] defen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddlatham|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sarciszewski|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stox|11 years ago|reply
My best wishes in your success!!!
I look forward to the results.
[+] [-] CmonDev|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaymaroon|11 years ago|reply
By this I mean, the article uses some creepy language as only a company enthusiastic about its power to broker reputation can.
>>We can tell you exactly what happened when your candidates tried to implement a REST API.
What, are you going to keep a record of the time I fiddled with it for an afternoon and then use that to disqualify me from a job?
You say elsewhere about MicroCorruption:
>Microcorruption player identities were totally private. There's no way for a recruiter to look someone up, unless they used a very-identifiable username.
Sounds like a good starting point, but what if I don't want my report card stored and used to compare with other people? What if I don't want to feel like my performance is owned by you?
>>We assess for skill first, passively as players play our games and then actively. Our founders — talented technologists — personally reconstruct candidates’ solutions and evaluate them.
If I don't have any control over how and when my information is going to be monitored, I'm forced into an ugly position where I have to treat the whole thing as part of my career and perform competitively. The sense of relaxed exploration is killed, the idea of treating it like a college course or project isn't viable, and honestly I begin to resent the project.
Alternatively, I play on an anonymous account, and then if I decide to use my information about me in a professional setting, I'm best served by creating a new account and just redoing everything.
Edit: I should say that the idea really excites me and I'd love to learn in this format.
[+] [-] japesinator|11 years ago|reply
I do think this is significantly better than the alternative, but I’m also concerned that it will just create a new class of people who do unfairly poorly in the hiring process.
[+] [-] jameshart|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bearclough|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marssaxman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icco|11 years ago|reply
Just the first header block read like they were creating some kind of videogame company... and then finally at the bottom of that text block, "Oh, it has something to do with interviews..." and then halfway down the next section, "oh, it's that kind of CTF".
Anyway, seems cool if they can make applying for jobs more interesting.
[+] [-] davidw|11 years ago|reply
That sounds pretty bold - some of us are kind of happy to go in and do an interview and talk about our experience and not spend a lot of time playing a game. I could see the game as more likely to work for people with lots of time and not as much experience or proficiency with the typical process. I could see it working very well indeed to find people who might otherwise have been ignored.
In any event, it sounds cool, and I wish you guys the best of luck with it!
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] losvedir|11 years ago|reply
Couple questions:
1) Is this a Stripe-like CTF that happens over some caffeine-fueled weekend? Or is it more of an ongoing Project Euler-style drop-in-and-solve type process? I don't think I could handle the former, but the latter sounds quite enjoyable and something I might do in my free time just to learn. I did that with PE for a while since it was fun to earn completion points.
2) You mention "Let's Play" style videos. How do you make it so that the solutions aren't given away? Does each player have a customized CTF somehow?
[+] [-] jCanvas|11 years ago|reply
After leaving his job he works as a freelance online marketing expert. Then quits that despite implying making a lot of money. Instead wants to create online marketing courses to reach bigger audience, but takes forever to produce any content and is now abandoning that track. Creates AppointmentReminder with some good initial success but reading between the lines that is going to be sold/abandoned as well.
Now moving onto yet another project. Seems you have created several great opportunities for yourself but cannot stick and focus on any one thing?
[+] [-] kasey_junk|11 years ago|reply
"Contingent recruiting" has an extremely negative connotation to me. Quite literally, I have to constrain my bias when designing hiring pipelines to not throw recruiter backed resumes away. I understand that you are only taking the payment model, and are trying to undermine the business model, but have you run into any problems associating with the industry?
Or, more interestingly, have you encountered anyone on the consumer side (HR, C-Suite management, etc) that has pointed out a non-obvious advantage to typical contingent recruiting. I for one would love to hear why companies keep going back to that obviously terrible well.
I'm excited to see what comes of this.
[+] [-] agentultra|11 years ago|reply
How utterly irrational.
It's ideas like this that make me question why I bother being a programmer for anything more than leisure these days... except that I have no idea what else I could do to keep a roof over my family's head this late in my life.
You call yourselves, "engineers," but I've yet to work for any company that treated you like one or even invested in your future. You're offered a salary well above average for most working adults. They lure you with frivolous perks and stock options. They never send you to school for training, offer you a pension to keep you secure in your golden years, and I've never seen any unions you could join to demand these things from your employers. Your career is probably not going to be on the line if you merge a patch that degrades performance or introduces a timing error. But don't think they'll care about you when it comes to the bottom line. Someone else seeks to profit off of your talents and abilities and nothing else. If they can hire someone to automate you away, they will.
And we're all the poorer for it I think.
[+] [-] EliRivers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
The science of hiring practices is settled: work-sample tests are the most effective way to assess skill in potential hires.
This is one of the most obvious, yet under-applied truisms in hiring.
If they can apply Starfighter beyond Games, or enable non-Game skills to shine while working on Games, it will be industry changing.
[+] [-] fixxer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliotec|11 years ago|reply
Ok, so lets replace whiteboarding ancient algorithms and useless trick questions with a capture the flag game!! That'll make the industry seem less "unserious."
This is so unfathomably ridiculous. I can't believe you're marketing this as an interview replacement. If I get asked what my "Starfighter score" is before a job interview, I will be running as fast as I can in the other direction before they finish their sentence.
There will be people who become great at this game, and if (god help us) this gains momentum, they will get jobs.
I can only hope the rest who are developing applications and actually writing programs will come out on top, and employers will recognize that some people want to build things and not just improve their ranking in a game.
[+] [-] ChargingWookie|11 years ago|reply
That being said, I've got a couple questions
Will all the CTFs be security focused?
One of the most common problems coursera ran into was people copying the assignments of other people. How do you intend to prevent copying for the CTFs? I see that you mentioned you're not going to DMCA tutorials or Let's Plays and instead track their every iteration on the code. I guess you can get rid of outright copying that way but I'd love to hear your other strategies.
Other than that this seems like a really interesting way to do recruiting. I can't wait to see the actual CTFs.
Also you've got a tiny typo in the WHY IS STARFIGHTER THE RIGHT TEAM FOR THIS? section: "I have a folder in Gmail saving messages from geeks who used by career advice or salary negotiation tips to their advantage." I think the by should be my
[+] [-] otakucode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chipsy|11 years ago|reply
(To elaborate a little, Richard Bartle noticed four types of players of MUD. Achievers are just one.)
[+] [-] gsaines|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alain94040|11 years ago|reply
I didn't do so well on the microcorruption game. I'm curious to see what else they can come up with, hopefully both less specialized, more generic, but also more advanced...