There's a small typo that caught my eye. In the 'Why is the Starfighter the Right Team' section, 4th paragraph, 2nd sentence "I have a folder in Gmail saving messages from geeks who used by career advice or salary negotiation ..." It should be my instead of by.
Announcing Starfighter
41–50 of 418 posts
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#42> 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 proce…
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.
> If the only reason you'd mess around with Starfighter is to get a job, we've done something wrong
That was just my first impression.
At my age, I kind of know how I stack up: I've met really awesome people like Andrew Tridgell and... I'm not one of them. So I don't feel like I have anything to prove, and I much prefer to hack on open source ( http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/04/27/an-erlang-postgres-dri... ) or side projects where I make and create something rather than playing a game. So I really don't think I'd use it unless I had to as part of a job process. I don't think that's where you're going with it though; it's more of a way to attract interesting people who might otherwise not get noticed, right?
So I'm "not your target market", which is of course natural and to be expected. I think it's a great way to find people who might otherwise slip through the cracks, and have the time and inclination for puzzles.
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#43Wonderful, 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.
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#44I’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…
We'll try to make Starfighter maximally useful for casting as wide a net as possible in the candidate pool, including folks who have demanding career/family/etc situations. I'm an ex-salaryman, believe me, I know the frustration.
That said, the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good here. The hiring process as it exists on March 9th 2015 is already insanely hostile to people who don't have scheduling flexibility to invest hundreds of hours to doing speculative work. "Hey, could you fly to a different continent for 3 days to do six rounds of in-person interviews?" is considered an attractive, reasonable proposition.
We can extract more signal than that gauntlet gives, in substantially less time, delivered in the candidate's own space and at their own pace. This is an unambiguous win for candidates with commitments.
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#45One 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?
Honestly, they probably don't care. If the company is willing to pay, they'll be willing to send them candidates.
On the other hand, they may want to be a bit more selective to keep great programmers coming to the site.
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If it's not going to help me get a job (and increase my exposure to companies that might look at my stats), then why, as a developer, would I play it? I know you mean well, but I improve my development skills by developing applications.
(a) For the same reasons you'd noodle with any other game
(b) For similar reasons to the ones that make you noodle with a programming language you doubt you'll ever use in production
(c) For the same reason anyone ever did anything with a BeBox
(d) Because for some of the technologies/concepts we work with, our dumb game will be the easiest way to get your hands dirty with them.
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#47I 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?
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#48One 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?
Actually, I guess there's the fact that you're hiring someone who you know is kind of addicted to an online game... and if you don't find anything more interesting for them to do, they'll probably go right back into it.
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#49I 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 int…
Entirely insane, yes! After reading this article, I have no real idea what they are doing, but it appears that they are related to an entire genre of games I didn't know about.
Re: Announcing Starfighter
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> If the only reason you'd mess around with Starfighter is to get a job, we've done something wrong That was just my first impression. At my age, I kind of know how I stack up: I've met really awesome people like Andrew Tridgell and... I'm not one of them. So I don't feel like I have anything to prove, and I much prefer to hack on open source ( http://journal.dedasys.com/2014/04/27/an-erlang-postgres-dri... ) or side…
We've been talking to people for a few months now about this and have heard that concern repeatedly. We're working on designing and releasing something that rewards competition for the kinds of people for whom that's a motivator, and rewards tinkering for the kinds of people who enjoy tinkering.
I'm the Dwarf Fortress kind of game player, when I ever play games, if that gives you a sense of the direction I'm pulling us.
If Starfighter is only rewarding to people like Andrew Tridgell, we've done something very wrong; count on us to adjust course quickly if that happens.