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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#91

Post by danielweber »

bearclough wrote: post #40

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.

While I'm very happy to see attempts to get rid of the interview and move towards a work-sample test, this comment represents the whole sense of unease I have at this.

There is, of course, releveant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/927/

I can say that I have hopes that if anyone can stop what you fear from happening it's these people.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#92

Post by tptacek »

jasonlotito wrote: post #86
patio11 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you ensure people won't be required to still fly out for 3 days of interviews? How do you prevent this from being just another filter before the "real" interview begins?

Give us some suggestions. We're all ears.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#93

Post by dsp1234 »

splawn wrote: post #62
chipsy wrote: post #34

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.)

IIRC, The three other types are Explorers, Socialites, and Griefers

The 4th is killers, not griefers. Killers prefer playing specifically against other players. Killers are generallyl looking for the challenge/reward of fighting and winning against other players, rather than necessarily trying to grief someone. Though obviously getting killed in PVP can sometimes feel like griefing.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#94

Post by defen »

tptacek wrote: post #2

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 doi…

Can you talk at all about the pricing structure for companies that will use your app for recruiting?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#95

Post by jonny_eh »

achompas wrote: post #78
bearclough wrote: post #40

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 think patio11 and tptacek hope this can replace those things, so that you can work towards a new gig on your own terms (instead of going through the usual song-and-dance).

http://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#96

Post by tptacek »

j2kun wrote: post #88
achompas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent's point is that companies implicitly filter for this by asking candidates to participate in time-consuming multi-phase interview processes. It's already difficult to work contract-for-hire or take time off for several days of on-site interviews, and it gets much more complicated when you're not well-off or you also have to take care of your kids.

Of course. But you still hire more skilled people over less skilled people, and if free time contributes to skill it's not necessarily unfair. In fact, I think a quality CTF could level the playing field, since each candidate could be judged on their relative abilities (how far they can progress through a game that adapts to their prior knowledge). Moreover, one could offset the time commitment by paying candidates t…

That's definitely the ambition here, and it squares with our experience with the Crypto Challenges and Microcorruption: the "top tier" of people in both those events were, as a general rule, not very experienced in either of those problem domains.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#97

Post by 001spartan »

marssaxman wrote: post #49
icco wrote: post #39

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 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.

I think it's primarily written to a different audience than yourself, then. I mean that in the best of ways. As an infosec sort, it came across pretty clearly what they intended. I think it's just a culture difference between information security, and the rest of IT.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#98

Post by patio11 »

Oculus wrote: post #7

Will the CTFs be security focused or more non-traditional, like Stripe's distributed systems CTF?

Starfighter is not a security company. We're going to test for a wide range of skill sets. These may include web app security but will not be limited to that.

You can reasonably assume "What skills does the market want to hire for?" is a good proxy for what we'll be assessing for. I love security, but that's 0.01% of the software market. We have... grander ambitions.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#99

Post by otakucode »

dataker wrote: post #80

Part of the current interviewing process is Github and side-projects. I truly understand the reasons for Starfighter, but are you putting any real value behind it? I like CTF, but it's not quite the same as contributing to open source projects.

You're quite right that a CTF is not the same as open source projects... and I thought the point of this was exactly that. People who contribute to open source projects prove they have a certain set of skills. What if you need people with a different set? What if instead of being able to learn a large codebase, it is more important that they are able to look at a problem and design an algorithm to solve it in the first place? Rarely in an open source project will you be going in and radically changing the fundamentals.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#100

Post by 147 »

otakucode wrote: post #59

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 Matasan…

The founders of Starfighter were the founders of Matasano.
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