101–110 of 418 posts
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…
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…
If this works the way they're hoping it will, I have to think it will be a huge time saver over: -Updating a resume -Contacting a recruiter -Replying to recruiters -Searching job descriptions -Writing cover letters -Tweaking previously updated resume -Sending applications -Maintaining a GitHub profile -Working on open source projects that may or may not fit a future job description -Spending 1-5 days interviewing And…
[1] a term I just made up, and may not correspond to something in reality
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A CTF is a game that one plays by programming. I wish I could point you to competing CTFs that you can sign up and play right now, but most disappear from the Internet because they are fiendishly difficult to keep running. Ask me (or any team that has shipped one) why if you're curious. One example would be MicroCorruption. https://microcorruption.com Thomas and Erin helped build it back when they were still at Matas…
So, for those of us who fit your archetype, that mostly build web apps in high-level languages like Python, haven't touched Assembly in a decade, but do not have a team of seasoned hackers hanging out with us in our living rooms, what are the odds that we're going to be able to use it to refine our skills in isolation? I fully understand that if your company is looking for pen testers, I'm not the guy you'd hire. Tha…
It is troubling that the language they use on the site implies that systems and security programming is what all programmers aspire to do, but that's just an unfortunate bias on the part of the authors. Personally, I think they'd do well to change it, but perhaps that's exactly how they feel and exactly the kind of messaging they need to attract the right people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I play games for fun and to relax.
"(b) For similar reasons to the ones that make you noodle with a programming language you doubt you'll ever use in production"
On your website, it says that these will actually be real problems for real companies. I would think it's something I would see in production?
"(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."
Isn't this what open source is all about? Pretty much every job I've ever had involved technologies I could just download or install myself and throw on a Linux box/VM.
I suppose it could involve proprietary technology that I would never see in the wild, but if this is the case, I don't think I could get enough experience with it on your game to prove to a company that I know enough to get a job.
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…
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…
Besides cryptography, what are some other programming problem domains you'd enjoy playing with? We're particularly interested in problem domains that are hard for ordinary programmers to pick up on a whim. We want to make it possible to seriously engage with interesting problems while in your couch with the Daily Show running in the background.
It works great for them, but I believe you attract a certain kind of developers with these contests; you attract people who enjoy puzzles, and people who enjoy measuring their abilities against others. It could be that those are the traits that make good employees; but I myself would never take part in such a competition.
Then again, I don't actually want to work for anyone else at all.
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.
What are some things you'd worry about a company like this doing that would increase dance-monkey-dance factor? What are some things a company like this could do to decrease dance-monkey-dance factor? We're not interested in making monkeys dance, unless they want to, and enjoy it.
Your question is good though. If I understand you to be saying "what can we do to get you to drop one of those other things or you nightly watching of reality tv?"
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…
Congrats on this new venture, looks fun. 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.
However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job. I believe in this so strongly that I am dedicating the rest of my career to work sample testing and, eventually, training.
Getting women to play, though? I'm not so great at marketing, so still working on that. I am writing a blog post to go up later in the week that addresses some of the issues in hiring women, based on my personal experiences and those of my female peers. The tone of the post is as politically neutral as it can be. My hope is to draw out some productive dialog rather than piling on stink for flies. Specifically, vast majority of the people in my professional network, male, female or in between, are genuinely interested in addressing the "women-hiring problem," but they avoid any discussion of it because ... well, it's always covered in flies.
The challenge will be to make just enough of a stink that it draws attention and not flies.