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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#161

Post by TillE »

patio11 wrote: post #60
marssaxman wrote: post #47

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?

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…

> A CTF is a game that one plays by programming.

Or, much more commonly, it's a popular game mode in any number of multiplayer games. You're using some really niche jargon without properly qualifying it.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#162

Post by digisth »

Apocryphon wrote: post #150
digisth wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of ways to acquire and prove skill and knowledge; ultimately, they are all monkey dances to at least some degree. Until we develop a way to read minds (and it'd be great to also do the reverse: give everyone the ability to insta-learn, Matrix-style), we will continue to have to use some kind of signaling mechanism. Right now, there are many of them, all with various levels of difficulty, entrance requi…

Whatever happened to companies spending the resources to train and mentor green recruits?

The same things that happened to a whole lot of other things, I suppose:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-...

http://privatizationofrisk.ssrc.org/Hacker/printable.html

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#163

Post by dennisgorelik »

jschulenklopper wrote: post #152
dennisgorelik wrote: post #124

Patrick, What is going to happen with Appointment Reminder now?

The answer is at the bottom of the announcement: "I have no announcement to make about my involvement with Appointment Reminder at this time. We will, naturally, continue keeping all commitments to our customers."

Thanks - I just found it myself and came back to edit my question.

That's a non-answer though. Let's see how the answer about the fate of Appointment Reminder would evolve over time.

In any case, that's an extra proof that being solo-founder while possible - is a disadvantage.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#164

Post by throwawaymaroon »

patio11 wrote: post #153
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you be allowing anonymous participation? 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…

Will you be allowing anonymous participation? Yes. You can participate anonymously or pseudonymously. I think we say in three places that we only give out contact details if candidates ask us to. 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? Our incentive is to find reasons why you're hireable, not reasons why you're not. What if I d…

Edit: The following is a neutral appraisal, not a criticism of either the implicit or explicit variety.

If you feel that it is an accusation or a criticism, I would suggest that indicates something unrealistic in how you view business negotiations.

As patio said, this is a trade between interested parties. Generosity is therefore expected to be limited.

---

Fair enough. I just wanted it on record that this is a business transaction for you, not a generous educational endeavor.

Some people want to pretend that they're in it to make the world a better place when that's not truly their absolute top priority. They're probably asking "Why can't it be both?" when I say that this is business, not generosity.

One simply can't have multiple top priorities, particularly with profit and generosity; generosity is practically defined as something that doesn't profit. Something like one of your (patio's) blog posts are given generously in that there is no formal expectation/obligation on a reader to 'give back' some asset, for instance.

Thank you for your clarification.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#165

Post by jasonlotito »

tptacek wrote: post #92
jasonlotito wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My worry is that this service could be seen as yet another certification, and just adds to the list of things you "have to do."

I guess I can ask you directly: how much time do you spend interviewing people, not counting the work-samples you already require?

As for suggestions, it's really about the next year. Unless you've already been doing this, you have to find people, and place them. And that means working not only with the programmers, but also the companies involved. Part of that would mean coaching them on how to use your system. You want to destroy the current tech interview process? You have to replace it. You want to remove the tech portion? Then I think the best way right now is working directly with the companies you are placing people with. They need to play by your rules, and a year from now is when you'll have a better understanding of where you stand, as the person you've placed is hired, and still employed.

Obviously there is more than just one candidate and company, but unless that happens, I don't see a company just buying into your system without keeping it's own. So you need to teach them what it is you are providing, and what they should do to maximize interaction with the candidate. The interviews will still exist: I want to meet the person I'm working for before I show up. But instead of dealing with white boards and ping pong balls, we are having a conversation about my potential future with the company, and what I can bring to the table.

patio11 said it: "we’re here to destroy it, and create something new and better in its place."

A job interview has two sides, the applicant, and the company, and if you want to destroy the interview and rebuild it, you have to do it with both sides at the same table. Otherwise, you aren't destroying anything, just adding more red tape before anyone gets to the table.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#166

Post by dragonwriter »

throwawaymaroon wrote: post #164
patio11 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you be allowing anonymous participation? Yes. You can participate anonymously or pseudonymously. I think we say in three places that we only give out contact details if candidates ask us to. 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? Our incentive is to find reasons why you're hireable, not reasons why you're not. What if I d…

Edit: The following is a neutral appraisal, not a criticism of either the implicit or explicit variety. If you feel that it is an accusation or a criticism, I would suggest that indicates something unrealistic in how you view business negotiations. As patio said, this is a trade between interested parties. Generosity is therefore expected to be limited. --- Fair enough. I just wanted it on record that this is a busin…

If your top priority is providing a service to the community (e.g., education), you need a sustainable support model, whether its as a business or through someone else's charitable donations.

If your top priority is a profit-making business, you need to provide a product that is (or, at a minimum, people perceive as) valuable.

Perhaps you can't have two top priorities (I actually am not sure I agree that this is the case, I don't see that it is actually impossible for two priorities to be equal in priority and above all others), but even if you can't, its quite possible for "business" to be a means and "education" to be the goal, and vice versa. They aren't incompatible.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#167

Post by akavel »

Is there any protection planned against people who would be paid to solve the puzzles on someone else's behalf, i.e. against cheating by hiring someone to "train" your account?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#168

Post by tptacek »

jmgrosen wrote: post #148
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…

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…

This is (a) a real challenge, (b) something we're addressing in part by not letting the content get stale, (c) something we were surprised by with the crypto challenges --- if you ask people to follow the honor system, they tend to do it! --- and (d) something that the game model will also somewhat address.

It's hard for me to go into more detail on (d) without revealing a whole bunch of stuff about the game I don't want to talk about yet; I should be more comfortable talking about it, but until we announce it officially I have a lot more leeway to slip rev1 features. :)

The shortest simplest answer though is: we're a firm whose whole purpose is to make fun, interesting CTF-style games (well, one game; we're the Blizzard of CTFs, and we're building our WoW), so we can address a lot of these kinds of problems with brute force, because this isn't a spare-time thing.

If it helps to understand where we're coming from:

Chris Eagle, the author of The IDA Pro book, published an IDA Pro plugin for the bizarro-MSP430 that Microcorruption (our last CTF) emulates. There are tools with "microcorruption mode" in them because of all the little ways we broke MSP430. Someone wrote a symbolic execution engine to solve the Hollywood level on Microcorruption and posted it to Github. There is still a #uctf channel on Freenode for Microcorruption.

This. Is. Awesome. It is my favorite thing about Microcorruption.

We did practically nothing at all to foster a community for Microcorruption, apart from Erin starting the IRC channel. That's not an opportunity we are going to miss this time; in fact, doing better on the community and sharing side is part of the thesis of the company.

I reallllllllllllly hope people share code and tools and stuff to make progress in the game. How cool will that be?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#170

Post by TeMPOraL »

paulhauggis wrote: post #105
tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

"(a) For the same reasons you'd noodle with any other game" 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 w…

> I play games for fun and to relax.

Different people have different definition of fun. Some play Minecraft just to build CPUs out of redstone.

> 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?

The key word isn't "production", it's "you". I, for example, don't really expect to ever use Go or Rust in professional setting. Nor do I expect to use Prolog. Then there are real production systems today that use PDP machines (nuclear reactors) or COBOL (banks). I don't expect to work on them either, but sure as hell would like to play with them at some point.

I get the feeling that Starfighter is about giving geeks some hard-core tech game with a side effect of helping them find a job that is not boring.

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