181–190 of 418 posts
- Is it going to hurt?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
* We demanded the same or slightly less time in total than other conventional-interviewing companies did.
* The scheduling of our demands was totally flexible, unlike interviews, which are rigidly scheduled. If you're a morning person, and you have next Tuesday free, that's when you threw the 2-odd hours you needed at the challenge.
* Obviously, it's easier and less stressful to put effort in from your couch than in an alien office environment with people staring at you waiting for you to answer properly.
* The challenges themselves were fun. They were real work: we didn't have people literally slaying dragons (they were breaking a web app and a client/server app), but they were the distilled enjoyable essence of that work with most of the BS removed. In fact, if you didn't find the challenges fun, that was a huge signal that we were the wrong job for you.
* If you did decide we were wrong for you, you could stop at any time --- randomly, on a Tuesday night, with a slice of pizza in your mouth --- and have none of the weird social pressures that would make you sit through a string of pointless interviews. Which is an experience I have had, more than once.
Regarding certification: pure, chill-filtered hatred of certifications is what got me into the part of software security I wound up in. There is zero chance that we are going to build something with the market dynamics of a certification.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you might be confusing the very unfortunate use of the acronym CTF for security-related programming games with the usual meaning of Capture The Flag, as in a game mode in First-Person Shooters where people work as a team to capture enemy's flag and bring it back to their base.
I was previously unaware that security-related programming games existed!
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?
Starfighter doesn't make any money unless they actually place someone. Their pitch selects for people that aren't doing well in the traditional hiring process. So if a company tries to use its ordinary process, just putting the candidates in at the front, we can expect they won't do especially well. If a few candidates get sent out to an interview, have a miserable time, and don't get the job, I'd bet Starfighter will fire the client. Even when you are just selling to clients, you need to occasionally fire a toxic one. In a two sided marketplace it is absolutely crucial. The screened, high quality, applicants looking for a new job (or at least willing to consider one) are too valuable a resource to waste on companies that aren't serious.
- Do you think there will be some threshold where people get past a certain stage and then start getting offers, with nothing being offered below that? (my only experience is basic OverTheWire challenges, so not sure if this will have similar progression of 'levels') - Is it going to hurt?
There will be a subset of participants for whom it's worth their time and ours to have a conversation. Our job will be to identify that subset and start that conversation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I imagine that one might still get called for a 3 day interview, but I suspect that people using a work-test like Starfighter before asking for that will already have a MUCH better idea about your capabilities than they would have without it. Interviews then seem like they become more about assessing your fit with the company, and less about trying to weed out incompetence -- because they wouldn't invite you for an interview unless you'd already demonstrated your competence in this way.
That sounds a bit bad, if it were for only one company, but what excites me about Starfighter is that it sounds like something I'd want to do for fun __anyway__, and its signals about my competence (I hope! ;)) could then be given to multiple companies -- including ones I might never have thought to apply to.
I'd much rather hear, "Greetings Starfighter, .... we want to hire you to do more like that" than get spammed by random recruiters because my LinkedIn profile happens to have Python or Java on it.
At this point, my biggest fear is that I might not have the technical chops to complete the challenges.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was previously unaware that security-related programming games existed!
I recognized your confusion because not so long ago, I also had it. I started hearing about reputable security conferences having "CTF tournaments" and was all like "oh cool, they're playing shooters for prizes, go geeks!" and then was disappointed when I discovered that someone just stole the term CTF to call pentesting contest with it (it takes a lot of imagination to say that a file is "a flag"...). Not to say tho…
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…
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…