211–220 of 418 posts
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Whoah. You misread and we miswrote. We are not taking our clients problems and reframing them as games. How boring would that be? Read "real" here in the sense of "plausible". Sorry about that.
> We are not taking our clients problems and reframing them as games. How boring would that be? Not that boring, if your clients have interesting problems.
This sounds like the sort of thing that teenagers would come up with to "solve" recruiting.
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> "... if you ask people to follow the honor system, they tend to do it!" This is great but I think the stakes are somewhat different if it's ostensibly about jobs/hiring. I don't recall the crypto challenges being promoted as a hiring mechanism (though they may have been useful for that).
The crypto challenges were how we (for instance) hired Alex: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ I think we plan on making minimal demands of our users, and none of them involve grooming them for prospective employers. Look, the reality is, most of the people who participate aren't going to be looking for a job when they do. So all our incentives are to make the experience itself rewarding to parti…
>most of the people who participate aren't going to be looking for a job when they do.
This is weird, and I'm sensing some miscommunication between you and patio.
I'm only hearing about this as a tool for proving my worth. Your major marketing (as far as I'll likely ever be aware) has CAREER CAREER CAREER stamped all over it.
People won't follow the honor system if the stakes are at the 'career' level. You're losing the 'fun and free' culture of Microcorruption that makes people spend their free time building fun tools.
Your understanding of the incentives differ from the incentives that have been communicated to me about Starfighter.
Still... if it works, and is actually better than most other attempts at code-gaming this may be fun. Profitable? They will have to see.
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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.
Sorry, I think I'm a bit of a cynic and a bit burned out. There seems to be at least an expectation in the tech industry of having to maintain certain after hours activities to make one self marketable. Personally having a 50+ hour a week day job + side projects + studying + leveling up in order to find new employment is exhausting .... I'm just concerned adding another implied responsibility to a candidates plate se…
Most / much of the success of a valuable developer is not in their specific technical talent, but in areas like expounding a vision, documenting, running a team, navigating politics and fund raising. (Bit vague here I admit, personal experience of success is problem for me)
Patio11 made a name for himself saying "tech is a necessary but not sufficient condition for business success - now learn about basic marketing"
Something similar seems to be applied here - how can a CTF program ever handle politics or investor problems or documentation issues.
Getting good technical capable people is important - but not sufficient.
Will be interested in seeing the CTF program however ... Good luck.
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…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301
I love what you're doing but I agree with other commenters that presenting it as a game to programmers but a recruiting channel to companies might not align well. What do you do if a lot of your top players aren't interested in getting a job? There are probably exceptions, but do you think people who are good enough to beat your CTF have that much trouble getting a job?
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Is this a reference to "The Last Starfighter"?
"Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada."
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(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…
Also you can probably expect things dealing with custom VMs, file formats or networking. Say for instance one of the challenges involves a machine with a broken TCP/IP stack, so you have to write your custom client that can talk to it, how often do you do that in real life? Yet it can translate into useful skills.