231–240 of 418 posts
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I got completely stuck on the first level of Microcorruption. Should I even attempt this new stuff?
Yes. And as someone who also was stuck for many moons on later levels of that challenge: keep going. Research. Ask questions -- people will help. Honestly, I had no expectation of getting past the first microcorruption level but goddamn if it doesn't feel good when (not if) it happens.
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Usually CTFs / wargames / whatever are the only way you ever get to work with stuff like radio or telephony protocols, credit cards, homegrown crypto... 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 rea…
Thank you. Exactly this. Try to make a list of interesting stuff you'd like a chance to play around with, in a highly structured environment that handholds you just long enough, and that eliminates all the nonsense required to get dev environments working, or expensive subscription fees, or bankrolls, or laboratories... those are all places we want to be. Part of the problem I had earlier today was with the words "fu…
And it allows outliers to get potentially amazing job offers from your partners.
It's exciting to think that with today's easy access to cheap cloud computing and good process isolation you can have instanced "raids" in the same way as an MMO so I can get my very own version of a challenge that can be as realistic as possible.
>Unfortunately, the technology industry is fundamentally unserious as to how it presently identifies and employs engineers. Ok, so lets replace whiteboarding ancient algorithms and useless trick questions with a capture the flag game!! That'll make the industry seem less "unserious." This is so unfathomably ridiculous. I can't believe you're marketing this as an interview replacement. If I get asked what my "Starfigh…
Without opening up a pointless vein of second-guessing about Patrick's writing: I think the timing of this post has led people to believe that this right here is my answer to The Hiring Post.
No. The Hiring Post itself contains what I believe the answers to The Hiring Post are.
There are two halves of the recruiting problem: OUTREACH and QUALIFICATION.
Companies need to be smarter about qualification. We have a lot of thoughts on how they can be smarter and I am in full-on insane street preacher mode about those thoughts, which are not directly remunerative to our business.
Starfighter is about the OUTREACH side of the recruiting problem. Our goal is to be a credible pipeline of candidates who are not effectively identified by the resume/interview/github process. We are looking for buried talent, and to have fun doing it along the way.
I know HN all too well, and I think the instinct people will have reading this comment is to try to reconcile it with exactly the words Patrick chose to use in his blog post and then object to the perceived discrepancies. Please, no: that's a waste of all our time. Patrick speaks for Erin & I. I speak for Erin & Patrick.
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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?
Where is this hyperbole of 3 days of interviews coming from? Sure, someone had that experience. 99% of people don't. Anyway, I'm happy to spend lots of time meeting and mingling with my future team and employer. Most people good enough to surpass these CTF's are going to be using the in-house interview time to be in the driver's seat of reverse-assessing their potential employer, realistically. The interview for my n…
I'm glad it didn't go further.
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I've got nothing against CRUD apps, because they make the world go round, but it is unlikely that Starfighter will choose to send our candidates to firms making CRUD apps. The difference will be fairly obvious when you see our client roster. We're geeks with good taste for the kind of jobs a geek would actually want to have. (Sorry for being coy here. Don't want to jinx contract signing.)
>We're geeks with good taste for the kind of jobs a geek would actually want to have. You're geeks who've assumed that the only job a geek wants to have involves finding system-level exploits. It's all very clever to write a program that reads use it's own bytecode as the secret, but does that feed people? Get them to Mars? Heal people? Does it make application programming easier, less error prone, more accessible? P…
For example, if you're an application security analyst at Google and you find a security flaw that could result in users' personal information being leaked, aren't you making the world a better place by finding and repairing that bug?
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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.
Ah, infosec. Yes, it was clear that it came from some other part of the computer universe, but I had no idea which one.
Don't get suckered into using a bot. They may be cheaper in the short run but you know you're going to get lifebanned. My prices are nothing compared to your future earnings.
How utterly irrational.
It's ideas like this that make me question why I bother being a programmer for anything more than leisure these days... except that I have no idea what else I could do to keep a roof over my family's head this late in my life.
You call yourselves, "engineers," but I've yet to work for any company that treated you like one or even invested in your future. You're offered a salary well above average for most working adults. They lure you with frivolous perks and stock options. They never send you to school for training, offer you a pension to keep you secure in your golden years, and I've never seen any unions you could join to demand these things from your employers. Your career is probably not going to be on the line if you merge a patch that degrades performance or introduces a timing error. But don't think they'll care about you when it comes to the bottom line. Someone else seeks to profit off of your talents and abilities and nothing else. If they can hire someone to automate you away, they will.
And we're all the poorer for it I think.
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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…
"expectation in the tech industry of having to maintain certain after hours activities to make one self marketable" On hacker news you are getting a very small slice of the tech industry. And by reading HN you are subjected to repeated attempts to make you think there is a clear way to be marketable and to earn a living. Rest assured that there are people in tech that the HN crowd makes fun of that are earning fine l…
Another attempt to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being. How utterly irrational. It's ideas like this that make me question why I bother being a programmer for anything more than leisure these days... except that I have no idea what else I could do to keep a roof over my family's head this late in my life. You call yourselves, "engineers," but…
So how you are working to make us all the richer? How can I join in?