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Announcing Starfighter

kalzumeus.com

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#241

Post by danielweber »

tptacek wrote: post #123
danielweber wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other companies that have tried to be the one-stop-shop for job hunting. It would suck if I worked on my Starfighter rep[1] and then I see a job I want but they want to use my HackerRank rep or StackOverflow rep or whatever elese instead. [1] a term I just made up, and may not correspond to something in reality

I don't know what it means to be a one-stop-shop for job hunting. I'm flattered by the concern on this thread that we're somehow going to monopolize dev hiring so completely that every working developer will need an account with us in good standing, but (a) that's not going to happen and (b) we wouldn't let it happen in the alternative universe where it might.

The fear is not that Starfighter dominates; that would be a good case.

The fear is that there are a bunch of hiring fiefdoms, all waxing and waning, so that I have to spend a bunch of time on a bunch of them to stay relevant. I don't want to be laid off one day and then find out that these days employers are using StackOverflow scores or wherever and that I should have spent the past year working on that.

OTOH, if 1) I can easily find out that SoftwareCo is hiring through Foo-CTF without having built a Foo-CTF profile, and 2) I can spend, say, 5 hours building a profile at Foo-CTF and get a serious response at the end of that, that's good. It means instead of spending 5 hours doing the silly technical interview dance with SoftwareCo, I'm spending 5 hours doing the serious work-sample test with Foo-CTF. Foo-CTF's value-add is that they're experts at doing the work-sample test.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#242

Post by lambda »

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…

On your "About Us" page, you say "We're especially interested in talking to you if you will be hiring 10+ engineers in the next year, as we may be able to help you out with that. Get in touch with any of us."

Does a company need to be hiring 10 or more engineers to make it worth it to talk to you?

I'm at a small company, that has been trying to hire engineers for the last couple of years, and not having much success; we've hired a couple, had a couple take other offers, lost a few to attrition.

We would love to be able to get some candidates who have already passed a technical screen; less time for us, scheduling an hour with a bunch of candidates who don't pan out, less time for them, only focusing on one more in-depth set of problems rather than a whole bunch of different phone screens.

But we're not hiring 10+ developers any time soon; that would double the worldwide size of our dev team. We're looking for maybe 3 or so at this point.

Would you consider working with smaller companies as well?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#244

Post by pron »

agentultra wrote: post #238

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…

You may love your job, but your job never loves you back. Don't remember where I heard this, but it's always good to remember. It applies (in varying measures) to anyone from the founders and CEO to the lowliest employee.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#245

Post by throwawaymaroon »

tptacek wrote: post #229
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think we plan on making minimal demands of our users, and none of them involve grooming them for prospective employers. >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 CARE…

Patrick. You're fired. Anonymous Throwaway Account? Yes, you over there. I'm looking RIGHT AT YOU. Yes you. You're the new CEO. Get to work. Explain this to everyone else on HN. The clock's ticking!

Just giving feedback as someone that's theoretically right square in the middle of your target audience. I really want to take this 'college course' and take advantage of what I see as your opportunity as a security expert to make your knowledge replicable.

But I'll play along. I'll be taking Starfighter in a new direction. Most notably, we'll be reorganizing how we react to online discussion. Anonymous critics will be summarily executed unless we cannot identify them, in which case they shall merely be barred from Starfighter for life, which, if you believe our marketing department (AND AS CEO I DO IN FACT I'M SORRY I IMPLIED IT WAS POSSIBLE TO DOUBT THEIR CLAIMS), will make it very difficult for them to find work in the hiring utopia that is the post-Starfighter process.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#246

Post by rhizome »

lambda wrote: post #242
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…

On your "About Us" page, you say "We're especially interested in talking to you if you will be hiring 10+ engineers in the next year, as we may be able to help you out with that. Get in touch with any of us." Does a company need to be hiring 10 or more engineers to make it worth it to talk to you? I'm at a small company, that has been trying to hire engineers for the last couple of years, and not having much success;…

They just say, "especially," and I think a charitable reading would tell us that it's a call to get a good base of early adopters from which more-easily generalizable results can be gleaned.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#248

Post by nsheth17 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #165
tptacek wrote: post #92

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…

Great point. It's happened before. For example, at many companies, HackerRank-esque code tests were meant to replace the technical screen, but just ended up being an additional step you have to do.

More red tape happens because companies feel like they have the power to ask people to jump through whatever hoops they want. But you can reverse this. If you have the people companies want desperately, you can dictate what the companies can and cannot do (no 3-day interviews, for example). I think that's what Starfighter is trying to do.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#249

Post by pron »

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…

While this might indeed help employers find better employees, I am concerned about hidden (or not so hidden) bias. Games like this (and the way this one is described confirms it) select for competitive people. Other talented programmers might prefer expressing their creativity and talent in less competitive ways. While competitiveness might be a desirable quality, sometimes it is not. It might also appeal to men more than women, and so might be inadvertently sexist. I think you should very carefully analyze player demographics to make sure you're not making matters worse in terms of diversity.

When you design a test -- any test -- you should make sure that 1/ score correlates with success (i.e. full bivariate correlation), and 2/ if the test is voluntary, that there are no prior biases which would select candidates prior to taking the test.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#250

Post by wglb »

ebbv wrote: post #207

This is neat, but is it really that hard for people to tell who has the skills they're looking for and who doesn't? Every developer I've interviewed it's been really obvious to me what they know and what they're bullshitting about. I guess there's value is all in assembling a pre-qualified pool for employers to recruit from, though. But in that way this is kind of like the 2015 version of CNE. Except it's free, which…

If you read http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/, you will see that this approach is looking to find folks that were not obviously good, as you say, but they found someone that is a stellar crypto breaker.
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