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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#251

Post by tptacek »

danielweber wrote: post #241
tptacek wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Ok. I see the disconnect.

This fear is unplugged from the reality of recruiting incentives.

It is in the direct financial interests of companies to recruit you directly, not through us. To recruit through us, they have to pay for the privilege.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#252

Post by tptacek »

pron wrote: post #249
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…

Best answer I can give was that we've heard that concern from a bunch of different sources, we share it, and we're designing against it to some extent.

As a reminder: this is an outreach strategy we deployed at Matasano to enormous success. We had an English professor finish the crypto challenges. We didn't solve all our diversity problems, but we made a palpable dent in them, and we did that by coming up with something that surfaced aptitude that wasn't held hostage to the biases of random human interviewers.

There is, to my mind, no hope for the "random human interviewer" hiring strategy. It's hard to make the problem we have now worse. But we're watching out for it.

I would love to hear more thoughts on how we can address this at the level of game design! We're at a "finishing touches on infrastructure, just starting with level design" place in our design right now.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#253

Post by CamperBob2 »

steakejjs wrote: post #72

I actually began working on the exact same thing within the last month or so in my spare time. Having competed in the CCDC for 6 years in college, I found it pretty insane when I saw that employers don't use real hardware during interviews. Looks like I picked the wrong side project now this team is working on it. However, interviews are broken enough that there is plenty of room in the space =]. Can't wait to see wh…

Looks like I picked the wrong side project now this team is working on it.

Competition is a signal that you picked the right field. Just about everybody gets this backward.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#254

Post by logn »

tptacek wrote: post #79
bearclough wrote: post #40

Wonderful, let me add this to the list of things I need to do in my spare time to remain a hire-able resource .... GitHub, Meetups, reading hacker news, preparing for puzzle interviews, , HackerRank, conquering a CTF. Jeez, can we say dance monkey dance.

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.

> What are some things a company like this could do to decrease dance-monkey-dance factor?

- Let players be paid by your clients to play for ~1 day.

- Introduce a non-game version that's a straight forward coding assessment.

- Make the game un-cheatable.

- Write into your contracts that you won't be the exclusive hiring funnel.

- Keep your clients confidential and don't let them mention your game in job ads (i.e., target people who just want to play a game).

Edit: I have to add, this does seem like a dance-monkey exercise and not something that an actual profession would have people do. My preferred hiring approach would just be contractor-for-a-day arrangements.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#255

Post by tptacek »

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…

If you could tell us how to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being, I would love to hear it; it would make my job a lot easier. I didn't know that was possible. Is this some kind of linear algebra-y machine learning sort of thing?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#256

Post by tptacek »

tokenrove wrote: post #203
javajosh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Does it make application programming easier, less error prone, more accessible? If you want to write systems that improve the safety of application programming, it helps to have a lower-level understanding of what is happening. As for Mars, if articles like this ( http://spinroot.com/dcas/ ) are any indication, there will need to be a lot of systems programming and especially tool building that requires deep system…

It's so weird to me, because for me, it is absolutely the other way around. It's easy to break into computer systems. Put a single quote in the wrong place on enough web apps in a /19's worth of IP addresses and you will get in. What's interesting about security is the tour of functionality it takes you on. Security is an opportunity to crawl into the ventilation ducts, open the hatches, and directly tinker with the inner workings of hugely complex systems. It's a goal system that gives you a reason to do that, that points you in a coherent direction, that forces you to learn and retain otherwise random-seeming details, and rewards you with huge endorphin rushes to keep you going.

It doesn't even have to be competitive. It's just... fun.

Virtually everything I know about computer science I learned because of software security.

I don't think you need to care that much about security to benefit from a syllabus of exercises framed by security.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#257

Post by patio11 »

steakejjs wrote: post #72

I actually began working on the exact same thing within the last month or so in my spare time. Having competed in the CCDC for 6 years in college, I found it pretty insane when I saw that employers don't use real hardware during interviews. Looks like I picked the wrong side project now this team is working on it. However, interviews are broken enough that there is plenty of room in the space =]. Can't wait to see wh…

interviews are broken enough that there is plenty of room in the space

Amen.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#258

Post by tptacek »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #214

May be interesting. But the claims made in the announcement are very hard to believe. The admission of not being ready to show that the claims have been achieved aren't helping my scepticism either. 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.

The origin story of this company is the application of exactly this process in a real business, to great effect.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#259

Post by tptacek »

nsheth17 wrote: post #218

tptacek: ever heard of Cicada 3301? It's this mysterious group that has anonymously posted very involved cryptopuzzles. Not clear why, but one theory has been for recruiting people into intelligence agencies. 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…

---> VERY YES. <---

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#260

Post by pron »

tptacek wrote: post #252
pron wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Best answer I can give was that we've heard that concern from a bunch of different sources, we share it, and we're designing against it to some extent. As a reminder: this is an outreach strategy we deployed at Matasano to enormous success. We had an English professor finish the crypto challenges. We didn't solve all our diversity problems, but we made a palpable dent in them, and we did that by coming up with someth…

The thing is that the effect of such biases is hard to measure directly. Employers will get better employees than before, but may also miss more good employees than before, yet notice the former much sooner than the latter (which will have a delayed effect).

The best way to address it is to first measure for biases (run a demographic analysis on players), and second actively design for unselected populations with focus groups. I am sure some of this information has already been collected by game studios.

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