Announcing Starfighter

Meh. The port-forwarding bit is probably unnecessary. And yes, there's a good chance you'll end up hacked and still poor, but there's still a decent chance that you'll end up with a large salary and not hacked. I suspect the black market is adequately efficient at self-policing when there's money involved.

Though that's where my scam would be most likely to fall apart. Recruiters typically only get their cut if the candidate doesn't get fired in the first N months. So if they purely cheated their way in, then the hiring company is only out a couple months of useless work. (Which could be very costly, to be sure, but at least they don't have to fork over the $50K. And there are many other reasons why a new employee doesn't pan out.)

I think you are misunderstanding the incentives that are setup via the Starfighter business model. You are thinking of them on the QUALIFICATION side of the pipeline. That is, you have entered a companies hiring pipeline and they are using Starfighter to determine whether you should stay in it or not.

The Starfighter team is trying to change the ACQUISITION side of the pipeline. They are stepping in to the space where traditional recruiters feed applicants into the pipeline. In marketing terms they are generating leads. Their value proposition to the employer is that the leads they generate will be of higher caliber than the traditional contingent recruiters. Their value proposition to you is that Starfighter is a) fun and/or b) at least better than dealing with a traditional recruiter. Your Starfighter experience replaces your resume/cover letter that gets you into the pipeline. Not your ability to navigate the pipeline once you get into it.

If your resume/traditional recruiters/responding to web ads/word of mouth is more valuable than Starfighter CTFs fun - hassle + employer payoff than you are quite simply not a good fit for the Starfigher Recruitment agency. Just like you wouldn't be a good fit for a DBA centric recruitment agency if you weren't a DBA.

If I'm disappointed about anything in the announcement, its that it is obvious to me anyway, that they are NOT trying to replace the current qualification steps in a hiring pipeline. Because to me, getting rid of that time wasting/unproductive process is the big value add, not shoveling more devs into the top of the pipeline (management at my company may feel differently).

Many on HN, including myself, are very excited about Starfighter. However, many HN readers are probably already employed or can easily find employment if they desire. You guys and gal know that maximizing outreach will be critical to your success. You aim to find buried talent, but that talent must first know Starfighter exists and understand it well enough to be enticed to try. I assume you want to both find talent whose ability is not accurately represented in a typical technical interview, but also those who have aptitude for these skills but whose resume wouldn't even be considered.

I grew up near a small town surrounded by family farms. I've really enjoyed manipulating code and finding bugs in games and other software since middle school, and I suspected I was the only one when I was younger. There were very few "nerds" at our school who focused on computers, and even those that did almost never discussed the discovery or exploitation of bugs. Although I stumbled upon a few communities online that shared my interests, I hadn't found one that just clicked. I happened upon HN while learning more about startups, and it was just right for me. I'm grateful I found HN, but I wonder why it took me so long to find the community I was looking for.

I didn't even know about CTF games until tptacek's recent hiring post, and it was another "How could I have been oblivious to this awesome thing for so long?" moment. There are many people who are a great fit for your clients, and they won't know about Starfighter unless you cast a wide or deep enough net. How do you plan to address this challenge?

Good luck, and thank you for building this!

Thank you.

I may seem to be against StarFighter, but no. I'm not. Actually I'm on the mailing list and waiting for the service to be offered. But I am not fully sure that I will be a good contender. I have not been a good gamer for a long long time.

I believe you fully understand my concerns. It's about the interviewing process, not the tools. Every tool has it's uses and quirks and every institution may use the tools in different ways, intended or unintended.

Believe me, that has crossed my mind. This is where the segue into training comes. We've discussed it. As a woman, my one experience of being allowed to play outside and beyond the hiring process is pretty consistent with the anecdotal evidence given by my peers. But correlation is not causation. For every one candidate, there are an uncounted number of pivots to consider, and mapping them all out is impossible.

I agree that bias is overrated as a contributing factor to this so-called problem. But it is one we focus on because we also believe that behaviors can be controlled for and habits can be rehabilitated. There are a lot of narratives where the circumstances are very different but the dynamic is the same. Someone whose parents want them to be a doctor or lawyer who aggressively derail them from pursuing the arts. Some very intelligent kid growing up in poverty with no access to resources who starts acting out and ends up with a criminal record. A woman who is forced to take HomeEc in high school instead of trigonometry (me).

Taken in isolation, these narratives can be explained away. As examples of a larger pattern, they become flaws in a system that can be engineered away. There's a meta-bias, and I'm still searching for a way to describe it that doesn't trigger an emotional response. It seems that until we can have that rational, engineering-focused discourse to identify the not level playing fields of the world, cataloging their characteristics, finding what things can be controlled for and/or eliminated,... sigh I don't know how to finish that sentence.

You say it's a nice thought. I believe it's a nice thought. More people hope for it than do not. What exactly is keeping all of us who genuinely believe that it's at least worth a try to apply a dialectic method to the problem from banding together and attempting it?

I don't know.