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Announcing Starfighter

kalzumeus.com

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#391

Post by peejaybee »

kylebrown wrote: post #364
shubhamjain wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is wrong to except everyone to contribute to open-source and I have seen that even the very smart programmers are not interested in making personal projects or contributing to existing ones. Honestly, after mind-taxing eight hour job, you want to go home, watch a movie, read a book or some other relaxing activity. Not to mention that for people with families, it is nearly impossible to find the time to con…

> Honestly, after mind-taxing eight hour job, you want to go home, watch a movie, read a book or some other relaxing activity. Then this person probably wouldn't find much time to do CTF challenges, either.

Yet, somehow, I managed to find time after a crappy day to tear into MicroCorruption.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#392

Post by rcorin »

sfink wrote: post #380
tlrobinson wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand their business. Contingency recruiters' fees can reach 30% or more of an engineer's first year of salary, which could work out to $50k or more per engineer. You can bet they will be looking closely at each candidate's solutions, plus automated code plagiarism detection is pretty easy. It also depends on the type of problem. If you just need one weird trick to pass the level (e.x. use this…

Sorry, I don't see the connection. Yes, a successful candidate is worth a lot of money to Kalzumeus, and they are incented to make sure that the solutions are real and not plagiarized. But that salary is worth even more to that successful candidate, and hence they would be willing to pay handsomely for someone to write customized , non-plagiarized solutions for them if it gets them in. (The mythical level 45 mentione…

"when a candidate arrives at a company's interview, spot-check them on their understanding of a few of "their" trickier solutions."

The verification burden shouldn't be on the hiring company, it should be Kalzumeus...

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#393

Post by wglb »

woah wrote: post #304
sfink wrote: post #237

Hey job seekers. I'm level 45 in starfighter with a power VI blaster in C++ and IX in Python. $100 to get you to level 30, x1.5 per level above that (though obviously I can't get you above 45, but I know a guy so I can subcontract up to 52.) You just have to set up a port forward from your machine and I'll take care of the rest. Contact info is in my profile. Don't get suckered into using a bot. They may be cheaper i…

I'm not sure that cheating on this would be unethical. Programming is about getting things done. As a hiring metric, nothing can beat open source. The open source portfolio really is kind of a golden standard. It is real work that you have done, that has (hopefully) advanced the commons, because you love programming and have something unique to add to the world. Some fake video game programming may indicate something…

As a hiring metric, nothing can beat open source.

I don't agree. Only a small segment of the talented programming folks I know do open source contributions.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#394

Post by elptacek »

rhizome wrote: post #261
dragonwriter wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job. That's a nice thought, though it rather presumes that the playing field is level outside of the immediate neighborhood surrounding the hiring process. I think that neighborhood, though, is probably, while not witho…

I think the desire to to figure out where a level playing field can be built within a neighborhood of aptitudes. And to be fair to a process of refinement for that goal, some problems can't be solved before you have them. Like a business plan, the initial draft is just a guess, and I think we can all agree that it's a heretofore unsolved problem, the gender thing.

Also true for large coding projects. At some point, you have to identify the components that will need to be built and portion them off into approachable tasks. In this case, the first task is agreeing on the 'heretofore unsolved problem' -- that hasn't happened yet.

Discerning invested participants from trolls might help.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#395

Post by btilly »

ErrantX wrote: post #323
cdr wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Euler is more like math problems that can be solved with programming than programming challenges. Very neat, but decreasingly useful for programming practice past the first 20ish.

I always ask for the easier Project Euler tests (or give them a couple) to do; the reason they are good test (IMO) is that they are too small a task to leverage frameworks and can demonstrate things like good approaches to engineering and programming practice (even if the questions are mathematical)

It is possible to demonstrate good approaches to engineering with your solution. But if you're cranking out PE problems, you really are better off just throwing out a bunch of one-off unmaintainable scripts. It is a good test of math and cleverness. It is not a good exercise for maintainable software.

See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/01/solving-project-euler-p... as evidence that I am not just talking out of my ass about PE.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#396

Post by SonicSoul »

Isn't it about putting in the time ? How would kalzumeus know if candidate is doing it for the first time vs after 500 hrs of experience. I presume the latter would have a huge advantage

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#397

Post by SCdF »

tptacek wrote: post #374
woah wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that cheating on this would be unethical. Programming is about getting things done. As a hiring metric, nothing can beat open source. The open source portfolio really is kind of a golden standard. It is real work that you have done, that has (hopefully) advanced the commons, because you love programming and have something unique to add to the world. Some fake video game programming may indicate something…

That's awesome if you're the guy who wrote Expressjs, and less awesome if you're an extremely talented systems programmer nobody's ever heard of who hasn't hit on a project that happens to capture the industry's attention.

Exactly. I know some amazing programmers who happen to also like mountain biking and building robots with their kids, who happen to work for companies that don't publish their code to github♯. The idea that all the good programmers work with open source in their own time and spend every waking moment pushing to github is a dangerous and fruitless one, because you're missing out on great talent with those blinkers on.

♯And let's be fair, 99% of what's "open source" is junk anyway, just because you wrote an 80% done static blog generator doesn't mean you're "advancing the commons"

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#398

Post by sfink »

rcorin wrote: post #392
sfink wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't see the connection. Yes, a successful candidate is worth a lot of money to Kalzumeus, and they are incented to make sure that the solutions are real and not plagiarized. But that salary is worth even more to that successful candidate, and hence they would be willing to pay handsomely for someone to write customized , non-plagiarized solutions for them if it gets them in. (The mythical level 45 mentione…

"when a candidate arrives at a company's interview, spot-check them on their understanding of a few of "their" trickier solutions." The verification burden shouldn't be on the hiring company, it should be Kalzumeus...

Sure, but if Kalzumeus can't verify the candidate's identity while playing the game, how could they verify it afterwards? Until someone physically walks through your door, you really have no guaranteed way of knowing who you're talking to.

I don't think they'll really need to worry about these things for quite a while, though. Good problems to have, I guess.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#399

Post by jerematasno »

fitzwatermellow wrote: post #113
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…

Hey, tptacek. Your last post on hiring definitely found its legs and I am sure will cited for some time to come. You mentioned that you used to send a sampling of key text books to potential Matasano candidates and was wondering if you could share some references. I imagine Applied Crypto might be on there. Any any other important resources for mastering CTFs you might pass along would be obliged ;)

These days we mostly send The Web Application's Hacker's Handbook and a link to microcorruption. (We do somehow get candidates which haven't heard of microcorruption.) Generally, we continue to endorse Tom's Amazon reading list: http://www.amazon.com/An-Application-Security-Reading-List/l...

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#400

Post by jerematasno »

revorad wrote: post #69
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…

Congrats on this new venture, looks fun. What do you expect will be the effect of this on hiring women? Do you have any relevant data from microcorruption (what % players were women)? It'd be great if Erin could also chime in.

Hi, I've taken over from Tom for hiring at Matasano. There's a couple of things that you need for "diverse" recruiting (e.g. hiring women in tech): 1) A way of evaluating candidates that avoids mirrortocracy style institutional -isms like sexism and ageism. 2) A way of convincing people who have bounced off the field due to -isms to even try.

BTW, Tom was great at Matasano on #1, and only moderately successful at #2. We get tons of people who aren't in the industry, but they tend to self-select to be young men. For an individual company, #2 is way harder. It's "easy" to fix yourself, but hard to fight the larger culture.

Starfighter looks to me like something that supports #1 directly (by allowing objective metrics), and enables #2. It's a way for people who aren't welcome into a field to dip their toe in without some roomful of young white men asking them illegal questions about their child-rearing plans. On the other hand, there's still tremendous pressure pushing people away, and it's a deep problem. Still, part of the puzzle and I (personally) highly endorse.

As to the numbers, I've been meaning to dig into the data, but Matasano's hiring as fast as we need to, so it's been hard to motivate myself to do so. Maybe once graduation season ends...

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