This is awesome. I'll definitely become an avid player, right after I contribute meaningfully to several open source projects, have an active GitHub profile, while keeping my Stack Overflow reputation high, and having a fleshed out CodeCombat profile, and of course making sure my LinkedIn page is up to snuff. I hope when I get this awesome job my employer doesn't mind me keeping all my profiles updated on company hou…
Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#22Patrick gave an interview to The New Scientist when we announced last week. We're a little worried about Starfighter Fatigue and are definitely trying not to get too much onto the front page (Erin's diligently writing the game details post, which we want to be the next thing people see from us). In the meantime though, if any of you have questions, we're watching and will answer.
How close to launch are you guys?
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#23Would this be a good way to teach my son technical skills? He's 6 years old, homeschooled and is interested in technology. He's already figured out how to bipass the parental controls on his Kindle. We're trying to figure out how to stimulate that desire when you can't read well yet.
Geek to geek and parent to parent: honestly, no. Can I recommend Besiege? It doesn't require literacy. It has the same sort of freeform expressiveness you're allowed to do in Minecraft. "Syntax" errors are inherently fun rather than demotivating. There's fun, rewarding visual feedback for success.
It doesn't teach programming qua programming, but it is almost perfect for a gateway drug into engineering. (You get to build catapults! And airplanes! And catapults which fire airplanes!)
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#24Would this be a good way to teach my son technical skills? He's 6 years old, homeschooled and is interested in technology. He's already figured out how to bipass the parental controls on his Kindle. We're trying to figure out how to stimulate that desire when you can't read well yet.
Geek to geek and parent to parent: honestly, no. Can I recommend Besiege? It doesn't require literacy. It has the same sort of freeform expressiveness you're allowed to do in Minecraft. "Syntax" errors are inherently fun rather than demotivating. There's fun, rewarding visual feedback for success. It doesn't teach programming qua programming, but it is almost perfect for a gateway drug into engineering. (You get to b…
Teenagers, though: I wish I had excellent CTFs when I was growing up.
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#25Patrick gave an interview to The New Scientist when we announced last week. We're a little worried about Starfighter Fatigue and are definitely trying not to get too much onto the front page (Erin's diligently writing the game details post, which we want to be the next thing people see from us). In the meantime though, if any of you have questions, we're watching and will answer.
How close to launch are you guys?
Close enough that the question makes me want to barf into my sock.
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#26Such a cool idea, and I enjoyed Microcorruption, but ended up getting stuck in the second or third level and couldn't even figure out the right questions to ask to get help. (I stepped into the irc channel at some point and asked some simple question, but got an answer that I couldn't even parse. So I realized I was out of my league and needed to learn more basics first.)
My one concern is about something that was mentioned during the announcement a little while back. The post mentioned something like "employers will be able to see exactly what you did when you had to create a REST service" (or something like that). Maybe I'm just learning this concept, maybe I'm only playing around! Will I have to have one "play" account, and one "real" account? If I knew that I'd be judged by not only whether I complete a level, but every single thing I tried.... Yeah, no thanks.
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#27Patrick gave an interview to The New Scientist when we announced last week. We're a little worried about Starfighter Fatigue and are definitely trying not to get too much onto the front page (Erin's diligently writing the game details post, which we want to be the next thing people see from us). In the meantime though, if any of you have questions, we're watching and will answer.
What Thomas said. In particular, while we're really glad that many HNers like Starfighter, we were members of this community far before we were co-founders. We're keenly aware that a) HN is a community, not a marketing channel and b) the community frowns on saying the same thing over and over. I'm CEO of a company and am pot committed to spending the next several years of my life repeating close variations of the sam…
> HN is a community, not a marketing channel
I wish the YC people saw it like that.
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#28My sci-fi scale projection/evolution of this concept: because the things we do at work aren't intrinsically unenjoyable to begin with, but the way we think about them has the potential to make them feel that way—slow fusion of games that resemble work and work itself produces games that do work, and the distinction between the two is forgotten, a relic from a cruder era.
Seems possible since the activity in games (for all the examples I can think of) has a pretty strong relation to 'work' activities to begin with: puzzle solving, mastering agility-dependent procedures, military stuff, social finesse, exploring etc. —though typically it's more 'primordial work' (exploring, hunting/gathering), which makes sense since atm we'd be putt off by something that resembled contemporary jobs too much. Dislike of one's work is not pervasive in human cultures/history.
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#29This is awesome. I'll definitely become an avid player, right after I contribute meaningfully to several open source projects, have an active GitHub profile, while keeping my Stack Overflow reputation high, and having a fleshed out CodeCombat profile, and of course making sure my LinkedIn page is up to snuff. I hope when I get this awesome job my employer doesn't mind me keeping all my profiles updated on company hou…
Don't forget to have had a >3.5 GPA from a top university!
Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best
#30Am I the only one that doesn't entirely enjoy gamification of everything? What's wrong with just writing software?