Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

newscientist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 125 posts

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#71

Post by pjungwir »

patio11 wrote: post #6
tptacek wrote: post #5

Patrick 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…

Patrick, best of luck to you. With the success of Appointment Reminder (and consulting, and BCC . . .) I was very surprised to see you launching into something new. But your most recent "annual report" (which felt much more personal and vulnerable than usual) makes me glad you're trying to find something that makes you happy and motivated. I'm skeptical about Starfighter, with so many others trying to gamify and "reinvent" hiring, but you folks have the talent and audience to succeed, like Joel Spolsky with Stack Overflow. Thank you for all you've contributed to us programmers (which I still call myself :-)---it has made a tremendous difference in my life and in many others. I hope Starfighter achieves everything you are dreaming for it.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#72

Post by tptacek »

pjungwir wrote: post #70
tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2yhcqn/were_not...

I especially like your point there that this will highlight people who don't have a spectacular Github profile. Lots of people complain that they have a great track record writing proprietary code and the recent focus on Github profiles is unhelpful to them. Hopefully a Starfighter score, compared to a Github profile, is more fun to develop, less intimidating to share, more meaningful when still "unfinished", more di…

We're also not an information source for employers; they can't "query" us for all their candidates to get scores. Anything we ever share is opt-in. We expect most of our participants not to opt-in.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#73

Post by tptacek »

bitwize wrote: post #29
ConfuciusSay wrote: post #18

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…

Don't forget to have had a >3.5 GPA from a top university!

This is an especially weird snark to offer on this particular thread, as I have a single semester of liberal arts, and Erin is an audio engineer; only Patrick has a CS degree, and it isn't from Stanford.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#74

Post by tptacek »

ezdiy wrote: post #62

While the efforts of Matasano to make wargaming cool and hip again certainly is commendable, I think HR drones of the world also appreciate a game of "pretend to be sociable teamplayer/brogrammer". Too often hackers don't get the job because of being overqualified and prima-donna, rather than lack of technical skill - a game teaching/testing the art of office politics could be applicable to wider market [outside of i…

Those employers aren't going to be our clients.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#75

Post by tptacek »

autoreleasepool wrote: post #43
krstck wrote: post #26

Such 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 me…

I'm with you. There's no way I'd play a game where my every move was fair game for employers to scrutinize. That's too much stress and it would suck the fun out of everything. The thought of a game like that irritates me to no end. This is one reason I pay for a private github. I hate that if I'm learning a new technology, have "too many" commits on something simple, or am generally messing around it looks "bad" to e…

We agree. We don't think many people would play a game like that. What we're doing doesn't work that way. Employers can't "query" us to get scores for players. If you share something, it's because you want to.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#76

Post by tptacek »

scienceoflife wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest misconception we've managed to foster about what we're doing is that Starfighter is a form of interview. It isn't. At all. A better way to think about it is that it's a sort of Venn intersection between "Github resume", "Coursera course", "Dwarf Fortress", and "recruiting firm". Our crusade against the tech job interview is roughly analogous to Google's "organizing all of the world's information". It's a…

I thought I recognized this. I wanted to work for Matasano at one point but found the CTF environment incredibly difficult if you come from a Web Dev side of things. Hopefully starfighter is different.

That's too bad, because the Matasano hiring process is actually not at all CTF-focused, and is very web-dev centric. If you're ever looking again, you should reach out to them.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#77

Post by tptacek »

patmcguire wrote: post #61

I am lulzing a bit that the top Google result for Starfighter starts "Official website for Starfighter, an erotic sci-fi m/m webcomic" Kind of like when Django Unchained came out and it got a lot harder to debug one of my projects...

You figured us out; the other problem domain besides security in Starfighter is sci-fi porn.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#78

Post by jameshart »

32bitkid wrote: post #31

I know this article is referring to a different kind of gaming, but back in the day, I used to give potential candidates a NES controller and Tetris when they were in the waiting room before the interview... You can tell a lot about how a person deals with time constraints, pressure and approaches problem solving by watching somebody play tetris for 4 minutes. Not that Tetris would be the only input into the decision…

I've learned to be cautious whenever anybody says "You can tell a lot about a person by..."

You probably can't. You can probably justify a lot of preconceptions about a person. But unless you've done statistical studies that demonstrate high correlation between what you're testing, what you think you're observing, and what you're actually looking for, then no - no you can't tell a lot.

Young male candidate, lets a big stack build up on one side, then clears the lot down with a couple of well-placed four-long blocks down the edge. Shows an easy confidence, clearly worth considering for the role.

Female candidate, lets a big stack build up on one side, what is she doing? Does she even know how this game works? Then she drops a four-long down the side and clears some rows. Huh - lucky break.

"Not that Tetris would be the only input into the decision, but it was a thing."

Hmm.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#79

Post by soup10 »

ConfuciusSay wrote: post #18

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…

Seriously, this might be relevant to fresh out of college grads with no industry experience. But I have nothing to prove and see this kind of stuff as a waste of time. Why waste my efforts on contrived competitions when I can put them into projects that actually interest me.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#80

Post by cpach »

ConfuciusSay wrote: post #18

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…

Can we have real arguments instead of snark, please?

Are you satisfied with they way hiring works today? If not, how do you propose it could be improved?

Post reply on HN