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Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

newscientist.com

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Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#81

Post by cpach »

soup10 wrote: post #79
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.

”Why waste my efforts on contrived competitions when I can put them into projects that actually interest me.”

How do we know it’s contrived and competitive? Keep in mind that we’re discussing a ”game” that’s not even released yet.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#82

Post by pjungwir »

sputknick wrote: post #19

Would 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.

Rocky's Boots and Robot Odyssey might be great things to try. You can run both on an emulator. I'm pretty sure you can play Rocky's Boots pre-reading.

In fact I would not be sad if v1 of Starfighter was playing Robot Odyssey on a web page. :-)

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#83

Post by MichaelGG »

cpach wrote: post #80
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?

I agree with you (and really am looking forward to Starfighter and don't share the GP's), but I'd like to point out that your answer is sort of incorrect. I can launch a stupid idea aimed at, say, world peace. People can reasonably mock my stupid idea, while not being able to find a solution. E.g if I propose stacking rocks in order to reach Mars, a dismissive, snarky, comment may be warranted. Honestly, if it was Monster or Oracle behind this instead of well-known awesome people, I'd be as skeptical as the GP.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#84

Post by MichaelGG »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #47

Having worked on an applicant testing and tracking system in the past, it was a decent business case to operate because a single company has a job type with 100's of openings and high attrition so it helped screen people. In that case it is self-serving and you know if someone is applying twice (SS Number or other identifier) to try and ace the test. If Starfighter is open, there are people out there that will try to…

This is my major concern, but they've said that it's easier to learn the skills than cheat. I'm don't know how, but it's something they're obviously concerned about.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#85

Post by sthreet »

Leon wrote: post #30

Am I the only one that doesn't entirely enjoy gamification of everything? What's wrong with just writing software?

The last I heard "gamification" was simply adding achievements onto things, such as getting work done, which I agree is awful.

This doesn't sound like that though.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#86

Post by fsniper »

eridius wrote: post #36
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.

Why does the story say "video game"? I wouldn't call Microcorruption a video game. Was this your word choice or something New Scientist did on their own? Or is Starfighter actually going to be something I would call a video game (instead of what I was expecting which was an experience akin to Microcorruption)?

because of that choice, my brain spam filtering just gave up on the story. If not for the comments here, I didn't know that it was about microcorruption.Maybe I should give it a chance.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#87

Post by scrollaway »

MichaelGG wrote: post #83
cpach wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I agree with you (and really am looking forward to Starfighter and don't share the GP's), but I'd like to point out that your answer is sort of incorrect. I can launch a stupid idea aimed at, say, world peace. People can reasonably mock my stupid idea, while not being able to find a solution. E.g if I propose stacking rocks in order to reach Mars, a dismissive, snarky, comment may be warranted. Honestly, if it was Mo…

But this is not "stacking rocks to reach Mars". This is a complete unknown where we can't reasonably tell the outcome in advance.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#88

Post by krstck »

tptacek wrote: post #75
autoreleasepool wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the reply. It's reassuring to hear that this will not work that way, and I'm glad to know that anything shared will be voluntary.

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#89

Post by pbhjpbhj »

halhod wrote: post #66
gohrt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not impressed that your submarine PR effort lead with a marketing line / hope, presented as established fact. That's crossing the line from self-promotion to skeeziness, especially in a publication that calls itself "Scientist", and attracts readers who don't know it doesn't respect the culture of scienctific communication.

I wrote this story, and can confirm what Thomas says (although I suppose you have no reason to believe me).

All glory to the hypnotoad!

/ot

Re: Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

#90

Post by Dewie »

Dewie wrote: post #64
ditonal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No CodeJam victories or at the top of the TopCoder leaderboard? Extensive Coursera certificates? No-hire. Plus I'm beginning to doubt that you've even solved several Project Euler problems in a variety of functional programming languages.

He probably hasn't even implemented a brainfuck interpreter in Scala's type system.

I'm sorry: type checker.
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