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Am I on the right track?
However, could you address a concern regarding negative hiring signals? I'm concerned that you're going to collect a huge amount of data as I play - and some of it will reflect badly and stop me either ever getting seen by your process for introductions or will lead to your employers throwing me away when you pass me to them.
I guess my question is - does starting without the skills you're looking for mean that while I might have fun and "level up" I'll never get the hiring benefits?
Does a 'bad level' caused by, say, trying "that language/framework/problem space/etc you’ve been meaning to learn" (quote from Patrick's original announcement post) stick out and mean it's game over from the hiring perspective? If I decide to learn Ruby to write some REST API (again, an example referenced in Patrick's announcement) on some level, and my newbie Ruby is rubbish - isn't that going to mean anyone who looks at that thinks I'm rubbish? Sure I had fun and learnt something, did I also stop myself ever getting an intro? You say you'll show them exactly what happened when I implemented that REST API, which is great - but I can't use it to learn some new skill if I want to look good right?
Sorry, this has got a bit long. To summarise - I'm concerned about the clash between on the one hand the claim I can play to learn new things, to get better - but on the other that you'll show employers exactly what I did. Of course the hiring thing is just extra and I can have fun without it, but if I'm interested in the hiring bit how do I experiment with new things without flooding myself with negative signals?
To be clear, the game sounds awesome. I'm just concerned I'll either screw up by not being world class yet or by trying new things and lose opportunities.
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Wow, THT! I was their Director of IT around 2007-2010. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Why would a developer work in such a place? I imagine you would be forced to be all professional yet always play second fiddle to the traders, no matter great your skills were. But then again I am probably the only one who is disappointed over this announcement - the game sounds really boring to me.
> I don’t really like games. > Yeah, so… I was planning on telling you more about our game. > Just two months ago, Tom and I were driving to the grocery store The announcement read like a mentally disturbed love letter about the typical idea guy stream of consciousness. Good luck, but I had to unsubscribe to prevent the arrival of any more...whatever that was.
The world has way too much bland corporate/HR sanitized writing as it is. Besides when you are married to someone who is your equal and then some that is how some conversations go :)
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I'm a longtime professional developer and Starfighter doesn't appeal to me either. I don't see why I'd spend time on it instead of on paid work or a personal project or open source, all of which would demonstrate my value to an employer and reward me more than playing a game. I've followed Patrick McKenzie since before BCC and this is the first thing that I don't get. Maybe it'd appeal to me if I played computer game…
Here's our stock answer to this question, which seems to come up a lot: A lot of very talented people won't want to participate. There are amazing engineers with families whose discretionary coding time is committed entirely to open-source projects. It is not our thesis that we can or should pull those people away from that work. But those people also have no trouble getting noticed by employers. Our target candidate…
Holy crap, he's talking about me!
"who is secretly one of the industry's best distributed systems software debuggers"
Oh, nevermind.
But I'm still very much looking forward to trying this out! Thank you all in advance for bringing such a cool idea to life.
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Here's our stock answer to this question, which seems to come up a lot: A lot of very talented people won't want to participate. There are amazing engineers with families whose discretionary coding time is committed entirely to open-source projects. It is not our thesis that we can or should pull those people away from that work. But those people also have no trouble getting noticed by employers. Our target candidate…
"Our target candidate is a .NET line-of-business backend software developer at a boring insurance company..." Holy crap, he's talking about me! "who is secretly one of the industry's best distributed systems software debuggers" Oh, nevermind. But I'm still very much looking forward to trying this out! Thank you all in advance for bringing such a cool idea to life.
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Clarify? Are you asking if you'll be able to compile something with avr-gcc and upload it to the emulator? If so... maybe. All of my test code was compiled with Crosspack AVR libc. The bundle has its own test code which was very useful.
Yes, sorry, I asked in haste. "Can I compile with gcc-avr and use that rather than your fine compiler" was the actual intended question.
Uploading machine code -might- break something. But in a fun way, I think.
Heh, if you think AVR's are weird, try a PIC sometime if you really wanna get buck wild.
So obviously I have a huge amount of respect for the team here, and the idea sounds really great - it seems like a path to becoming one of the best in the world and that's obviously hugely appealing. However, could you address a concern regarding negative hiring signals? I'm concerned that you're going to collect a huge amount of data as I play - and some of it will reflect badly and stop me either ever getting seen…
The REST API thing lets me tell employers "The reason I'm bringing Bob to your attention is you asked me to keep a lock out for API devs. Do I have a story for you..."
As to whether someone recently learning something new and useful makes you seem less valuable to the SF founders when we do our internal "Do we try to reach out to this person to get the ball rolling?" calculation, just trust us to not be idiots on that score. (I acknowledge idiots are widespread in the industry.)
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Well IMHO the whole "I had no idea what I was doing and it was really difficult to figure out that in the emulator memory-mapped registers must be (gasp!) mapped to memory, and Tom's mansplanation didn't help" doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.
What are you talking about? That's not what she said. She pointed out that the stack pointer is a I/O register, which was in fact so weird that we did in fact argue about it (she was right, I was wrong). Why did she write about that? I don't know, perhaps because people who participate in Microcorruption are going to program AVR stack pointers? "Mansplanation"? Really? It feels like no matter what someone writes ---…
Yes, that's what I'm talking about, and that is what she said: You argued about something that is a fact (and well-documented) and thus simply not up for argument.
Previously I thought you were a group of experienced professionals with a proven track record of delivering great stuff. That made me pretty confident that Starfighter would be awesome. With this announcement that explains how you all did new stuff without building on that experience and it came out kinda crappy and buggy, haha, my confidence is diminished. I don't expect you to agree, but that is my impression from what I can gather from this announcement.