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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#191

Post by tptacek »

bearclough wrote: post #177
pnathan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest Starfighter Recruiter, LLC have a contract with a VP, CTO. Something to the effect of... "We provide you the names of people interested in your fine company, along with our certificate of credibility. You in turn agree that the interview process will be entirely on the intangibles[1] of interpersonal relationships, career goals, etc". Along with that would be a rider that would involve Starfighter Rec…

I think if it leads to higher quality job leads than that would be great for many people. I find personally with response rates to cold drops of a resume being around 75%. The amount of time shifting through positions I don't want >> than pursuing those that I do. The great employers don't require to much chest thumping and I've had some down right fun interviews. I question the culture of a company that uses a CTF g…

We used it at Matasano and had a diverse culture of people --- many with families --- with a variety of different personalities and personal styles. Beware of attribution error.

The underlying idea here isn't speculative. We used it at Matasano, and it was extraordinarily effective.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#192

Post by dragonwriter »

elptacek wrote: post #110
revorad wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We do not have access to the µc data, any longer. That belongs to Matasano. I am now sad that I did not ask myself the same question and pay closer attention while I did. 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. I believe in this so strongly that I am dedic…

> 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 without gender/race/etc. bias, overrated in terms of the proportion of that bias on the course between birth and getting a software job that it is perceived to contribute.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#193

Post by patio11 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #184
jasonlotito wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ensure people won't be required to still fly out for 3 days of interviews? How do you prevent this from being just another filter before the "real" interview begins?

I wouldn't worry too much. The incentives align. Starfighter doesn't make any money unless they actually place someone. Their pitch selects for people that aren't doing well in the traditional hiring process. So if a company tries to use its ordinary process, just putting the candidates in at the front, we can expect they won't do especially well. If a few candidates get sent out to an interview, have a miserable tim…

I think I deleted the line from the draft that actually got published, but an earlier draft said:

Companies will process Starfighter candidates expeditiously and with dignity. Why? Because we're the work-sample company, and each candidate's experience is a work-sample of your hiring process. I see no need to introduce the best engineers in the world to anyone but the companies that most have their act together.

(Plus, yeah, obvious confluence of interests there regarding incentive compatibility.)

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#194

Post by tptacek »

MichaelGG wrote: post #158
patio11 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved the Stripe CTF. We're not going to adopt the time-boxed model from them. Starfighter : our CTFs :: Blizzard :: Blizzard games. There's no reason for us to ever turn them off. We'll likely have a particular flagship property but we have the option of dropping a new game on the market any time we want. You don't have to rush through Starfighter games. Some people will, of course, just like there is a metagame t…

>The same way you do it with math problems. Mastery of the subject material is the easiest cheat code. Elaborate? Math questions are the opposite of a good example, aren't they? Even with randomized values it's fairly easy to write generic solutions. People do this even for Project Euler. How much more so for something even cooler sounding? (I'm very excited to see this project and it sounds like a lot of fun. I'd ju…

I actually hope this happens, and that there's a community of code sharing that forms around it.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#195

Post by nobody_really »

patio11 wrote: post #67
losvedir wrote: post #53

Very cool! Signed up for an invite. Couple questions: 1) Is this a Stripe-like CTF that happens over some caffeine-fueled weekend? Or is it more of an ongoing Project Euler-style drop-in-and-solve type process? I don't think I could handle the former, but the latter sounds quite enjoyable and something I might do in my free time just to learn. I did that with PE for a while since it was fun to earn completion points.…

I loved the Stripe CTF. We're not going to adopt the time-boxed model from them. Starfighter : our CTFs :: Blizzard :: Blizzard games. There's no reason for us to ever turn them off. We'll likely have a particular flagship property but we have the option of dropping a new game on the market any time we want. You don't have to rush through Starfighter games. Some people will, of course, just like there is a metagame t…

> The same way you do it with math problems. Mastery of the subject material is the easiest cheat code.

This, at best, sidesteps the question. If a solution is a string of characters, that string of characters will end up on the Internet.

If a solution is a series of tasks---try this string of characters, observe what happens, then try this other string of characters---people will still share the strings and instructions on the Internet. All this still holds if the strings are personalized in some way; then the general patterns will be shared.

I spent a few years at university as a teaching assistant for a programming course using an interactive IDE where this kind of thing was required: Run the provided unit tests, ONLY THEN write some code, ONLY THEN run these other tests, ONLY THEN make the appropriate modifications etc. The idea was to make cheating more expensive than actually thinking about the issues, and to some extent this succeeded in the narrow sense that cheating WAS more expensive, but it did not succeed in the more general sense: people STILL cheated because they really didn't want to think things through.

The higher the stakes are, the more not-so-great people will be attracted to the system and will chug through based on someone else's solutions. This will be a fun game for those who see it as a game, but I don't see how the using-this-for-recruiting part will not implode almost instantly.

Finally, the whole thing about keeping even the general subject areas a secret is a bit silly. The work the best tech companies in the world need ranges from medical visualization to databases to systems programming to pentesting (one of you wrote this will not be a pentest game!) to static analysis and verification to distributed systems to scientific computing to drawing pretty pictures in web browsers to... You will only cover small sliver of this. Everybody knows this, why be an ass about it?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#196

Post by TeMPOraL »

tptacek wrote: post #188
TeMPOraL wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recognized your confusion because not so long ago, I also had it. I started hearing about reputable security conferences having "CTF tournaments" and was all like "oh cool, they're playing shooters for prizes, go geeks!" and then was disappointed when I discovered that someone just stole the term CTF to call pentesting contest with it (it takes a lot of imagination to say that a file is "a flag"...). Not to say tho…

I only know the term as applied in the Defcon sense (which goes back to the late 1990s).

https://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-ctf-history.html

Wow, I didn't realize that, thanks!

I retract my point about "stealing names". I guess that this application of term CTF just wasn't known widely outside INFOSEC field and that's why a lot of programmers (like me) get confused, as security conferences become more recognizable in the mainstream.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#197

Post by patio11 »

sarciszewski wrote: post #190
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…

Do you have a wishlist of all the problem domains you'd like to tackle? (I'm thinking web, mobile, and desktop applications above the system level when I ask this, but any other areas are wonderful. Databases. etc.)

We prefer to keep things a pleasant surprise, but we'll be emailing anyone who signs up with a suggested reading list if they want to start brushing up on old skills or acquiring new ones to get ready for launch day. The reading list will give a good deal of direction.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#198

Post by tptacek »

paulhauggis wrote: post #105
tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(a) For the same reasons you'd noodle with any other game (b) For similar reasons to the ones that make you noodle with a programming language you doubt you'll ever use in production (c) For the same reason anyone ever did anything with a BeBox (d) Because for some of the technologies/concepts we work with, our dumb game will be the easiest way to get your hands dirty with them.

"(a) For the same reasons you'd noodle with any other game" I play games for fun and to relax. "(b) For similar reasons to the ones that make you noodle with a programming language you doubt you'll ever use in production" On your website, it says that these will actually be real problems for real companies. I would think it's something I would see in production? "(d) Because for some of the technologies/concepts we w…

Whoah. You misread and we miswrote. We are not taking our clients problems and reframing them as games. How boring would that be?

Read "real" here in the sense of "plausible".

Sorry about that.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#199

Post by sarciszewski »

dragonwriter wrote: post #179
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I was careful to prepend "generous" to every instance of "education" in my response. Starfighter isn't generosity of knowledge, it's barter of it. Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their busi…

Even if you are being generous with your time and effort, you can't carry out an effort with any kind of reach without some support model. Financing it through its own operations may not be the only choice, but its not a choice incompatible with generous motivation.

The thing is, making money off providing a useful service that benefits society as a whole isn't immoral, so I don't see why it's that big of a deal. Nobody is forcing anyone to participate.

EDIT: In fact, socially rewarding companies that do good things incentivizes others to adopt ethical strategies and might do more good than a vow-of-poverty educational service provider.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#200

Post by samstave »

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…

EDIT: Ill need to lookup other CTFs like this... as clearly I am not familiar with how they work.
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