Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 12:46 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #23

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.

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…

Post by mathgeek » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 1:22 AM UTC

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…

Post by cbd1984 » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 1:52 AM UTC

pyrocat wrote: post #49

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 percent of your team is women?

Post by deciplex » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 2:43 AM UTC

yareally wrote: post #60

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…

I'd argue that if an employer cares about public repo commits to personal repositories, one is probably better off not working for them (at least from my perspective of an ideal employer). If an employer thinks all their developers are infallible and instantly experts in everything they're learning, that sounds like a pretty awful culture. I know I've made silly/trivial commits to my github and it has yet to hurt my…

Post by thomasjames » Fri, Mar 20, 2015, 2:59 AM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #96

thomasjames wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, ever since I started using XML for every task imaginable I never looked back.

Yup , I looked never back ever since I started using XML for task every imaginable Fixed that for you.