Ask HN: Experience with job hunting on starfighters.io?

When I first finished, the challenges had just launched and the Stockfighter team was busy putting out fires. I think they switched to recruiting mode about a month later.

Patrick of Starfighter sent me an email with an invitation to have a phone call. We talked about the game, then about a job opportunity. If I had been looking for a job, the discussed company sounded great - a distributed team and interesting problems to solve.

I think they spend a week on recruiting, a week on signing up companies, a week on coding the site, and a week on other stuff before cycling back again. This means that it may be awhile from the time you "win" to the time someone gets in touch with you.

Both the players and the hiring companies are high quality. Last time I checked, less than 1% of the people who completed the first level actually finished the last. It seems to be a pretty strong filter.

Pros: Fun game, good hiring companies, great players. Cons: I would not expect to be hired right away if I was needing a job.

Unfortunately I thought that this was exactly the problem starfighters was supposed to solve. I.e. qualified engineers getting dropped mysteriously due to various biases of a company's interview process.

We had a chat over skype, talked about my experience and what I was looking for. He very quickly lined me up an interview with a very well-known company (well-known, in this case, can be interpreted as "thousands of search results on HN").

I had a 15-minute non-technical phone call with an internal recruiter, and then we scheduled an onsite interview straightaway.

I ended up not getting an offer. Not sure whether that's due to my having an off day, or them picking up on legitimate qualities they didn't want, or merely the tendency towards avoiding false positives at the expense of false negatives.

In any case, I have since found a job I'm very excited about (starting soon), to which I was connected through Triplebyte. Triplebyte's model for recruiting is slightly different from Starfighters and won't appeal to everyone (though they are probably closer to one another than to any other player in their field). Triplebyte does have an advantage in that they got started a bit earlier, and, importantly, have more clients. (Though only YC companies currently, I think.) They used this advantage concretely by lining me up with several interviews at once. I don't think that that's something that Starfighters has done; I think they've been connecting candidates with companies in serial.