This is awesome. I still don't see how this isn't easily cheatable. What's stopping me from writing up a little tool that can win these levels and providing minimal instructions?
At one point, it even says they will award people that write OSS for it. Doesn't that just further reduce the effort needed to pass levels?
Not to be negative. I'm very, very much looking forward to this.
I have some ideas jumbling in my head about this, but it's getting late and I'm not sure they're maximally coherent. Briefly:
a) What's the worst thing that possibly happens? Someone scams a row out of our database? It has more rows. 10,000 someone scams a row out of our database? I will write a for loop which scams a million rows out of our database. What about the actual world or Starfighter's capability to positively impact our players, our customers, the industry, or our own situations just got worse as a result of that for loop?
2) I think you will find that a solution which beats level six also sails over the Turing Test, so if you have a tiny script which does so, I recommend not burning it on Starfighter, but would be honored if you decided to try.
3) At the end of the day, the model is not "Someone pays us for a PDF automatically spat out of our database", the trivialization of which PDF would be dangerous to the business model. It is "We become sufficiently enthusiastic about someone's performance that we successfully introduce them to a company which is not us and then that company hires them." Is the threat model "You use a script which trivializes our levels to win a free conversation with Patrick about your career?" Anyone can get that! At any time! Save yourself a git clone; just send me an email!
The more interesting question is then, given that you've learned absolutely nothing from Starfighter because you've git cloned your way to the finish line, whether you can (in thirty minutes with me, or Erin, or Thomas) convince us "Yes, this person is totally someone I should burn my stack of accumulated karma with the CTO of $CLIENT with to suggest they interview them."
Ohhh. Ok I get it. I was under the impression that the goal was to have a Starfighter profile publicly, like a new type of credential/cert. Which, I guess now that I'm thinking about it, wouldn't be much better than those MS certs. If it's just a way to generate great leads for you then it makes total sense. And I imagine even if there are public scoreboards, the end point of your company isn't to provide an embeddable seal like those SSL resellers.
> The more interesting question is then, given that you've learned absolutely nothing from Starfighter because you've git cloned your way to the finish line, whether you can (in thirty minutes with me, or Erin, or Thomas) convince us "Yes, this person is totally someone I should burn my stack of accumulated karma with the CTO of $CLIENT with to suggest they interview them."
So, how is this any different from $CODER burning their accumulated karma directly with CTO of respective $CLIENT ? Why should we expect them to behave any differently because it's you, Erin or Thomas?
Patrick is saying that if someone is incompetent gets through with scripts, they'll still have to pass a chat with Patrick before Patrick puts his reputation on the line with a CTO.
That's my point. Why can't all of the IT recruiters that exist today simply just do the same thing? I'm failing to see how this is any different than the current funneling/filtering system?
They totally could do the same thing. They can come up with their own outreach programs to start meeting lots of developers at scale on the Internet. They can invent systems that reveal programming aptitude that isn't on the resumes of people who have been stuck doing line-of-business J2EE apps at insurance companies, or QA for enterprise products. They can hire people that can competently talk to developers on the phone or in person and actually learn things about them.
Maybe, with companies like ours and TripleByte in the mix, that's what they'll start doing. Won't that be interesting?
We're a bootstrapped startup founded by 3 veteran consultants. Consultancies always compete for gigs; that's why we have to write proposals. This isn't a consultancy, but we've learned our lessons. We sincerely do not give a shit about what other incumbent recruiting companies do. Our approach will work or it won't, and if it works, we're going to grind on it and continuously improve on it, and if other people do the same thing, eventually we'll start having meetups and sharing beers with them.
My impression is that Stockfighter is a reaction to the fact that recruiters are exceptionally lazy and prefer a basic keyword match on a resume to actually checking anything. If Stockfighter works well then I would guess IT recruiters will do the same thing, else they'll be competing against a company with a tremendous advantage over them and they'll lose lots of their competitive advantage.
To that end, it might be worthwhile starting a company to build something similar to Stockfighter that can easily be whitelabelled for recruitment companies.
Maybe cause IT recruiters don't have the karma? I'm sure there's some good ones, but most stories I've heard are pretty bad. They aren't actually developers and can't vet people. Patrick et al can. And recruiters that can do this? Well I imagine they're supply constrained.
Random devs don't have karma either.
Now that Starfighter's portrayed as a recruiting system, it makes total sense.
Don't want to speak for them, but why would they want to stop you from writing that tool?
Remember their business model, it isn't "get people to the end of the game following the rules", it's "identify people with talent to recruit". Your tool would just be evidence of the latter.
The only thing we're worried about is people spoiling the challenges for other people (it's not a problem for us if people get help clearing levels, but it's a problem if people find ways to suck all the fun out of it for everyone else).
We like the idea of people publishing and sharing tools; they did for Microcorruption, too. We'll have more to say about this.
At one point, it even says they will award people that write OSS for it. Doesn't that just further reduce the effort needed to pass levels?
Not to be negative. I'm very, very much looking forward to this.