
State of Starfighter - gk1
https://discuss.starfighters.io/t/state-of-starfighter-may-14th-2016/6647
======
pfarnsworth
If this doesn't allow successful candidates to skip the onsite interview, then
what value does this add? I had the exact same criticism for TripleByte. If I
spend the time going through a non-direct link to a company, there has to be
some value along the lines of skipping onsites which are the bane of our
existence as programmers these days. If going through starfighter doesn't help
us with this, then there's no value, I can just email the company and get a
phone interview pretty quickly.

~~~
patio11
If you're primarily interested in getting a job, and can cold email a company
and get an instant onsite, then going for that is a _totally_ valid option.
The most time-efficient way to get job offers is to get introduced to hiring
managers (self-intro if necessary), make a good impression on them, and ask
them to jump you along in their firms' hiring practices. I've said that here
for years; I'll continue saying it.

There exist many engineers in the world who either a) cannot cold email
$DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, b) do not
believe they can cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of
an interview, or c) are not comfortable executing on the process of emailing
$DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and getting an interview. Those are three subtly
different problems. We are a partial way to address them, and other problems
besides.

a) A very talented engineer might not have a resume/background/etc which pings
the radar very hard at a software company. If you do, great, more power to
you. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone without a great educational
pedigree whose last couple of jobs look something like "IT at insurance
company. Responsibilities: rebooting printers." or "Network administrator:
CISCO routers, light systems administration." That person might _also_ be able
to black-box cryptosystems, find RCEs in Rails given a day of effort, or
program trading algorithms, but the company won't find that out because they
likely won't even be offered a phone screen.

b) You know how impostor syndrome is a thing? Oh boy, do a lot of very
talented engineers have it. If you can program, many desirable companies like
e.g. Stripe would love to make your acquaintance. If they don't offer you a
job they _will not feel like talking to you was a waste of time_. There are a
lot of people who _do not get this_ and benefit from being told some variant
of "I understand that you feel like you've still got lots to learn. I've got
lots to learn! And I've been doing this for 12 years! But I see from your
demonstrable performance that you're _actually good at this._ The folks at
Stripe trust my judgment about this -- if I'm making a mistake about this,
well, that's on me and not on you. Why don't you have a call with $PERSON
there? I predict that they are super-inviting wonderful people who will want
to geek out with you about tech stuff; if a job offer happens after that,
wonderful. But I can almost guarantee you that no job offer happens without
you talking to them."

c) Many engineers are afraid of selling themselves, for personal
reasons/cultural reasons/etc which our community unfortunately frequently
amplifies. Even if you tell them "All you need to do to get a job is a) meet a
hiring manager, b) convince them you're not an axe murderer, c) get a coffee
date and do your thing, d) say yes to the job offer", they're not willing to
take the clearly valuable first step of sending an unsolicited email. I am
totally willing to send a (very) solicited email on one's behalf, if I feel
like a candidate and a client could have a productive conversation together.
I'm also pretty good about writing that email.

Also: for the right kind of person, the challenges are fun, in the same way
that chess or poker or Starcraft or sudoku are fun. Except with more REST API.

~~~
dragonwriter
> There exist many engineers in the world who either a) cannot cold email
> $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, b) do not
> believe they can cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of
> an interview, or c) are not comfortable executing on the process of emailing
> $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and getting an interview.

And, it seems to me, the traits involved in doing those things are _also_ not
what a lot of companies _intend_ to be looking for in hiring developers, so
its in _companies_ interests to find a way to adapt hiring so as not to
implicitly bias it in that direction (if they were hiring people for sales
position, that bias might be _exactly_ what they want...)

~~~
hox
But in a lot of cases, it is. I prefer a high-functioning communicator with
decent programming skills over a top-notch programmer who can't communicate.

~~~
dragonwriter
> But in a lot of cases, it is. I prefer a high-functioning communicator with
> decent programming skills over a top-notch programmer who can't communicate.

I would suspect that the specific subset of communication skills tested
implicitly in a system biased toward people's drive and ability to
successfully cold-email potential employers is generally neither the same
subset of communication skills that are important in actual work of technical
staff in most development teams nor a subset which serves as a good proxy for
those.

But I could be wrong.

~~~
yummyfajitas
There are some places where writing kickass software, demonstrating it, and
clearly and honestly answering technical questions about it will cause a
person to perform effectively in their job.

There are other places - a surprising number of them - where effective
internal marketing and sales skills are needed. Those are probably the
communication skills that patio11's clients are lacking.

------
the_rosentotter
Your biggest problem is that I have read several quite long blog posts about
Starfighter, and _I still don 't understand what it is_.

I am a developer, I like to believe of above average intelligence, I'm your
captive audience. If I don't get it, what are the chances the rest of the
world will?

~~~
aantix
+1. My stream of thought is "it's some game and I guess trading is involved?
Is this some sort of old school BBS game? Fuck, I have no clue.."

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Step 1: read the API docs. Step 2: write an API client Step 3: Connect to a
level Step 4: Lose loads of money Step 5: ??? Step 6: Profit! Note: I have not
actually achieved step 6, but I blame a detour into learning C++ and wrapping
a websocket client in R.

~~~
kbenson
> I have not actually achieved step 6, but I blame a detour into learning C++
> and wrapping a websocket client in R.

I always assumed detours like that (assuming you are referring to
doing/starting that because of the game) would be one of the most useful
benefits to playing. It forces you to have to explore areas that you might not
normally get into based on your job and interests.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Completely, its been a lot of fun, and I surprised myself by enjoying reading
the RFC (full disclosure, I always liked doing that).

That's what I'm taking it as a license to do. I mostly do statistics/analysis
for a living, so building automated systems is pretty new (and fun) for me.

------
armitron
I totally do not understand the reason for starfighters existing. Who is it
aimed at? Mediocre engineers? Those targeting hedge funds?

First of all, as a boss, I would never hire someone from starfighters without
an additional interview. Too many ways for one(s) to game the system. The
current interview process may have faults, but it works out OK for the vast
majority of the field. Are Ptacek & co trying to fix a problem that's simply
not there?

As a software engineer, why would I even consider wasting my time with
starfighters.io when I can simply go do as many traditional interviews as I
want, with the top 10 companies in my field (that are also not using
starfighters.io), get multiple job offers that I can use for
leverage/negotiation, without having middlemen parasitize off of me. And this
is exactly what starfighters.io is, a middleman. Historically, middlemen have
been tolerated (yet always seen as parasites) whenever they ABSOLUTELY HAD to
be there.

Ptacek's background is in computer security (Matasano). Rumor has it that
whatever success they had came from consulting (penetration testing). The
single product that they released that I am aware of, a firewall rule manager,
didn't seem to go anywhere. One has to wonder what he's doing with
starfighters.io.

~~~
ryanSrich
> I would never hire someone from starfighters without an additional interview

This is the crux of my issue with the product as well. I'm entirely uncertain
what a Starfighter candidate gets me as a hiring manager. I'm not going to
blindly hire someone because they passed a few levels in an online programming
game. The fact that the candidate is technically competent accounts for only
10% of what I test a candidate for in an interview.

~~~
hawkice
A very reasonable and predictable attitude. Which raises the question: what
does this get engineers, if it takes a lot of time and doesn't save any in the
interviewing phase?

Personally, I hate resumes with the fury of a thousand winds. They say nothing
important and decontextualize every important thing I've done in my career.
But this won't help unless the Starfighter crew has managed to negotiate
_something not so small_ with hiring managers who are skeptical of everything
(it is kind of their job to be skeptical, sort of?).

------
partisan
Thank you for being so open and honest. A lot of people look up to you and I
think it is a good thing for them to understand that one does not
spontaneously become a patio11 and that the struggles continue on even after
success (however that is measured).

I have some questions below, though I understand if you prefer not to address
the topics therein.

> The components to this include an emulated AVR microcontroller, an emulated
> hardware device built out of three of those microcontrollers, a scratch-
> built C compiler, a scratch-built fully-functional debugger, and an in-
> browser UI to tie everything together.

I'd say you guys jumped into the deep end of the pool and your goals from a
technology standpoint were ambitious, to put it politely. Do you think that
you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Did
you have to invent these wheels or where there other options you could have
leveraged to accomplish the same goal? Is the technology you are building part
of your competitive advantage? Having seen in-browser consoles and programming
environments, I just have to wonder what the advantage is of coming at the
recruiting problem from a hard computing perspective. As a programmer, that is
the way I would approach it as well, since that is where I would feel I am
making the most impact, but that would simply be to make me feel useful and
not to move the company along, necessarily.

Also, I detected a hint of discord in yours and tptacek's posts during and
after your release. Would you say that the process has put a strain on
relationships, even if temporarily?

~~~
patio11
_Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do
it over again?_

Oh goodness yes. If I had a do-over, I'd run a straight-up recruiting company
with ~0 lines of code written for 2~3 months on the strength of our personal
networks, figure out how that works, launch a single tech tree far closer in
scope to e.g. Stripe CTF 3 than what we launched, fold candidates developed
from that into the recruiting stream, then scale engineering and recruiting in
parallel. Instead we went into hard-core dev mode for ~10 months to do
something which derisked the business a lot less than being recruiters for a
month would have.

Co-founder relationships are co-founder relationships. It's been a stressful
year getting a totally new thing off the ground. I think thats a comes-with-
the-territory sort of thing based on the reports of literally every founder I
know; it is new territory to me. Maybe someday I'll write more about that, but
for the moment, still have to figure out recruiting first.

~~~
tyre
First off, this is perfect.

    
    
      Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again?
      Oh goodness yes.
    

To founders, if you don't answer the question this way, you're not pushing
yourself/your team enough. If everything is going perfectly right, be scared
or get another job.

@patio11 [Unsolicited advice from a fellow founder]

> All three of us were working as recruiters for it, but Thomas and Erin were
> also full-time on development for Jailbreak.

Have one person own recruiting, which I'm guessing is you. That is priority
number 1, 2, and 3 for you no matter how little you know/like it. It sounds
like you learned this really well (we fucked it up initially as well — the
dangers of all-technical co-founders.)

For other founders:

As an early startup, you have two goals:

1) Acquire users.

2) Build something users need.

You should always be doing something towards one of those two things. If you
have more than one person in the company, there should be one clear owner for
each. Set metrics that are just out of your reach. As J. Cole said, "If you
don't aim too high, then you aim too low."

Do not stop doing either of those two things until either your sleep schedule
is on fire (for goal 1) or your servers are on fire (for goal 2.)

Do not hire, talk to press, design a new logo, talk to investors, join a
softball league, speak at conferences, or bring on a social media manager
until shit is on fire. That's what product-market fit feels like.

Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful
company until your small team is on fire. Then fire yourself from positions
(via hiring) to put out the fires.

~~~
birken
> Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful
> company until your small team is on fire.

I was a "founding employee" of a very successful company and I don't think I
would have ever classified anything as being "on fire". I also slept 8+ hours
a night because I like sleeping and never worked on the weekends because I
like enjoying weekends. The company did well because when everybody came to
work they were ready to come up with great ideas and execute them quickly.

I don't think your comment is complete off-base, I've met a lot of people who
"play startup" and spend time doing things that aren't actually helpful to
their company but feel like they are (going to conferences, perpetually
talking to investors, etc). These people probably aren't going to be
successful. However, it also isn't true that the only way to succeed is to
ignore everything else in your life and devote yourself fully to your startup.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't work 80-100 hours at your startup if you
want to. If that is bringing you personal satisfaction and you are efficient
at it than more power to you. But that lifestyle is not a requirement for
startup success.

~~~
tyre
I (personally) think there is a significant difference between a founder of an
early-stage startup and employees.

The best equivalent is parents of a newborn. Do you get to not feed your baby
to preserve work/life balance? No, because its survival depends on you. You do
whatever it takes. That doesn't always mean working 80+ hours per week.
Sometimes it means a vacation to preserve sanity, but there is a certain bar
(and a high one, at that) for being a good parent.

Once things stable out, you can start to diversify your life. But until then,
there are so many things constantly going wrong or unknown.

That may be an unnecessary pressure I put on myself, but my bar for starting a
company is "all in." It's just too hard, with too small of a likelihood of
success, to waste time half/90%-assing.

~~~
birken
That's great if that belief motivates you to work hard on your company.
Whatever makes you happy. Your advice just isn't as broadly applicable as you
think it is. Companies never really "stable out." In my experience the bigger
and more successful the company got, the harder it was. More people to manage,
more people depending on the company's success, endless recruiting, etc.

The goalposts are always going to move too. You are going to think "oh, once
we just get to this milestone everything will be great". Then you'll reach
that milestone and you won't even care because there will be something new you
want to achieve. Over and over again.

Companies are good at sucking you in and taking over your whole life. That is
why the advice that the company must take over your life is so wrong. You
should try to be in a softball league and force yourself to take vacations,
because you are going to be more efficient and happier that way.

I wouldn't be surprised if the two biggest causes of startup failure are burn
out and/or stress-related founder break ups. In retrospect, I think the
biggest challenge in the early years of what ended up being a very successful
company was staying motivated and positive through the 2.5-3 _years_ it took
to get any sort of serious traction. It's really hard to work at something for
so long and have very little tangible success to show for it. Things that
distract you from the sad reality and help you push through are your friends,
not your enemies.

------
solutionyogi
Copying my comment from last time which went unnoticed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11448323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11448323)

Thomas and Patrick: First, I want to thank you for trying to address one of
the most frustrating part of a developer's career.

As you know very well, after Silicon Valley, it's the finance companies in NYC
area who pay top notch developer salaries. Even though I am a competent
developer, it was quite a struggle for me to break in to the finance industry
(They only wanted to hire people with finance experience). It took me a little
while but I was able to break in. Now I am over that hump but I am faced with
another problem. I have been working in 'Back office' for hedge funds for
several years and would like to transition to 'Front office' and I am faced
with the same problem again. I am not able to switch roles because I don't
have experience working in the front office. The Stock Fighter CTF is a
perfect way to demonstrate the relevant ability to prospective employers. Do
you guys have any plan to work with hedge funds/investment banks for your
recruiting platform?

~~~
patio11
Yes. Something like 90% of our client roster is software companies; most of
the balance is finance firms. (There are some companies that are a bit of
column A and a bit of column B.) Some developers are under the impression that
we _only_ work with finance due to the theme of our first game, but we care
about finance like Blizzard cares about orcs -- it is a convenient backdrop on
which to hang fun gameplay, stories, and a few pedagogical goals. (Mostly
engineering-oriented rather than market-microstructure oriented, but if we
totally change the tenor of HN HFT threads I will be _very happy indeed_.)

Many of our finance industry clients/prospective clients have, shall we say,
more process requirements to adopting new vendors than typical software
startups have, and rather less reason to trust that we know what we're doing.
This makes the sales cycle longer.

Medium-term, I'd love for us to be a good place to get developer jobs in the
finance industry. If you were hypothetically in a conversation with me _today_
about opportunities constrained to finance (and not FinTech), I would not have
as many options as I want to have, but I'd hypothetically recommend keeping in
touch and/or waiting for consequential announcements later in the year.

------
hawkice
Thanks for pushing the human element of recruiting forward. Instantiating the
Recruiting post by Mr. Ptacek is perhaps the best good any small group of
people can do for tech at this point.

That being said, I lost a lot of interest when it started seeming like
finishing the game had a low chance of leading to anything. If your
retrospective says, when we started, we should have only done recruitment and
gotten that at 100% before writing any code, why is your near term plan to
launch the low level tech tree environment, followed by the challenges?
Shouldn't the plan be, oh, hey, let's put that completely on the back burner,
and get like ten stories of employees who are comfortable with us telling
where and how they got an awesome job?

------
no_wave
I have two takeaways from this article:

1.) Your organization is in a rough state right now (for any number of
reasons, some outside of your control), and you're likely to have more
difficulties going forwards.

2.) You haven't successfully placed a single developer into a job yet even
though forty thousand people have signed up.

Both of these statements might be inaccurate, but those were the main things
communicated. I'm much less likely to open an account having read this, and I
don't understand why new levels are being released when the recruiting
pipeline currently seems like the bottleneck of the business.

------
nilkn
I think the #1 issue this is going to encounter is that companies aren't going
to trust it enough to hire top players blindly or with only a culture-fit
interview, and most top developers aren't going to want to invest in finishing
all the Starfighter exercises if it just means they're going to be put through
the gauntlet again for each individual company they're put into contact with.
(Certainly _some_ top developers will still participate, just for the fun of
it, but probably not enough to make it into a really sustainable high-impact
business.)

I really love the idea, though, and I want to believe that with enough
perseverance this issue could be solved. I think it mostly centers around
trust. Starfighter just has to establish itself as an extremely reliable
recruiting platform.

------
educar
I am wondering why you are not selling your product for what it is. You have
made a game/CTF engine/whatever. This is your expertise and what you have
spent the most time on. Sell the game.

I don't quite get the recruiting angle. How is this related to the above other
than the assumption that your game helps identify smart people? Leave it to
_other_ companies to approach you rather than you approaching companies.

------
Alex3917
"We're going to be stepping up our operational tempo as a recruiting company,
rather than sinking back into the dev cave where we're comfortable for weeks
at a time."

Without respect to whether this is the right move in this situation, which it
may be, I'd like to point out that, as 'advice', this is suspiciously trendy
lately. I can't count the number of times in the last month where I've had
people who have never seen or used our product tell me that our product is
already good enough, and we need to spend more time doing growth or sales
stuff.

------
loeg
I finished all of the Microcorruption challenges relatively quickly (I'm on
the first page of the "Hall of Fame"). Yet I have no idea how to approach the
2nd level of Stockfighter ("Choc a Block"). It's frustrating and I don't enjoy
that game. Given that, I don't see how Starfighters could possibly place me in
a reasonable role.

~~~
WA
I felt similar. Especially since Patrick said that something like "the first
levels of Stockfighters are so easy, most devs should be able to beat them in
5 minutes with cURL only". It actually took me three days to beat chop a
block, because I couldn't wrap my brain around it.

Then I beat it, but more due to luck I guess, because my bot couldn't reliably
beat it again.

Edit: What I want to say is: Don't get discouraged too quickly. If you enjoy
it somewhat, it's kind of nice to figure out how to win :)

~~~
SyneRyder
Ditto on the "don't get discouraged". I've gone through a few levels now and
part of it has been perserverance (and sometimes a lot of thinking & sketching
ideas over coffee).

The "5 minutes with cURL" comment is definitely offputting if you get stuck.
Ignore it. Consider it a convenient lie that helped motivate you to start, but
don't kick yourself over it.

As for the unreliable bot - many of my first solutions were something
unreliable. Then I went back and improved the code's reliability /
performance. Having a stroke of "luck" is usually just a first insight into
what's going on.

------
lawnchair_larry
It seems like there are 2 very simple metrics that make everything else pretty
irrelevant.

For applicants - how many who "pass" get jobs?

For employers - how many positions did you fill?

I found it odd that the blog post intentionally left that out. Getting someone
an interview is not a good metric!

And as someone who has spent a fair bit of time on both sides (it sounds like
the founders have minimal experience actually applying for jobs) it is a huge
mistake to interview serially. Companies take their sweet time getting back to
you (weeks is not uncommon), and their initial offer is not as good as it
could be. When they know that they are competing for a candidate, they are
very quick to move on a candidate. This helps the whole "follow up" problem
solve itself. While it might seem like it requires more mental bandwidth, it
probably requires less. And customer satisfaction goes _way_ up. For someone
job hunting, every passing hour waiting for an outcome can be brutal.

Also, I am simultaneously impressed and confused by the technical investment.
It's fantastic work, but doesn't seem like it is helping to increment #1 or
#2.

------
aresant
In my experience with marketing two-sided marketplaces you need to focus your
messaging / outreach around the more scarce asset, the "catalyst asset", let's
call it.

The catalyst asset in this case is developers.

If Starfighter's system / gamification can actually identify incredible
developers, that are also amenable to looking at job offers, the recruiters
will be banging down your door.

Right now the Starfighter landing page is recruiter centric, the "For
Engineers" and "Play Now" are low contrast menu items at the top.

Further confusing the issue for your catalyst audience is that your player-
centric funnel is called Stockfighter.io and yet most of the mentions
(including this one) are of Starfighter.

I think you'd get a lot of engineer's attention if you kept it as simple as
"Play engineering games developed by experts. Winners get a better job."

PS - Considering how many times you guys have been / will be at the top of HN
why don't you consider adding a "Try Starfighter. Get a better job." button to
the right side of the blog as a call to action so all these lovely clicks
aren't wasted?

~~~
patio11
The day we can credibly promise "Winners get a better job." we will have that
exact sentence on our website, tended to by a team of people whose only
responsibility is finding more players, paid salaries out of the stupefyingly
large rivers of money that sentence implies. A pre-requisite to being able to
truthfully say it is figuring out how to run a quirky take on a recruiting
company.

Until we feel comfortable on that, we don't have to maximize for reach, and
certainly don't want to overpromise. ("Come use our fake stock exchange. It
may not crash! Some people find it intellectually interesting! There exists a
non-zero possibility that you might have a fun conversation with a geek in
which that stock exchange and your career goals will feature prominently." is
about what we can promise right now.)

------
weinzierl
> Incidentally: should you ever go in to get a bank account at a Japanese
> bank, remember to edit your company's website to take the words I rob banks
> because that is where the money is. off your homepage prior to the initial
> customer interview. Irony doesn't translate well. ("NO NO NO, we're not bank
> robbers; we're a video game company! Honest!" "What, like Nintendo?" "... In
> a manner of speaking, almost exactly like Nintendo.")

This is hilarious. BTW the quote is really there -
[https://www.starfighters.io/ctfs](https://www.starfighters.io/ctfs).

------
mattste
Just a heads up to the Starfighter team browsing this thread: going to
starfighter.io with uBlock Origin results in the job listings being blocked.

EDIT: it appears starfighter.io is different than starfighters.io.

------
lordnacho
I'm genuinely excited about a recruitment firm where the people can actually
code. It's an industry that needs some skills, even just basic ones like
calling back people that you said you'd call.

So often you get guys who have no clue talking about things they don't
understand, deciding who gets to apply where. This is terrible for both
employees and firms. They also charge way too much money as a middleman. No
way it's worth 1/4 of a salary to filter a list of candidates. Especially when
you just do it by the staircase method. That's the one where you throw the
pile off a staircase and choose the ones on one step.

I really hope recruitment doesn't turn you into douchebags. Here's some choice
tactics I've come across:

\- They call you, the employer, with the perfect candidate. Guy checks all the
boxes, top degree, top employment history, looking to move for more
interesting work. Half an hour before the interview, he cancels. But luckily
the recruiter has some other guys available, and why not talk to them since
that time is booked anyway?

\- They call you, the employee, saying one of your colleagues is leaving and
mentioned you. He's got a top job lined up, just send your CV. (Why bother
harvesting CVs though, if you're gonna do like in tactic one?)

\- They bomb your LinkedIn with an employee's CV. Your LinkedIn say nothing
about you wanting to hire, or what technologies you use.

\- They put out generic ads to get CVs. Not real jobs, just imaginary jobs.

Anyway, I'm hoping there's going to be some real value added from you guys.

~~~
patio11
The last few months have been an interesting mix of learning empathy for some
of the pathologies of the recruiting industry and being absolutely slackjawed
amazed at how bad some players [edit in response to reply: meaning, actors in
the recruiting industry] are.

An example of the former: I now totally understand why recruiters frequently
forget elementary facts about individual candidates or jobs. They're often
juggling multiples of both at once, at numbers which overwhelm the working
memory of almost any human, for weeks at a time. I had a very nice
conversation with (making up facts) Cindy the Pythonist and Sandy the front-
end engineer one Tuesday, minutes from each other, and three weeks later had
about twenty minutes of the conversation with Sandy go by before realizing
that I was giving her advice for Cindy's situation, to her amazement. I do
know that React is not made of Python, and I've recently shipped a retail
stock trading site built in it, but from Sandy's view of the conversation it
probably sounded like I was scatterbrained, incompetent, or scatterbrained and
incompetent.

I thought I could fix this with better notes or a database, but I think it has
to be fixed with process improvements, because the amount of task-switching I
was doing was making it impossible for me to keep each of the X0 stories I was
telling straight.

I don't anticipate us adopting lying as a business tactic. Telling the truth
seems so much more straightforward.

~~~
yawn
"being absolutely slackjawed amazed at how bad some players are"

Can you elaborate on this? Were the results you're talking about just flat-out
"I can't code FizzBuzz" or something else?

Personally, I created an account, started reading the directions, then
realized I had no interest in the problem domain and decided to wait for the
next one. It helps when the problem gels with you. I wonder if that had any
role.

~~~
patio11
Sorry for imprecision -- I meant "players in the recruiting industry", not
Starfighter players.

It is probably the case that at least one person who can't FizzBuzz has signed
up for Stockfighter, but it's highly unlikely that I end up talking to them
regarding career options, and even if I did I'd phrase things more like "OK,
so you've got a fun couple of years ahead of you; let me recommend some
resources for learning more about programming" rather than being contemptuous
of that. Our industry does way too much of that; no need to add to it. Plus,
we intend to be in business in 3 years, and even starting from "can't
Fizzbuzz" if you're dedicated you could be a _really_ interesting person to
try placing in 3 years, so I'll happily spend a few minutes buying a call
option.

(I guess that's closer in actual practice to a put option, as I'd be selling
the candidate's availability rather than buying it, but you get what I mean by
the joke.)

------
Grue3
I remember this thing from back when it was launched. I only solved like 3
levels, but I did it entirely in Lisp. Which brings me to the following
observation: since there's no way to see the source code, it's not possible to
check if the person legitimately solved the task or just used somebody else's
code.

~~~
linuxfan2718
your source code is checked on the last level

------
nickpsecurity
Interesting. I must have misread something early on because I thought
Startfighter was launched to improve recruiting of coders and stuff. I didn't
know about games and such. Does that factor into recruiting or is there a nice
post showing exactly what it's about? Tptacek?

~~~
patio11
This is our perpetual messaging conundrum: are we a game company or a
recruiting company? Yes.

When we talk to our clients, we're a recruiting company which uses online
challenges to a) source and b) pre-qualify very good engineering candidates.

When we talk to engineers, we're a company which makes fun engineering-y
things you can do on the Internet. (Hack a stock exchange through it's REST
API! Code a market maker! Buffer overrun a C program running on an AVR
microprocessor to corrupt a FIX message to steal a billion dollars!) And we
can also, potentially, introduce you to a job if that is interesting to you.
Our estimation is approximately 95% of our users are not in the market for a
job at this exact moment in time.

You can see the two-sided messaging on our website:

For companies:
[https://www.starfighters.io/approach](https://www.starfighters.io/approach)

For engineers:
[https://www.starfighters.io/players](https://www.starfighters.io/players)

~~~
chrisseaton
I understand the trading game aspect and the recruiting aspect... but then why
is it called 'Starfighter'? That name doesn't seem to be related to either and
makes the think there's some third aspect I don't know about.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Let me try this one cuz I was hoping tptacek and patrick were cool enough for
it to be true:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7NaxBxFWSo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7NaxBxFWSo)

They used a game to recruit warriors to protect the galaxy or universe or
something. Lost with my memory. I remember loving the movie when I was
younger. Gotta rewatch it some time.

------
gist
Meanwhile starfighter.io points a job search page which shows jobs from
indeed.com...

------
davidw
"This site can’t be reached" right now.

Interesting - I can ssh to a server of mine and read it.

So maybe it's getting blocked by the firewall here. If that's happening here,
perhaps it's happening elsewhere too.

------
tehabe
Confusing, at first I thought this was about the F-104 Starfighter, than I
thought it was a new science-fiction computer game but I never thought about a
recruiting firm.

I hope I'm not alone.

------
daxorid
Question to the proprietors: How would you prevent proliferation of solutions
to levels on github, etc, as has happened with Thomas's cryptopals challenges?

------
diziet
How many users have you folks gotten to register?

~~~
patio11
Only about ~40,000 or so, but I wouldn't pick that as one of the top three
metrics I'd be interested in. It's like hits. I don't even know how many hits
we've gotten, and frankly no answer to that question matters to me.

(Good candidates for metrics that I should be worrying about might be "number
of players who hit our internal bar for outreach", "percentage of that
population who would like Starfighter to give them options", "count of
successful placements", and "revenue." You'll understand if I don't publish a
/stats page with those numbers updated in real time, even though the thought
certainly crossed my mind a time or three.)

~~~
zeemonkee3
I was looking for the most important metric in the article - how many jobs
have you filled so far?

I have limited bandwidth for free-time coding, and anything has to compete
with my own side projects and "list of things I need to learn/revise to keep
head above water in notoriously mercurial industry".

If I were to invest time in Starfighter, I'd need to know that, assuming I do
my part and finish the game with a reasonable score, that a) it will land me
an interview and b) it will do sufficient pre-vetting of my skills so that the
interviewer doesn't need to throw whiteboard curveballs. If I saw some kind of
metric on job placement I might think it's worth spending time on. Otherwise
my time would be better invested in improving my Github profile and resume and
building my network.

------
partisan
@patio11 Do you play starfighters? How do you ensure that the product is fun
for the end user?

------
daveguy
Blog post is crashing my mobile browser: chrome on galaxy S5. Anyone else
having this problem?

~~~
codinghorror
Hmm that device is modern enough, latest Chrome version? Any plugins?

~~~
daveguy
Most recent chrome. No mobile plugins (that I know of). Coming back a day
later (after a reset) the site is slow to load and scroll, but is not crashing
every time.

Maybe just the forum webapp (Discourse) that is just too heavy for mobile like
aeorg mentioned.

~~~
codinghorror
Weird, the Galaxy s5 should have enough power to run modern JavaScript apps.
Have not seen this reported elsewhere in the network.

------
cm2187
Another website that can't just display some html without javascript...

------
galistoca
Any competent developer I would like to hire would be spending time building
stuff with their skills instead of playing games with it. No disrespect to the
players, but just saying if you're good at something you should use your gift
to produce something useful instead of using it to consume what someone else
built.

~~~
danielvf
Hey now! :)

Tinkering with things is a fantastic way to learn. And a desire to tinker for
the sake of understanding is a really good tell for a smart problem solver.

Every job I've had has been because I played around with some technology for
fun, and then ran into people who had a need for it.

Playing with code can also be relaxing. In my normal work, the code that I
write needs to be reliable, maintainable, and performant. Buy playing
stockfighter is a way to have fun without the burden of any that. I can do
really stupid stuff, just for the joy of it. Heck, I hooked up a spam filter
to one of the levels and won. Or built a minecraft stockfighter hologram
visualizer.

