
Ask HN: Experience with job hunting on starfighters.io? - ReadingInBed
I am curious to hear your experience hiring or getting hired using https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.starfighters.io.
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danielvf
I'm the third person to finish all the current Stockfighter levels. (I also
coded a MineCraft visualizer, a physical hardware stock trading device with an
ESP8622 plus cardboard and duct tape, and helped organize PVP games.) I had
fun.

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.

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djb_hackernews
So you play the game (proving your talents by finishing) and then start from
square one in the companies interview pipeline? I thought the whole point was
to solve that problem?

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matheist
No, the way it worked for me was that I had a short non-technical chat with an
internal recruiter and then we went straight to an onsite interview.

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djb_hackernews
That sounds exactly like square one in the interview process...

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matheist
No, square one would have been several phone screens if they liked my resume
at all. So it got me to around square four or five.

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jnbiche
Just to be clear, did the on-site interviews consist of additional technical
interviews, or just cultural/general interviews?

~~~
matheist
Technical interviews.

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tptacek
Hey, all. Thanks for asking about this. I can give a pretty simple answer
here:

We are still figuring this stuff out. As an actual business, it's early days
for us. We have a thingy we send out to candidates who want to consider
working with us that goes into this in some detail.

You should play with the Starfighter CTF stuff if you are interested in CTF
stuff (or trading, or, any day now, low-level programming and AVR). You should
_not_ do our CTF stuff if you're just trying to get a better job. Maybe
someday in the future, if we're wildly successful, this will change, but right
now the best mental model for us is "we're a goofy game company that does some
recruiting on the side".

I have a lot of strong feelings about hiring process, ineffective and inhumane
interviews, work sample testing, and recruiting underserved demographics. I've
written some of them up. I think I've also given the impression that what
we're trying to do with Starfighter is to singlehandedly fix all of that.
Nope!

If you're doing large-scale hiring and you want advice on how to structure
your process based on our experience doing hiring (for instance, at
NCC/Matasano), please feel free to reach out.

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patio11
To elaborate on Thomas' answer:

I got a head start on working with players to get them jobs. (All of the SF
founders do this, in principal.)

I rate my execution on that process at about 3/10 right now. (I'm very good at
writing introductions in a way that gets hiring managers excited about
candidates; I'm terrrrrrible at follow-through with candidates at present and
have been juggling too many balls for the last several months.)

I'm hoping to get better at it, rapidly, and then replace myself with a short
shell script, dedicated hiring engineers, or both.

Things are exactly as fluid as Thomas said.

At present, the modal conversation with me goes something like "Hey I noticed
you did $PICK_A_THING. That impressed me and I read your solution. Do you want
to have a chat about the game and about potential job options?" If so, proceed
to 30 minute phone call about what you liked/didn't like about the game, about
your background and interest, and about what you want in terms of a job. If I
have a good option for you, I tell you about it. If you agree it is a good
option, I write a three paragraph email to someone who has agreed that they
trust my judgment on engineers saying why I think they should interview you.

Again: execution ability on this, not fantastic at present. The biggest issues
are followup, followup, and followup, for example if e.g. the company I intro
you to doesn't immediately jump on the intro. Aspirationally I should bang
down their door; in practice, that ball is a ball I often drop. If you have an
interview(s) but the interview(s) doesn't result in an offer, I should
aspirationally get in touch with "OK, let's debug that, and let me introduce
you to some other options." That ball also one I'm not great at, particularly
as I've been traveling for the last week and a half.

We're very very new at this, and we're at least as bad at recruiting as I was
at writing stock exchanges before I actually wrote a stock exchange. Hoping to
get this nailed down over the course of the next few weeks/months and then
scale it out.

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airza
I finished the levels during the beta and have the first unique badge (a
timing attack no longer possible on the last level). I was looking for a
really specific set of job requirements and patrick both 1)was totally willing
to accommodate and 2)really on my side during the application process. They
got me a great interview at a large, well known company- who didn't end up
making an offer, but had a great hiring process.

It was overall great and exactly what it said on the tin.

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karterk
>They got me a great interview at a large, well known company- who didn't end
up making an offer, but had a great hiring process.

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.

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brianwawok
Clearly passing a game doesn't mean hired right?

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matheist
I finished the levels during beta. I had already been in communication with
Patrick via email (giving beta feedback), and after I finished the last level
I sent him a note saying that I was actively looking for work.

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.

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patio11
_I think they 've been connecting candidates with companies in serial._

Literally changing on a day-to-day basis as I try things out.

Congratulations on the new adventure! (And pip pip for Triplebyte.)

~~~
matheist
Thanks, and I hope trying new things goes well!

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solutionyogi
This comment is tangentially related to the topic.

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?

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booop
The levels are fun but if you're job hunting and that's your primary
objective, there are better places to hunt.

