Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Perhaps you aren't the target market. That doesn't mean the market doesn't exist.

> 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.

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?).

Do you use contingent recruiters now? If so, how do they qualify their leads to earn their 20%? Do you think that that process is better/worse than the starfighter approach?

This also doesn't make a lot of sense for the candidate. Why do a ton of free work (a "game") if I'm going to have to spend a bunch of time in a technical interview anyway?

>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

But I bet many of the engineers you know hate collecting offers they aren't necessarily interested in, just to accumulate leverage (and honestly, to derisk the hire, create FOMO - "X has a competing offer from Y; I can see all the cracks in our hiring process, but I bet Y's is awesome!").

That takes precious energy. There's randomness in each interview. And lots of people hate current interviewing fashions (read any thread on the topic here). But engineers often love doing games & coding puzzles for fun - which proxy well to dimensions of technical aptitude.

Imagine this world: "As a software engineer, why would I even consider wasting my time with your technical screening process, when I can simply get as many role-fit discussions as I want, with the top 10 companies in my field (that are of course using starfighters.io), with my high score record that I can use for leverage/negotiation, without your boring programming-fundamentals interview wasting my days off?"

Can Starfighter execute on this? Probably too early to tell, looks hard to get started. But can you see the potential? I think I can.

As someone who is a programmer in finance, but not trading, it is difficult for me to wrap my head around this as well. If this is specifically targeting programmers and companies who are interested specifically in the trading aspect of finance, then I guess it could make some sense. I don't know, that isn't my world. But in the other areas of finance, things are heavily regulated. Both within the company and from outside. You want people with clean backgrounds (no history of financial issues/bankruptcy, no criminal record) who can write solid code to reliably transfer billions of dollars around the world on a daily basis.

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