8 ms·

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 s

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.

elliotec 10y ago
I'm with you. This really just seems like another annoying step in the broken process that will add more pain.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  I think the engineers that it is aimed at are the ones for which it will not add more pain: specifically, I gather that the entire idea is to have something that provides a useful input to a recruiting process (even if it doesn't completely replace, e.g., interviews, it ideally at least replaces coding tests in interviews with something simultaneously less tedious and more real-world) while actually being something interesting enough on its own to engineers that many of them, if it existed and wasn't tied to recruiting, would engage with it anyway for personal development and/or entertainment. (The name being a reference to The Last Starfighter sort of implies this: you play the game for fun, win, and someone drops out of the sky with a job offer doing what you were doing in the game, but in a non-game environment.) Obviously, making this work requires both convincing hiring managers that it can replace at least some of the annoying technical parts of the hiring process, and developing engaging games that can engage, collectively, a sufficient pool of engineering talent. Sounds like the concern is that, to date, they may have focused too much on the latter and not enough on the former, but while that's a challenge, I don't think it has to be an insurmountable one.
  - myblake 10y ago
    This really hits the nail on the head. The problem with onsites is really the "quick prove to me you're smart" type of tests that both are time intensive and also very frustrating to a lot of people in that they're often calibrated with a heavy bias towards avoiding false positives with nothing to even track the amount of false negatives. Success with something like start fighter provides a reasonable benchmark for the latter which is in itself pretty valuable. The thing to consider though is that it would be crazy to take a job without going in to meet your potential future coworkers. It's also a quicker and less unpleasant process (and more of a two way street) to try and make sure it's a good cultural match. Thus, solving a bunch of the problems with technical interviews shouldn't actually eliminate onsites, it should rather make them more effective and less awful.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      I think one of the benefits is that it changes those onsite interview from something akin to "come in and we''l see if you are worthy" to "come meet with us and we'll mutually see if there's a good culture and attitude fit" since your skillset has mostly been vetted by that point.
kasey_junk 10y ago
It seems like the obvious answer is "if its not fun for candidates to do for no other reason than its fun, then starfighters will fail".
pmikesell 10y ago
For some background: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ Part of the idea is that there are some great devs out there who don't have the resume to "just email the company and get a phone screen". I think if you look at their history with MicroCorruption (https://microcorruption.com/login https://microcorruption.com/login) you'll see that this isn't just a recruiting tool - it's supposed to be more of an interesting programming challenge, something you'd want to spend time on whether there was a hiring company at the end or not. Long term, I hope that after StarFighter gets more history and credibility with companies, they actually will reduce or remove technical parts of the onsite interview in lieu of StockFighter results. I spent time with MicroCorruption, and I plan to spend some time on StockFighter, and I'm not looking for a job.
- cheez 10y ago
  This is a good point. In my youth, I did not pursue the opportunities (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) I had for various reasons. Turned out, this was a bad idea. However, the "take home" coding interview has turned out to put me heads and shoulders above the rest. There has only been one take home interview that I have not done well on, and that is because I was pressured for time - they told me I could take 8 hours, but I only had 1 to spare. Because of this, I have had opportunities open to me that people would kill for and received an offer or interview almost every time. My personal opinion is that these things do have their place, but they will likely find that only a few types of people will give this the time of day: 1. People who are bored 2. People who need a shortcut to a job interview 3. People who are diamonds in the rough Out of these, only one type of person (3) will be greatly valued.
nialo 10y ago
For me personally, as someone who has finished all the existing levels, just skipping the resume screen is actually a big value add (at least in principle, assuming they get the recruiting side worked out). I also really enjoyed writing the software for the trading levels. On the other hand, I don't have a CS degree and currently work as a mechanical engineer, so the resume screen is relatively harder for me.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I've spent over 15 years in either a senior sysadmin, software engineer, or combined position at multiple companies, but never once once interviewed for such a position, even though I do have a CS degree. Going through an interview process is not something I would look forward to (to put it mildly).
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    You either interview explicitly or implicitly - it still comes down to five minutes where your new boss evaluates the real you and figures out where to put you. If you go into this eyes open you can control it. Put your best foot forward.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      Well, when the real you moved up from a prior position, or has consulted for the company for a few years, or has worked at the company multiple times in the past and kept in touch with old managers, sometimes it's less of a "let's discuss whether it will work" and more of a "you mean you're finally saying yes?"
joncalhoun 10y ago
I think the benefit of TripleByte is that they will help you find companies where you will perform well based on what they value in candidates, and they will (maybe?) help prep you for those interviews. You arguably don't have the time to interview at 10+ companies, so having them help filter it down to the 3-4 you are most likely to pass interviews with means you potentially have more competing offers with less overall time spent interviewing. They may also be able to help you find companies you hadn't heard of that would be a good fit for you. Eg if you didn't know company x is hiring type y devs then the relationship could prove beneficial there as well. That said, I hope they can start offering more value over time. For example, if TripleByte could not only tell you where you will succeed during interviews, but also help you understand how offers are likely to vary that would be valuable. Eg "company A would likely offer someone at your level $130-150k salary and y options, while company B typically offers more generous options, but a salary range of $90-110k". If your min salary is $120k, then this helps you prioritize where you interview based on what is important to you. EDIT Editing to add that regardless, I don't think you are their target developer. Anyone who can get an interview with these companies is likely going to do just that, while people who cannot for whatever reason (new grad, no flashy names on resume, etc) are more likely to benefit from using a service like TripleByte or Starfighter where if they do well they almost guarantee they get to interview instead of sending out a resume and never hearing back.
- Harj 10y ago
  That said, I hope they can start offering more value over time. We currently do help with thinking through offer details. We've been building up a database of what offer ranges are and help people use these to value their offers (equity ranges in particular are opaque and tough to unpack). We do also get candidates ready for interviews by providing detailed feedback on how they did on our process (for many people this is the first personal interviewing feedback they've heard). Longer term there are many more things we'd like to help with as we keep gathering more data. The one I'm most excited about is using data from how our engineers perform at companies over time to improve our screening process and make predictions about success at a company post joining, not just on the interview process.
patio11 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Harj 10y ago
Getting a phone interview by contacting a company is easy if you have the right resume credentials. If not, you need someone to vouch for you to even get in the door. That's what we're doing for engineers who are strong but lack these credentials and the connections to be referred. We find that engineers who apply to us even if they have those resume credentials are doing so for two reasons: (1) People only have bandwidth to talk with a few companies. We have enough data across companies to filter out the ones you won't be a technical fit for. This saves the wasted time of failed onsites, which as you say is the bane of existence for programmers. (2) Finding companies you wouldn't have otherwise heard about or realized were an interesting option for you. We can especially help here with engineers interested in joining smaller companies that haven't had breakout success yet. Traditional recruiters only help with getting you an introduction to an arbitrary company (usually whichever responded first to an email blast). We strongly believe that a recruiting service which does intelligent matching provides a lot of value for both candidates and companies (we wrote more about that here: http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-project http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-projec...).
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  > Getting a phone interview by contacting a company is easy if you have the right resume credentials. That's the problem. Resumes shouldn't matter. The capability to solve programs through an understanding of software-- which is often acquired without going through a resume-building path-- is what matters.
  - Harj 10y ago
    We agree, that's why our technical interviews are done blind without knowing anything about the credentials of a candidate.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Serious question though: what steps on good paths are there that you can't put on your resume? You can totally list projects you've worked on, or some other stuff which isn't "MS in Comp Sci at Stanford" I feel kind of the same way about resumes for hiring as you, but they're pretty good entry filters: if you can't be bothered to write 300 words (or, you know, reuse one with a slightly different intro), why should the company bother talking to you? I think this is all part of the "avoiding false positives" mindset that comes with recruiting. Since recruiting people is really expensive!
godzillabrennus 10y ago
Http://www.joinjune.com - gets you paid to hear offers.

elliotec 10y ago

I'm with you. This really just seems like another annoying step in the broken process that will add more pain.

dragonwriter 10y ago
I think the engineers that it is aimed at are the ones for which it will not add more pain: specifically, I gather that the entire idea is to have something that provides a useful input to a recruiting process (even if it doesn't completely replace, e.g., interviews, it ideally at least replaces coding tests in interviews with something simultaneously less tedious and more real-world) while actually being something interesting enough on its own to engineers that many of them, if it existed and wasn't tied to recruiting, would engage with it anyway for personal development and/or entertainment. (The name being a reference to The Last Starfighter sort of implies this: you play the game for fun, win, and someone drops out of the sky with a job offer doing what you were doing in the game, but in a non-game environment.) Obviously, making this work requires both convincing hiring managers that it can replace at least some of the annoying technical parts of the hiring process, and developing engaging games that can engage, collectively, a sufficient pool of engineering talent. Sounds like the concern is that, to date, they may have focused too much on the latter and not enough on the former, but while that's a challenge, I don't think it has to be an insurmountable one.
- myblake 10y ago
  This really hits the nail on the head. The problem with onsites is really the "quick prove to me you're smart" type of tests that both are time intensive and also very frustrating to a lot of people in that they're often calibrated with a heavy bias towards avoiding false positives with nothing to even track the amount of false negatives. Success with something like start fighter provides a reasonable benchmark for the latter which is in itself pretty valuable. The thing to consider though is that it would be crazy to take a job without going in to meet your potential future coworkers. It's also a quicker and less unpleasant process (and more of a two way street) to try and make sure it's a good cultural match. Thus, solving a bunch of the problems with technical interviews shouldn't actually eliminate onsites, it should rather make them more effective and less awful.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I think one of the benefits is that it changes those onsite interview from something akin to "come in and we''l see if you are worthy" to "come meet with us and we'll mutually see if there's a good culture and attitude fit" since your skillset has mostly been vetted by that point.

kasey_junk 10y ago

It seems like the obvious answer is "if its not fun for candidates to do for no other reason than its fun, then starfighters will fail".

pmikesell 10y ago

For some background: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ Part of the idea is that there are some great devs out there who don't have the resume to "just email the company and get a phone screen". I think if you look at their history with MicroCorruption (https://microcorruption.com/login https://microcorruption.com/login) you'll see that this isn't just a recruiting tool - it's supposed to be more of an interesting programming challenge, something you'd want to spend time on whether there was a hiring company at the end or not. Long term, I hope that after StarFighter gets more history and credibility with companies, they actually will reduce or remove technical parts of the onsite interview in lieu of StockFighter results. I spent time with MicroCorruption, and I plan to spend some time on StockFighter, and I'm not looking for a job.

cheez 10y ago
This is a good point. In my youth, I did not pursue the opportunities (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) I had for various reasons. Turned out, this was a bad idea. However, the "take home" coding interview has turned out to put me heads and shoulders above the rest. There has only been one take home interview that I have not done well on, and that is because I was pressured for time - they told me I could take 8 hours, but I only had 1 to spare. Because of this, I have had opportunities open to me that people would kill for and received an offer or interview almost every time. My personal opinion is that these things do have their place, but they will likely find that only a few types of people will give this the time of day: 1. People who are bored 2. People who need a shortcut to a job interview 3. People who are diamonds in the rough Out of these, only one type of person (3) will be greatly valued.

nialo 10y ago

For me personally, as someone who has finished all the existing levels, just skipping the resume screen is actually a big value add (at least in principle, assuming they get the recruiting side worked out). I also really enjoyed writing the software for the trading levels. On the other hand, I don't have a CS degree and currently work as a mechanical engineer, so the resume screen is relatively harder for me.

kbenson 10y ago
I've spent over 15 years in either a senior sysadmin, software engineer, or combined position at multiple companies, but never once once interviewed for such a position, even though I do have a CS degree. Going through an interview process is not something I would look forward to (to put it mildly).
- EdHominem 10y ago
  You either interview explicitly or implicitly - it still comes down to five minutes where your new boss evaluates the real you and figures out where to put you. If you go into this eyes open you can control it. Put your best foot forward.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    Well, when the real you moved up from a prior position, or has consulted for the company for a few years, or has worked at the company multiple times in the past and kept in touch with old managers, sometimes it's less of a "let's discuss whether it will work" and more of a "you mean you're finally saying yes?"

joncalhoun 10y ago

I think the benefit of TripleByte is that they will help you find companies where you will perform well based on what they value in candidates, and they will (maybe?) help prep you for those interviews. You arguably don't have the time to interview at 10+ companies, so having them help filter it down to the 3-4 you are most likely to pass interviews with means you potentially have more competing offers with less overall time spent interviewing. They may also be able to help you find companies you hadn't heard of that would be a good fit for you. Eg if you didn't know company x is hiring type y devs then the relationship could prove beneficial there as well. That said, I hope they can start offering more value over time. For example, if TripleByte could not only tell you where you will succeed during interviews, but also help you understand how offers are likely to vary that would be valuable. Eg "company A would likely offer someone at your level $130-150k salary and y options, while company B typically offers more generous options, but a salary range of $90-110k". If your min salary is $120k, then this helps you prioritize where you interview based on what is important to you. EDIT Editing to add that regardless, I don't think you are their target developer. Anyone who can get an interview with these companies is likely going to do just that, while people who cannot for whatever reason (new grad, no flashy names on resume, etc) are more likely to benefit from using a service like TripleByte or Starfighter where if they do well they almost guarantee they get to interview instead of sending out a resume and never hearing back.

Harj 10y ago
That said, I hope they can start offering more value over time. We currently do help with thinking through offer details. We've been building up a database of what offer ranges are and help people use these to value their offers (equity ranges in particular are opaque and tough to unpack). We do also get candidates ready for interviews by providing detailed feedback on how they did on our process (for many people this is the first personal interviewing feedback they've heard). Longer term there are many more things we'd like to help with as we keep gathering more data. The one I'm most excited about is using data from how our engineers perform at companies over time to improve our screening process and make predictions about success at a company post joining, not just on the interview process.

patio11 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Harj 10y ago

Getting a phone interview by contacting a company is easy if you have the right resume credentials. If not, you need someone to vouch for you to even get in the door. That's what we're doing for engineers who are strong but lack these credentials and the connections to be referred. We find that engineers who apply to us even if they have those resume credentials are doing so for two reasons: (1) People only have bandwidth to talk with a few companies. We have enough data across companies to filter out the ones you won't be a technical fit for. This saves the wasted time of failed onsites, which as you say is the bane of existence for programmers. (2) Finding companies you wouldn't have otherwise heard about or realized were an interesting option for you. We can especially help here with engineers interested in joining smaller companies that haven't had breakout success yet. Traditional recruiters only help with getting you an introduction to an arbitrary company (usually whichever responded first to an email blast). We strongly believe that a recruiting service which does intelligent matching provides a lot of value for both candidates and companies (we wrote more about that here: http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-project http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-projec...).

CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
> Getting a phone interview by contacting a company is easy if you have the right resume credentials. That's the problem. Resumes shouldn't matter. The capability to solve programs through an understanding of software-- which is often acquired without going through a resume-building path-- is what matters.
- Harj 10y ago
  We agree, that's why our technical interviews are done blind without knowing anything about the credentials of a candidate.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Serious question though: what steps on good paths are there that you can't put on your resume? You can totally list projects you've worked on, or some other stuff which isn't "MS in Comp Sci at Stanford" I feel kind of the same way about resumes for hiring as you, but they're pretty good entry filters: if you can't be bothered to write 300 words (or, you know, reuse one with a slightly different intro), why should the company bother talking to you? I think this is all part of the "avoiding false positives" mindset that comes with recruiting. Since recruiting people is really expensive!

godzillabrennus 10y ago

Http://www.joinjune.com - gets you paid to hear offers.