6 ms·
Why were you unable to keep StockFighter running?
by tabbott 10y ago
Why were you unable to keep StockFighter running?
- tptacek 10y agoI've written this before on HN, so will re-share it to buy more time before completing a big write-up on Starfighter: All three of us are software developers. We like developers. We spend a lot of time talking to developers, in particular about their careers. We had no trouble finding clients, but a lot of trouble convincing clients to take the CTF model seriously; virtually all of them wanted us to function like a traditional recruiter, offering 10 candidate profiles for every open req. That's a job that is 90% saying "no" to people. It was dispiriting watching developers we knew to be strong get rejected for positions because they didn't have the right resume, or didn't solve some pen-and-paper programming puzzle quickly enough. It was a drag for all of us. It made us unhappy. Life is too short.
- sogen 10y agoWhy didn't you listen to your customers and do just that? I mean, change some puzzles/tests or simply recommend someone to the job if you knew he had the skills? Wasn't this what you were solving? Matching positions to great devs.
- tptacek 10y agoNo, that's not what we were solving. If we wanted to be conventional dial-for-dollars recruiters, we would have done that. I understand and appreciate the mentality that your comment comes from. But the premise of our startup wasn't Steve Blank-style customer development, where we started with a vague idea of the space we wanted to be in and then worked with customer prospects to figure out exactly what product we would end up building. Rather: the company we started was an experiment, a very opinionated one, to see if we could port a hiring model that had worked extremely well for us at one company to a larger set of companies. I think there's a way to make that model work, but I've become convinced that "contingency recruiter" isn't the way to deliver it.
- jc4p 10y agoInnovation in the recruiting space is a really hard task. Most recruiters would rather throw money at yet-another-job-board-and-funnel-source than try something unique which requires putting in extra time and effort. The last "innovation" I've witnessed in the space was the Hired model, and everyone is trying different versions of that now. It's a hurtful model that abuses the inefficiencies and lack-of-transparency in the two sided market. (For anyone wondering what I mean: When you sign up on Hired they ask you what your preferred salary range is, then, as of last time I checked, they show _that exact value_ to the companies looking through prospective candidates. So guess what the first offer you get is? Not what a "fair" market rate is, but exactly what you typed into the sign-up form.) I do a lot of talking to recruiters as part of helping them use our Stack Overflow Talent product, and honestly it feels like taking crazy pills half the time. Having to answer "why?" to "You need to at very least explain what your company actually does, or maybe the tech stack you use" makes me feel insane. I loved Starfighter, but thinking back what I liked most about it was the content you and Erin and Patrick wrote about it. Your point about "life is too short" is very very poignant. I guess the whole point of this comment is for me to say I completely respect that decision, you all did the right thing. Trying to convince people who would rather just throw more money at a wall than try something unique to use your unique product is an awful feeling. I'm very glad to hear your new project is easier to make money off :)
- user5994461 10y agoThe last innovation I witnessed was Hacker Rank. I'd better do a stupid coding test online that have to schedule a phone call during working hours with a guy who just want to get away from the phone call and could barely present his company and what he's recruiting for.
- sidlls 10y agoMy view is that Hacker Rank just perpetuates the "textbook academia" and "trivia question" model of interviewing, except it automates out part of that step. If that's innovative, my bar is too high, I guess.
- sanderjd 10y agoI'm not him, but there are already like a hundred companies doing that. All it has accomplished is one more hoop to jump through in front of all the hoops that already existed. It has only made a ridiculous process more ridiculous. I think they were trying to make the process less ridiculous, not just be yet another hoop. But it seems like people don't really want that.
- hibikir 10y agoIt's perfectly possible to make money recruiting by matching exactly what your customers want, but at that point, you are exactly like every other recruitment firm out there. What separates you? Asking people to do awesome CTFs doesn't really help of success at CTF doesn't line up with success at passing your typical Silicon Valley interview. Anyone that has spent time working outside of firms that hire this way (which includes stockfighter's founders), realizes that the technical interview today is very expensive, throws away a lot of candidates, stifles all axis of diversity, and ultimately it's not really all that predictive of on the job performance. A CTF is not an ideal predictor either, but I'd argue it's better. Stockfighter found that their best candidates by the CTF were receiving terrible ratings by the companies they send them to, because they lacked the shibboleths required to pass the interviews. They'd only have success if the company filtering after being presented a candidate was minimal, and then they saw that yes, the job performance of the candidates that were good at the CTFs were at least as good as those that came through the traditional recruiting process. Apparently there wasn't enough appetite for that kind of process, and thus, Stockfighter made no sense as a company. That's a pity, because I share their view that technical interviewing is broken. I just don't see how we can systematically improve it without the kind of data that you can only get at huge companies that hire thousands of engineers a year.
- emilburzo 10y agoNow I understand why neither you or Patrick ever replied to my email asking about some career advice -- I managed to ask at the worst possible time, a bit before closing Starfighter so probably when you were really unhappy. Sorry about that horrible timing.
- tptacek 10y agoDon't ever apologize for reaching out! As it happens, we're all in a very happy place right now (Patrick is having a blast with Stripe, and Erin and I started a company with two friends that is booked solid through 2017), so if you're still looking for advice, we're all happy to help.
- tclAmockingbird 10y agoWhen you do your write-up, I'd be interested to hear more about the mismatch between what you thought your clients wanted and what their eventual actions demonstrated they wanted. Could this mismatch have been detected in the early planning of the company?
- tptacek 10y agoOh, you were asking a simpler question: "why is the site down?" Sorry! We'll probably put it back on the air at some point in 2017. It's down for a lot of little reasons (inefficient AWS configuration, occasional need to babysit, the need to adjust a lot of little messaging things around the site so as not to make people think we're still recruiting off it, &c) that add up to enough hassle that it's easier to have it be down for now.