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Will you be allowing anonymous participation? By this I mean, the article uses some creepy language as only a company enthusiastic about its power to broker re

Will you be allowing anonymous participation? By this I mean, the article uses some creepy language as only a company enthusiastic about its power to broker reputation can. >>We can tell you exactly what happened when your candidates tried to implement a REST API. What, are you going to keep a record of the time I fiddled with it for an afternoon and then use that to disqualify me from a job? You say elsewhere about MicroCorruption: >Microcorruption player identities were totally private. There's no way for a recruiter to look someone up, unless they used a very-identifiable username. Sounds like a good starting point, but what if I don't want my report card stored and used to compare with other people? What if I don't want to feel like my performance is owned by you? >>We assess for skill first, passively as players play our games and then actively. Our founders — talented technologists — personally reconstruct candidates’ solutions and evaluate them. If I don't have any control over how and when my information is going to be monitored, I'm forced into an ugly position where I have to treat the whole thing as part of my career and perform competitively. The sense of relaxed exploration is killed, the idea of treating it like a college course or project isn't viable, and honestly I begin to resent the project. Alternatively, I play on an anonymous account, and then if I decide to use my information about me in a professional setting, I'm best served by creating a new account and just redoing everything. Edit: I should say that the idea really excites me and I'd love to learn in this format.

patio11 12y ago
Will you be allowing anonymous participation? Yes. You can participate anonymously or pseudonymously. I think we say in three places that we only give out contact details if candidates ask us to. What, are you going to keep a record of the time I fiddled with it for an afternoon and then use that to disqualify me from a job? Our incentive is to find reasons why you're hireable, not reasons why you're not. What if I don't want to feel like my performance is owned by you? Your performance is owned by you -- we won't have copyright to your code or anything. Signal we gather, though? Owned by us. That's the trade: we give you a really fun game to enjoy, but we control the universe you play in and, inside that universe, we control everything and see everything. If you do not like this trade, that's your prerogative and I respect your opinion. Nobody will force you to play Starfighter.
- throwawaymaroon 12y ago
  Edit: The following is a neutral appraisal, not a criticism of either the implicit or explicit variety. If you feel that it is an accusation or a criticism, I would suggest that indicates something unrealistic in how you view business negotiations. As patio said, this is a trade between interested parties. Generosity is therefore expected to be limited. --- Fair enough. I just wanted it on record that this is a business transaction for you, not a generous educational endeavor. Some people want to pretend that they're in it to make the world a better place when that's not truly their absolute top priority. They're probably asking "Why can't it be both?" when I say that this is business, not generosity. One simply can't have multiple top priorities, particularly with profit and generosity; generosity is practically defined as something that doesn't profit. Something like one of your (patio's) blog posts are given generously in that there is no formal expectation/obligation on a reader to 'give back' some asset, for instance. Thank you for your clarification.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    If your top priority is providing a service to the community (e.g., education), you need a sustainable support model, whether its as a business or through someone else's charitable donations. If your top priority is a profit-making business, you need to provide a product that is (or, at a minimum, people perceive as) valuable. Perhaps you can't have two top priorities (I actually am not sure I agree that this is the case, I don't see that it is actually impossible for two priorities to be equal in priority and above all others), but even if you can't, its quite possible for "business" to be a means and "education" to be the goal, and vice versa. They aren't incompatible.
    - throwawaymaroon 12y ago
      Which is why I was careful to prepend "generous" to every instance of "education" in my response. Starfighter isn't generosity of knowledge, it's barter of it. Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their business is subservient to their idealistic educational aims.

patio11 12y ago

Will you be allowing anonymous participation? Yes. You can participate anonymously or pseudonymously. I think we say in three places that we only give out contact details if candidates ask us to. What, are you going to keep a record of the time I fiddled with it for an afternoon and then use that to disqualify me from a job? Our incentive is to find reasons why you're hireable, not reasons why you're not. What if I don't want to feel like my performance is owned by you? Your performance is owned by you -- we won't have copyright to your code or anything. Signal we gather, though? Owned by us. That's the trade: we give you a really fun game to enjoy, but we control the universe you play in and, inside that universe, we control everything and see everything. If you do not like this trade, that's your prerogative and I respect your opinion. Nobody will force you to play Starfighter.

throwawaymaroon 12y ago
Edit: The following is a neutral appraisal, not a criticism of either the implicit or explicit variety. If you feel that it is an accusation or a criticism, I would suggest that indicates something unrealistic in how you view business negotiations. As patio said, this is a trade between interested parties. Generosity is therefore expected to be limited. --- Fair enough. I just wanted it on record that this is a business transaction for you, not a generous educational endeavor. Some people want to pretend that they're in it to make the world a better place when that's not truly their absolute top priority. They're probably asking "Why can't it be both?" when I say that this is business, not generosity. One simply can't have multiple top priorities, particularly with profit and generosity; generosity is practically defined as something that doesn't profit. Something like one of your (patio's) blog posts are given generously in that there is no formal expectation/obligation on a reader to 'give back' some asset, for instance. Thank you for your clarification.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  If your top priority is providing a service to the community (e.g., education), you need a sustainable support model, whether its as a business or through someone else's charitable donations. If your top priority is a profit-making business, you need to provide a product that is (or, at a minimum, people perceive as) valuable. Perhaps you can't have two top priorities (I actually am not sure I agree that this is the case, I don't see that it is actually impossible for two priorities to be equal in priority and above all others), but even if you can't, its quite possible for "business" to be a means and "education" to be the goal, and vice versa. They aren't incompatible.
  - throwawaymaroon 12y ago
    Which is why I was careful to prepend "generous" to every instance of "education" in my response. Starfighter isn't generosity of knowledge, it's barter of it. Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their business is subservient to their idealistic educational aims.