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>Unfortunately, the technology industry is fundamentally unserious as to how it presently identifies and employs engineers. Ok, so lets replace whiteboarding a

>Unfortunately, the technology industry is fundamentally unserious as to how it presently identifies and employs engineers. Ok, so lets replace whiteboarding ancient algorithms and useless trick questions with a capture the flag game!! That'll make the industry seem less "unserious." This is so unfathomably ridiculous. I can't believe you're marketing this as an interview replacement. If I get asked what my "Starfighter score" is before a job interview, I will be running as fast as I can in the other direction before they finish their sentence. There will be people who become great at this game, and if (god help us) this gains momentum, they will get jobs. I can only hope the rest who are developing applications and actually writing programs will come out on top, and employers will recognize that some people want to build things and not just improve their ranking in a game.

tptacek 12y ago
Nobody is going to ask you what your "Starfighter score" is. Without opening up a pointless vein of second-guessing about Patrick's writing: I think the timing of this post has led people to believe that this right here is my answer to The Hiring Post. No. The Hiring Post itself contains what I believe the answers to The Hiring Post are. There are two halves of the recruiting problem: OUTREACH and QUALIFICATION. Companies need to be smarter about qualification. We have a lot of thoughts on how they can be smarter and I am in full-on insane street preacher mode about those thoughts, which are not directly remunerative to our business. Starfighter is about the OUTREACH side of the recruiting problem. Our goal is to be a credible pipeline of candidates who are not effectively identified by the resume/interview/github process. We are looking for buried talent, and to have fun doing it along the way. I know HN all too well, and I think the instinct people will have reading this comment is to try to reconcile it with exactly the words Patrick chose to use in his blog post and then object to the perceived discrepancies. Please, no: that's a waste of all our time. Patrick speaks for Erin & I. I speak for Erin & Patrick.
- elliotec 12y ago
  Thanks for your well thought reply to my regrettably snarky comment. I agree with you on many points, particularly how companies need to be smarter about qualification. But yes, this post does seem to directly correlate, in timing and in content, to Patrick's Hiring Post. I'm surprised to see you say this is not your response to that, especially considering that it addresses many of the questions we should ask ourselves as outlined in The Hiring Post (namely consistency, data, and the idea of one being a “natural”). Also the post itself is linked in the statement: >We’re not here to fix the technical interview: we’re here to destroy it, and create something new and better in its place. I disagree with the fact that outreach is a problem in recruiting. There is an entire industry of companies and teams created for the very purpose of reaching out to software developers for their skills. How many of us reading this thread get multiple recruiter emails a week? Are the recruiters effective? Maybe or maybe not, but I (who am apparently one of seemingly only few) just don't feel that a competitive game needs to add itself as another middleman in the realm of software recruiting with the intent of "destroying the technical interview."

tptacek 12y ago

Nobody is going to ask you what your "Starfighter score" is. Without opening up a pointless vein of second-guessing about Patrick's writing: I think the timing of this post has led people to believe that this right here is my answer to The Hiring Post. No. The Hiring Post itself contains what I believe the answers to The Hiring Post are. There are two halves of the recruiting problem: OUTREACH and QUALIFICATION. Companies need to be smarter about qualification. We have a lot of thoughts on how they can be smarter and I am in full-on insane street preacher mode about those thoughts, which are not directly remunerative to our business. Starfighter is about the OUTREACH side of the recruiting problem. Our goal is to be a credible pipeline of candidates who are not effectively identified by the resume/interview/github process. We are looking for buried talent, and to have fun doing it along the way. I know HN all too well, and I think the instinct people will have reading this comment is to try to reconcile it with exactly the words Patrick chose to use in his blog post and then object to the perceived discrepancies. Please, no: that's a waste of all our time. Patrick speaks for Erin & I. I speak for Erin & Patrick.

elliotec 12y ago
Thanks for your well thought reply to my regrettably snarky comment. I agree with you on many points, particularly how companies need to be smarter about qualification. But yes, this post does seem to directly correlate, in timing and in content, to Patrick's Hiring Post. I'm surprised to see you say this is not your response to that, especially considering that it addresses many of the questions we should ask ourselves as outlined in The Hiring Post (namely consistency, data, and the idea of one being a “natural”). Also the post itself is linked in the statement: >We’re not here to fix the technical interview: we’re here to destroy it, and create something new and better in its place. I disagree with the fact that outreach is a problem in recruiting. There is an entire industry of companies and teams created for the very purpose of reaching out to software developers for their skills. How many of us reading this thread get multiple recruiter emails a week? Are the recruiters effective? Maybe or maybe not, but I (who am apparently one of seemingly only few) just don't feel that a competitive game needs to add itself as another middleman in the realm of software recruiting with the intent of "destroying the technical interview."