10 ms·

Hmmm, personally, I have rather mixed feelings about this. I'd really like to be excited, but so far, I'm not. (And, on a somewhat tangential note, also I'm fai

by akavel 11y ago

Hmmm, personally, I have rather mixed feelings about this. I'd really like to be excited, but so far, I'm not. (And, on a somewhat tangential note, also I'm fairly surprised not to see any voices similar to mine here in the comments; am I the only one? hard to believe; or maybe others like me just shrug and don't bother to write? sounds more probable, to me at least.) I tried to analyze my thoughts on that; I'll try to give some feedback/impressions, but please forgive if chaotic or otherwise flawed. So, in somewhat random order: - I'm absolutely not interested in topic of "stock trading", or similar stuff. I'm not into trading/speculation, whether stock, currencies, or else. I don't like gaming others. Or PvP. So, if that's gonna be required, or important, sounds very much like something unfun to me. I like building stuff, and especially useful stuff. In my mind I characterize myself as "an engineer". And from this description, I don't see much in this area for myself. Even if I'm going to be building something here (some in-game "cyberdeck" of tools), I don't know how this could be practically useful for someone else, outside the game; so for now it sounds like wasted time and effort to me. - From the original announcement, it sounded to me as an attempt at something revolutionary, appealing to a wide audience, and who don't have much free time they can put into this (but I may have overinterpreted, I dunno). Given my previous objection, I don't see how it is so, for now. Specifically, when/if I have free time, I prefer to put it into attempts at some open-source work, so that it would be useful to others, while also I could learn something. But when I don't have much time, I don't see how I could take part in the game in any meaningful way, such that my "score" could reflect my knowledge & abilities. In other words, for now it sounds like it requires some "grinding", and for me that sounds like wasted time (real world requires enough grinding). I don't really see how this differs from MicroCorruption (where I also didn't care to waste time on that), or other "CTF"s. Or, really, "an actual job". Only unpaid^H^H^H^H^H^H"paid" in virtual karma points/pixie dust ("score"). - The one thing that seems mildly interesting to me as of now, is the AVR theme. I'm somewhat hoping to dabble a bit in microcontroller programming (one of my many hobby project ideas). So, if I correctly understood that it's aimed to have a very faithful simulator of an AVR, I may at least learn something in this area, which may be easier than experimenting on real hardware. So, maybe the relatively "wide range of topics" (stock trading, AVRs, compilers, competition) might be the "revolutionary" aspect, so that there's higher chance everyone will find something for oneself? But if I'm willing to grind only on one aspect in-game, then my "total score" will probably be low, no? Unless at least the scores are multi-aspect, not totalled/averaged. Still, if I don't grind on other aspects, they won't show up in my profile, and will remain unknown to "potential employers", no? Also, back to the AVR theme, microcontrollers are closely related to electronics (i.e. very physical hardware: cables, soldering, analog voltages, timing, unexpected capacitances, coupling, etc.), and here I presume I won't be able to learn anything anyway. All that said, I understand that this is kinda "2nd trailer announcement", and the stuff is not open to public yet, so the jury is still out.

tptacek 11y ago
We're appealing to a much wider audience than most CTFs, but we certainly aren't trying to appeal to everyone. You don't have to worry if none of this sounds fun to you; that doesn't make anything wrong with you, or us. We're just another thing that exists!
- akavel 11y ago
  The longer version of your answer (in response to cja's comment below), helped me understand your thoughts on that. Thanks a lot!
aesthetics1 11y ago
I felt the same way, and I'm happy that I happened upon your post. It just doesn't sound interesting to me. Maybe I had my hopes too high, or maybe my idea over the course of dreaming about this ballooned to be something completely different. Or perhaps I just did not fully understand the concept at the time of that first blog post.
cja 11y ago
I'm a longtime professional developer and Starfighter doesn't appeal to me either. I don't see why I'd spend time on it instead of on paid work or a personal project or open source, all of which would demonstrate my value to an employer and reward me more than playing a game. I've followed Patrick McKenzie since before BCC and this is the first thing that I don't get. Maybe it'd appeal to me if I played computer games. Having said all that, I'm not meaning to be negative. Clearly it does appeal to some people. I really only wrote this so akavel would know that he/she wasn't alone! I think uninterested people generally don't comment and it's impossible to be against someone creating a product like this so naturally all the comments are from interested people. Summary: Nothing against it, it's just not for me.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Here's our stock answer to this question, which seems to come up a lot: A lot of very talented people won't want to participate. There are amazing engineers with families whose discretionary coding time is committed entirely to open-source projects. It is not our thesis that we can or should pull those people away from that work. But those people also have no trouble getting noticed by employers. Our target candidate is in the workforce but underemployed. They have an aptitude for solving hard, lucrative problems. But they've never had the chance to get their hands dirty, and so nobody will give them that chance. Our target candidate is a .NET line-of-business backend software developer at a boring insurance company who is secretly one of the industry's best distributed systems software debuggers. They shouldn't be wiring yet another database row up to yet another Struts HTML form. They should be optimizing the wire protocol for a RAFT implementation at a software company. Only: nobody knows that yet, not even that candidate. Those people exist. We think they exist by the thousands. I ran a recruiting project at scale for several years looking for them. We found them, over and over again. It was an incredibly gratifying experience for me, and so: I started a company to do it full time. You're not one of those people. That's just fine. We're just going to find some great new people for you to work with. What we can add to that now is: If you're the kind of person who will mess around with microcontroller assembly for fun, or who will write tooling for random APIs just to see what they can make them do, you might be interested in goofing around with the Starfighter CTF regardless of your professional interests. We had to pick a couple things to start with, and we think we picked ambitiously: low-level systems programming and high-frequency trading.

by akavel 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago

We're appealing to a much wider audience than most CTFs, but we certainly aren't trying to appeal to everyone. You don't have to worry if none of this sounds fun to you; that doesn't make anything wrong with you, or us. We're just another thing that exists!

akavel 11y ago
The longer version of your answer (in response to cja's comment below), helped me understand your thoughts on that. Thanks a lot!

aesthetics1 11y ago

I felt the same way, and I'm happy that I happened upon your post. It just doesn't sound interesting to me. Maybe I had my hopes too high, or maybe my idea over the course of dreaming about this ballooned to be something completely different. Or perhaps I just did not fully understand the concept at the time of that first blog post.

cja 11y ago

I'm a longtime professional developer and Starfighter doesn't appeal to me either. I don't see why I'd spend time on it instead of on paid work or a personal project or open source, all of which would demonstrate my value to an employer and reward me more than playing a game. I've followed Patrick McKenzie since before BCC and this is the first thing that I don't get. Maybe it'd appeal to me if I played computer games. Having said all that, I'm not meaning to be negative. Clearly it does appeal to some people. I really only wrote this so akavel would know that he/she wasn't alone! I think uninterested people generally don't comment and it's impossible to be against someone creating a product like this so naturally all the comments are from interested people. Summary: Nothing against it, it's just not for me.

tptacek 11y ago
Here's our stock answer to this question, which seems to come up a lot: A lot of very talented people won't want to participate. There are amazing engineers with families whose discretionary coding time is committed entirely to open-source projects. It is not our thesis that we can or should pull those people away from that work. But those people also have no trouble getting noticed by employers. Our target candidate is in the workforce but underemployed. They have an aptitude for solving hard, lucrative problems. But they've never had the chance to get their hands dirty, and so nobody will give them that chance. Our target candidate is a .NET line-of-business backend software developer at a boring insurance company who is secretly one of the industry's best distributed systems software debuggers. They shouldn't be wiring yet another database row up to yet another Struts HTML form. They should be optimizing the wire protocol for a RAFT implementation at a software company. Only: nobody knows that yet, not even that candidate. Those people exist. We think they exist by the thousands. I ran a recruiting project at scale for several years looking for them. We found them, over and over again. It was an incredibly gratifying experience for me, and so: I started a company to do it full time. You're not one of those people. That's just fine. We're just going to find some great new people for you to work with. What we can add to that now is: If you're the kind of person who will mess around with microcontroller assembly for fun, or who will write tooling for random APIs just to see what they can make them do, you might be interested in goofing around with the Starfighter CTF regardless of your professional interests. We had to pick a couple things to start with, and we think we picked ambitiously: low-level systems programming and high-frequency trading.