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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 pr

by 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.
- kayge 11y ago
  "Our target candidate is a .NET line-of-business backend software developer at a boring insurance company..." Holy crap, he's talking about me! "who is secretly one of the industry's best distributed systems software debuggers" Oh, nevermind. But I'm still very much looking forward to trying this out! Thank you all in advance for bringing such a cool idea to life.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    How do you know you aren't? Have you tried a bunch of times and discovered that you don't enjoy it? Because I think you missed a sentence in my answer. :)
akavel 11y ago
Thanks for writing the comment for me! :) Reassuring to know I'm not alone.

by cja 11y ago

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.

kayge 11y ago
"Our target candidate is a .NET line-of-business backend software developer at a boring insurance company..." Holy crap, he's talking about me! "who is secretly one of the industry's best distributed systems software debuggers" Oh, nevermind. But I'm still very much looking forward to trying this out! Thank you all in advance for bringing such a cool idea to life.
- tptacek 11y ago
  How do you know you aren't? Have you tried a bunch of times and discovered that you don't enjoy it? Because I think you missed a sentence in my answer. :)

akavel 11y ago

Thanks for writing the comment for me! :) Reassuring to know I'm not alone.