Hacker News Reader

Comment by citizens | Hacker News Reader

"Starfighter is a new, weird kind of recruiting company. We detect and market underpriced programming talent. We do that by creating opportunities for programmers to casually and effectively demonstrate aptitude."

Having a hard time parsing this. Do you find underpriced talent and help them get paid more?

View on HN

Susie works making crud apps for a boring insurance company. She is a brilliant programmer but due to where she lives, personal situations, she hasn't faced a challenge that lets her know the extent of her abilities, etc, she is working below her potential.

Susie creates a novel solution to one of Stockfighter's games. Stockfighter uses that solution as evidence to present her to companpanies as a great engineer. She gets job offers for more money, challenge, and satisfaction than she currently has.

Susie writes great crud apps in Django/RoR/Node/MEAN/ASP/etc ad nauseum, and in order to get a raise, she must write a novel C program off a minified library that compiles to bytecode while using exact memory addresses as a debugger?

How does this solve Susie's problem?

Most developers can write crud apps without any issue.

Not all of them have problem solving skills that translate well across different technologies.

It's not about looking for people that meet a specific checklist of tools/languages, it's about finding people who can solve problems - even in fields they are not familiar with. The latter is far more useful trait for an employee to have.

It doesn't, unless Susie discovered she liked really low level stuff a few years ago.

It's definitely not equally applicable to everyone, and that's ok.

In case anyone in the thread above didn't know, there is a different set of stockfighter challenges to play that involves writing code that accesses a REST API that be more aligned with Susie's interests in that case.

Except according to an earlier posting from someone who went thru the process -- they didn't get a direct offer: they still had to go thru technical interviews. I thought a big point of this was that you could skip the BS technical interviews and prove yourself thru this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11433414

While it's a great service, this takes a lot away for people who are great programmers but might not be great technical interviewers.

We're just recruiters. We exert pressure where we can and get process breaks from most of our clients, but we're a tiny little company. Everyone gets interviewed.

Nobody wants to eliminate tech job interviews more than I do.

To be fair, regardless of where the lead was sourced, if I was responsible for hiring a new programmer, I would make damn sure I had an interview with them that contained at least a technical portion. It's irresponsible not to, I wouldn't be doing my job. If the new employee turns out to not be able to code their way out of a paper bag, I'm sure I would catch at least some of the flak.

Trust but verify.

Additionally, Stockfighter will get a placement fee for Susie from her new employer. This will allow Stockfighter to continue operations independently, and will let them help more Susies find better employment opportunities in the future.

Is that really the problem though? In my circle, plenty of people are doing the boring crud apps at random big company. The problem is that they're paid very well. So taking a job that is more challenging often involves taking less money, for more risk, with a small possibility of a payoff. Is there really a surplus of highly interesting tech positions with better than average pay that are desperately looking for people? If you're struggling to find talent, you're probably not paying enough.

>The problem is that they're paid very well

Are you sure? Tech companies you've heard of on the west coast (other than Amazon) are paying their most junior people at least $100k. When I looked at big boring insurance companies in the Midwest (toying with the idea of staying close to home) I was seeing closer to $50k for entry level and $80k for mid-career.

This invariably comes up whenever this is discussed, and what's usually referred to is that many people have a fairly narrow perception of what interesting tech work is, and sometimes exposure to other industries, or even interviews in other industries, can expand what they view as interesting work. Apparently, many industries have a problem sourcing good technical talent, even if they have the need and the ability to pay.

You might not think a position at an insurance company sounds interesting, but if the CTO starts explaining their plan on integrating their major departments with a new application they are developing from scratch (and maybe you get to help make ground floor decisions, like language), and needs to contain some interesting data warehousing to make sure that the statisticians and actuaries can access the data in heretofore impracticable ways, that might just tickle your fancy.

tptacek, one of the Stockfigher founders, comes from the world of security consulting. That strikes me as exactly the right sort of niche: incredibly high-paying even relative to cushy crud apps, but there isn't really an obvious inroad for even an experienced programmer to make the shift over to doing security work.

I'd imagine there are other specialized software engineering fields with similar problems.

Yes, that's the thesis. I mean, we're happy to represent anyone capable! But we're particularly interested in the people with no resumes.

They classify players to a market price and alert on those who are currently paid less. Presumably, they then attempt to capture from the difference by recruiting CTF players to market players.

Presumably, if they are able to entice those people away from their current employment, they are offering something better, whether it be more money, more fulfilling (which can be for many reasons, such as being more challenging), or allows a better lifestyle. If nothing else, if gives those undervalued employees that have been identified a metric by which they, and their current employers, can judge their worth on the market.

Sounds like a brilliant business model, honestly. The world is brimming with brilliant programmers who are, for one reason or another, not able to reach their full potential due to outside constraints (third world countries, lack of tech investment, etc)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com