Why Startups Should Only Hire Good StarCraft Players | Hacker News Reader

Why Startups Should Only Hire Good StarCraft Players

helloko.com

34 pointskoichi53 comments

Like I said in the other thread, I started Shopify build it up to 30 something employees and run it as CEO.

I play Starcraft2 right now and am usually in the top 10 of my diamond league. In fact the company is almost completely stacked with video game players. The article here is probably not taking itself very seriously but it's definitely close to what I've done ( unconsciously ) and it works extremely well.

It sounds silly but the day to day work of a CEO isn't very different from playing a game of Starcraft.

Before starting a startup I used to compete in many gaming tournaments. Not sure if that helped me much in preparation for becoming a CEO but it definitely got me started on programming. My first programming project was to decode the network protocol of quakeworld and create a proxy server that could inject all sorts of useful information into the network stream. Cool stuff.

you should have put in your battle.net ID and that Shopify is hiring :P

Mastering an extracurricular activity can be very good for your work ability. This article's list is StarCraft-focused, but similar lists could be made for several other games. NetHack taught me to type thousands of characters in a row without making a mistake or losing focus, and to use absolutely every resource; Descent taught me to visualize space and motion; Left 4 Dead taught me how to stay cool under pressure.

We need not limit ourselves to games, either. How many useful skills does one acquire in the process of becoming a quality musician, playing competitive sports, or raising a child?

I wouldn't advocate only hiring good StarCraft players, but I would advocate looking for people who are awesome at something.

> We need not limit ourselves to games, either

I think the opposite - that is, why is it impressive that someone is a good piano player, whereas being a top Starcraft player, not so much.

One cultivates the head and the heart, the other only the head.

Which is which? I'm not going to beat a dead horse, you can look at my comments in the other thread for my thoughts on StarCraft itself, but I'm going to speak generally on RTS:

I look at RTS as a sort of dance that eventually becomes a contest to find the better dancer. Even so, the better dancer may lose, and the better dancer may dance better and lose simply because the dance was better losing than winning. A loss has no real-world consequences, and as such, the sort of person I'd like to work with has no fear of losing. Only fear that the game will be uninteresting. I play for war stories, not to win.

Of course, games where one gets trounced tend to be uninteresting, and as embarrassing for the victor as the loser.

A really good pianist can literally bring me to tears with the skill and feeling of his art. No RTS player, no matter how brilliant, will ever do this. I admire Olympic athletes but an artist that can make me look at the world in an entirely new way or make me feel something I've never felt before is on a different level, IMO.

Some of my most treasured memories, even years later, are epic games with friends at the peak of our skills. You may not see the art in it, but that doesn't mean there is none.

Some people juggle geese.

I've had many of those myself, but the original question was why most people have more respect for pianists than gamers and the answer is that most people find the Moonlight sonata moves them in a way the goose juggler doesn't.

Prepare to cry over a Starcraft2 endgame: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOY2ve7zHb4

that is the greatest thing i have ever seen - literally laughing out loud.

Video games can do this - Starcraft is a poor example of a video game with emotion, but they do exist. (Metal Gear Solid, for example)

Because most people enjoy practicing Starcraft, but few enjoy practicing the piano.

Damn, here I am trying to learn Haskell and master Lisp, and it's really getting good at Starcraft I should be focusing on.

The point is that you're taking the time to master something in your free time because you enjoy it. StarCraft 2 just happens to be something relatable to the author.

You're fixating on the individual pebbles when you're supposed to see the mosaic he made.

That's the problem with kitschy blog material that gets a lot of attention, 80% of your audience goes off into la-la on the irrelevant minutiae.

> That's the problem with kitschy blog material that gets a lot of attention, 80% of your audience goes off into la-la on the irrelevant minutiae.

Perhaps if titles/analogies/content were more sensical ....

I feel a profound sense of relief that we have moved on from "Why WoW is the New Golf".

I suspect that I might actually be able to play Starcraft without it taking over my life. Though I have so far been loath to test this theory.

Definitely better for that - I can feel good playing one game and stopping, which is essentially 15 minutes or so. I'm glad I never played WoW... sounds like it could be bad in terms of being a big time suck :(

I ran a guild for a few years. It was a whole lot more work than running a business, with worse hours and more drama. Also, the loot sucked.

That said: Some people watch TV, some people put petroleum products on dead plant matter using animal hair, some people go watch fat men sing in classical Italian and they would have to read along in the handy little English guide if they hadn't known the plot for the last forty years. I killed imaginary dragons. It was quite fun at the time.

P.S. Not related to Starcraft, but nice job with the Japanese-learning startup. Cheers to your & your students' success with it.

The best thing about WoW is being thrown into a group of 10 or 25 strangers trying to solve a problem that requires careful, coordinated action. The group dynamics that emerge can be fascinating and the interactions and history of these groups reflect a lot of common real-world social dynamics.

It's interesting as a near-pure meritocracy too. A 15-year old kid might be calling the shots for 24 other people twice his age if he's got the experience and skills to lead.

It becomes a treadmill pretty quickly though.

I can't agree with you that WoW is a meritocracy. Give two people similarly situated characters and it might very well come down to experience, skills, and leadership ability.

However, the ability to arrive at "similarly situated characters" is not distributed in an equitable manner, and that grossly tilts the playing field. For example, WoW trades advancement for time. If you've got 720 hours to kill and spent them in the same calendar years as I did, you were going to end up with a level 60 character and a fair amount of gear (with differences depending on your WoW skill, guild, etc, but negligible compared to the differences between a lvl 1 and lvl 60 character).

Maybe skills would let you lead a raiding guild taking down what was then "top content", maybe they would not. But if you didn't have 720 hours free, perhaps because you had to work three jobs to keep your children fed, then you weren't going to be leading that raid, regardless of your charming personality or skill with stance dance.

(Speaking of stance dance, I have a few years of practice of flipping between Academic Liberal Or At Least Educated By Them and Republican Somewhere To The Right of Atilla The Hun. Sometimes in the same conversation.)

Yeah it's a meritocracy assuming you put in the minimum baseline of time it takes to grind up gear. This takes a lot less time than it used to though. I'm not sure if you played recently but the whole thing has been tremendously dumbed down. Players of average ability can now clear all raid content without a huge weekly time investment.

Heroic modes are a different story though.

Nowadays participation mostly depends on gear, not abilities. Parties will seek players with for example "at least 5K GS", which means 5000 GearScore points according to a popular GearScore AddOn which analyzes your equipment.

The Dungeon Finder (with which you can find random parties for random instances) also employs a gear filter, albeit less outrageous than human players.

Oh, don't get me wrong -- I heartily approve of time-consuming obsessions. I just have enough of them to choose from already!

- Good StarCraft Players Play StarCraft All The Time, And Don't Invent And Build Real Things.

- Good StarCraft Players Know How To Configure Their Video Card Settings, Making Them Savvy Enough To Deploy And Manage Business Servers.

- Good StarCraft Players Master A Small Predictable Walled Garden, Not The Vast Outside Ever-Changing World Of Business.

Seriously. Using that logic, you can make the argument that a porn star who has a high PPM (penetrations per minute) should be hired by startups. ;)

I think the greater point here is that you should hire people who have a real passion and knack for something in their life that isn't necessarily what you're hiring them for.

Given the choice between two mostly equal candidates, I'd choose the one that could wax philosophic about StarCraft 2 or their boat building project.

RTS games always seemed to me like nothing so much as a test of how much manual busy work somebody will tolerate.

If I were to hire people based on their ability to play any game, it would be Go.

Starcraft is probably as close to Go as you'll get as a video game.

Particularly when one compares the aspects of scouting, harassing, turtling, and expanding to the similar goals of Go to control board territory, eliminate enemy stones, and defend strong holds.

The real difference is in Starcraft you're dynamically adjusting to your opponent's strategy in real time with fog-of-war obscuring your view and no benefit of a turn based cadence.

I haven't played much Starcraft but the thing that makes Go endlessly fascinating is the dynamic behavior of groups and the fact that a single stone placed on one end of the board can instantly & completely reverse the fortunes of stones on the other end of the board. Is anything similar possible in Starcraft?

Yeah, I won a game earlier tonight because I kept a scout in his base, which he didn't notice, and was able to respond immediately to his tactics, allowing me to use minimal forces to great effect.

Although I won, technically my play was sloppy because I didn't have to utilize all of my resources to wrap up the game.

Things don't go to the extremes of Go in SC2, but the dynamic is still there.

StarCraft players do not have a monopoly on the virtues listed in this article.

http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1661890

Fun article, I agree the same principles in the article can be applied to many skill based hobbies.

The thing I love about Starcrack is how dynamic each game can be. The three races are so different and unique, yet balanced. There are so many different ways a game can end; there is a counter to every counter. You have to manage economy. You have to manage army production. Technology upgrades, information reconnaissance, micro-harassment, army positioning. Your brain has to be on top of everything, and you have to make decisions quick.

Its like compressing your startup work-life into a 20 minute simulation. Its kind of crazy, I actually get a bit of adrenaline and nervousness from wanting to win so badly.

Without too much effort I can translate this to:

- only hire white males

- under 25

- without much of s social life beyond other < 25 year old males

- but if your target market is under 25 males and you don't plan to deal with government laws that will screw you because of the the bigotry.

Then you're good.

you just described most startups.

Considering the immense popularity of Starcraft in Korea, should I take this statement to mean all Koreans who play Starcraft are actually white males?

Asians love Starcraft too. Hell, everyone loves starcraft.

I've did a lot of gaming when I was younger, and always on a super competitive level. I think it's more that personality trait of close to obsessive competitivity that translates into being good employees, or anything they put their mind to for that matter. Some of the things you list are very concrete in-game examples, but I feel can all be summarized as a result of people taking the game more "serious". But you definitely have a point.

Would I ever mention anything about my gaming history on a job interview though? Unless I know the interviewer would be really into it, sadly, no.

The article is interesting, but short on evidence.

Has anyone in academia performed psychometric testing on game players versus non-game players?

Have any of you detractors even played starcraft? I'd like you to try it. For all intents and purposes, starcraft (or any other real time strategy game) is essentially training for effective resource allotment, time based strategic planning, and command/control skill. All managers should be have to be excellent players.

That's a huge generalization. Different games test different skills. Some skills apply to things like startups, some don't.

Disclaimer: I suck at starcraft, so naturally I disagree with this post.

This title gave me my biggest smile tonight :)

Love it! "They know when to Expand"

I'm sorry, but being good at Starcraft only means that you're good at Starcraft.

I love how prefixing a statement with 'I'm sorry' has been transformed into meaning the exact opposite...

It's cool how prefixing a statement with 'I love' has been transformed into meaning the exact opposite...

Touche! Actually no I'm a word nut so it's all interesting to me.

Only?

Starcraft 1 players are acceptable too, but I imagine there's a bit of a "you're too old" discrimination associated with it.

I'm gold ranked, but I think the time the person spends honing their craft is important too.

You want to look at what kind of code projects (if you're hiring a programmer) they have in their portfolio that they made of their own accord.

brilliant; insightful; lucid. this piece deserve front page of the utne reader, let alone hacker monthly.

It feels forced to me, and kind of content free. You could reasonably make the same argument for any number of activities (eg, being a parent, or playing soccer).

Unsurprisingly, the article focused on the benefits concerned with individual performance, rather than leadership or teamwork.

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