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Comment by bcg1 | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea, although personally I wouldn't be excited about being "interviewed" like this. I am supportive of its existence however because it has definite upsides (i'm sure there are more, just enumerating a few):

1) eliminates some cultural/gender/language/fashion/appearance/disability biases

2) its not subjective

3) no difference between local and out-of-town candidates

I'm glad that the toolbox for candidate search is expanding. I hope one day employers might be able to ask candidates which form of "interview" they prefer to have so that candidates can best demonstrate what they excel at in a way that is most suitable to them.

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The biggest misconception we've managed to foster about what we're doing is that Starfighter is a form of interview. It isn't. At all. A better way to think about it is that it's a sort of Venn intersection between "Github resume", "Coursera course", "Dwarf Fortress", and "recruiting firm".

Our crusade against the tech job interview is roughly analogous to Google's "organizing all of the world's information". It's a mission statement, but it isn't a description of our first offering.

That said: the technology we're working on ports beautifully to actual interview processes (it came from a successful process I built at Matasano). We're also very happy to talk to companies building hiring processes and evangelize and help. Companies with smart, modern hiring processes are especially fertile ground for what we're doing, so we'd like to help more of them come into being!

Will Starfighter be focusing mostly on security? That seems to be most of the examples that I find, and it's not a field I'm terribly interested in. I love the idea though, and would like to see it applied to other areas.

Security is the through-line of the game; it gives us structure, incentives, little dopamine hits, and makes it so that the systems we're building reward exploration. But the game is not about security; it's about programming and interacting with complex systems.

If you're a software developer with no security domain expertise, one benefit of goofing around with Starfighter is that you'll come out knowing a lot more about software security. But it's not a tool for getting people security jobs.

It'll make a little more sense when Erin posts the game details.

Yes please, post the details.

We will not primarily be a security company. It's a fun and interesting field(s), but it's a small subset of engineering skill, and we plan to be substantially broader in focus.

I thought I recognized this. I wanted to work for Matasano at one point but found the CTF environment incredibly difficult if you come from a Web Dev side of things. Hopefully starfighter is different.

That's too bad, because the Matasano hiring process is actually not at all CTF-focused, and is very web-dev centric. If you're ever looking again, you should reach out to them.

I am super excited for these gaming hiring funnels to take off due to your first reason. Dollars to donuts there's a ton of unidentified talent out there that is being filtered out due to those biases (I would also add in academic pedigree bias which is correlated with economic/cultural upbringing). Granted these types of funnels also select for those who have free time to play games so they are not perfect.

Knack, the other company mentioned in the article, seems to have profiles with pictures and names that I assume are visible to hiring managers and others. In my opinion that's a bad move. I want to see a completely objective view of how a candidate is performing without age/experience/appearance getting in the way. These gaming funnels aren't perfect solutions but they are certainly a step in the right direction.

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