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by tptacek
3727 days ago
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Hey, all. Thanks for asking about this. I can give a pretty simple answer here: We are still figuring this stuff out. As an actual business, it's early days for us. We have a thingy we send out to candidates who want to consider working with us that goes into this in some detail. You should play with the Starfighter CTF stuff if you are interested in CTF stuff (or trading, or, any day now, low-level programming and AVR). You should not do our CTF stuff if you're just trying to get a better job. Maybe someday in the future, if we're wildly successful, this will change, but right now the best mental model for us is "we're a goofy game company that does some recruiting on the side". I have a lot of strong feelings about hiring process, ineffective and inhumane interviews, work sample testing, and recruiting underserved demographics. I've written some of them up. I think I've also given the impression that what we're trying to do with Starfighter is to singlehandedly fix all of that. Nope! If you're doing large-scale hiring and you want advice on how to structure your process based on our experience doing hiring (for instance, at NCC/Matasano), please feel free to reach out. |
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I got a head start on working with players to get them jobs. (All of the SF founders do this, in principal.)
I rate my execution on that process at about 3/10 right now. (I'm very good at writing introductions in a way that gets hiring managers excited about candidates; I'm terrrrrrible at follow-through with candidates at present and have been juggling too many balls for the last several months.)
I'm hoping to get better at it, rapidly, and then replace myself with a short shell script, dedicated hiring engineers, or both.
Things are exactly as fluid as Thomas said.
At present, the modal conversation with me goes something like "Hey I noticed you did $PICK_A_THING. That impressed me and I read your solution. Do you want to have a chat about the game and about potential job options?" If so, proceed to 30 minute phone call about what you liked/didn't like about the game, about your background and interest, and about what you want in terms of a job. If I have a good option for you, I tell you about it. If you agree it is a good option, I write a three paragraph email to someone who has agreed that they trust my judgment on engineers saying why I think they should interview you.
Again: execution ability on this, not fantastic at present. The biggest issues are followup, followup, and followup, for example if e.g. the company I intro you to doesn't immediately jump on the intro. Aspirationally I should bang down their door; in practice, that ball is a ball I often drop. If you have an interview(s) but the interview(s) doesn't result in an offer, I should aspirationally get in touch with "OK, let's debug that, and let me introduce you to some other options." That ball also one I'm not great at, particularly as I've been traveling for the last week and a half.
We're very very new at this, and we're at least as bad at recruiting as I was at writing stock exchanges before I actually wrote a stock exchange. Hoping to get this nailed down over the course of the next few weeks/months and then scale it out.