A fun programming challenge is building an open source platform or some other software that scratches your own itches-- it's being a creator.
Solving arbitrary puzzles someone else has set in front of you, in order to get a job, is not a fun programming challenge.
It's one engineer saying "I bet I can come up with something this guy won't be able to do" and clueless companies and HR thinking they can "evaluate" programmers by "how well" they do on these quizzes.
They will miss out on the best programmers because the best ones value their time enough to create new things-- not solve "challenges".
Challenges are attempts to make you fail. They are not about learning about the person.
If you have self respect, you will use Straighter as a filter to exclude companies that are not worth working for (because if they use Starfighter, you can guarantee their working environment is not conducive to a career where you look forward to going to work every day.)
Starfighter should pivot into education. Then this work would be useful. Right now it's corrosive to programming as a profession.
Here's a thought: If you're playing Stockfighter simply because you want a job, you probably aren't the target audience for the game.
By that I mean, they have two different target audiences: companies who want to hire people, and separately, developers that want to play their game. When there is an overlap of those two groups where they can make a job connection, then great.
I don't think the goal of this is to make it so that anyone who wants a new job plays Stockfighter.
> Solving arbitrary puzzles someone else has set in front of you, in order to get a job, is not a fun programming challenge.
Except this is how actual jobs work. Real business value-creating requirements tend to resemble an arbitrary puzzle much more than something fun to scratch your own itches.
You may be right that Stockfighter won't attract the best programmers. It's not trying to. Those programmers don't need and aren't hired via any sort of challenge system anyway. What Stockfighter is trying to attract and identify are programmers capable of being plugged in to a real-world business application to create value.
>Real business value-creating requirements tend to resemble an arbitrary puzzle
Actually they don't. I say this with 25 years experience as an engineer and a couple patents and a long history of solving very hard problems. The hard problems are rare, the trick questions and puzzle type problems virtually never exist in business and are useless for evaluating programmers.
Programming is about a lot more than solving puzzles.
Why not simply give programmers the NYT and have them solve the crossword puzzle? That's what this is the equivalent of.
It only addresses one aspect of programming and actually a very small part.
Thinking about systems. Communicating with code that others can read, and communicating about code in a way that others understand, these are skills not addressed here. Maintenance and reading others code, also not addressed with trick questions.
I really have no problem with them making programming based games-- if the games are fun, great.
My objection is only with using this as some sort of recruiting tool. It shows a lack of understanding of what programming is, and it optimizes for exactly the kind of recruiting tactic that has effectively destroyed the software development profession during the past 20 years-- it's seeking code monkeys, not software developers.
The reason software is broken is the current model is "get a biz guy to tell code monkeys what to do, hire the fastest code monkeys and pay them as little as possible using the threat of outsourcing to indian code monkeys to keep the min line."
The ability to find a faster code monkey (as measured by their score on a coding game or hackerrank or any other arbitrary score) eliminates the messy need to have the hiring team actually understand software development enough to hire developers.
A better solution-- one that would be cheaper and more efficient -- is to hire more expensive software developers and have them lead other more junior software developers to develop software that actually solves business problems.
It's shocking how rare this is.
Straighter is enabling the problem, not trying to solve it.
"Monkey" and "indian" indicate a poisonous attitude, even at 50 years experience. I've dealt with people from India and Brazil, and they are not monkeys. Health and happiness to you anyway.
The term is not monkey but "code monkey", a standard term to refer to how some businesses treat software devs, not how the devs themselves are. And businesses like that are everywhere, including India.
I believe the etymology of the term comes from the infinite monkey theorem.
You have no trouble imagining a site like Project Euler funding itself from ads, right?
And you can imagine that virtually nobody who looks at the ads on an ad-funded site actually buys things because of the ads, right? The ads have nothing to do with why people come to the site.
Just mentally substitute "recruiting" for "ads" here.
I highly doubt I'll get a job out of Starfighter, if only because any good compensation (150K+) is probably gonna require a ton of work. (Especially being outside of SV, since such salaries are really top end so the demands are too.) I'm comfy enough doing little consulting here and there. The most I can see getting out of Starfighter professionally is the promise of 10-15 minutes with Patrick and Thomas (I think that's the prize if you win?).
That said, I'm immensely looking forward to this and have already spent dozens of hours reading up on things and over a hundred bucks on books. (My main decision right now is if I use a higher level language like F# or Haskell to be elegant, or use something lower like Rust for speed. Seeing as they didn't mention any low latency interfaces in this post, I'm guessing high level it is.)
Literally anyone in the industry can get me on Skype, without ever playing Starfighter. I'm hoping that remains true forever, and would be sad if it became untrue.
To the very limited extent you're competing on speed, in Chapter 1 you're competing with a) a Ruby script which b) is forced to sleep for roughly 80~90% of the simulated trading day. You don't exactly need to strive hard to win the race.
Common lisp actually has that sorta switch built-in: you can choose to have the compiler optimize for safety-checks, debugability, etc or speed. Normally that ability doesn't really matter, but if you don't know your problem domain well enough, that ability might be useful.
Solving arbitrary puzzles someone else has set in front of you, in order to get a job, is not a fun programming challenge.
It's one engineer saying "I bet I can come up with something this guy won't be able to do" and clueless companies and HR thinking they can "evaluate" programmers by "how well" they do on these quizzes.
They will miss out on the best programmers because the best ones value their time enough to create new things-- not solve "challenges".
Challenges are attempts to make you fail. They are not about learning about the person.
If you have self respect, you will use Straighter as a filter to exclude companies that are not worth working for (because if they use Starfighter, you can guarantee their working environment is not conducive to a career where you look forward to going to work every day.)
Starfighter should pivot into education. Then this work would be useful. Right now it's corrosive to programming as a profession.