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.
