Financial Cryptography

Finally, someone is facing up to the critical problem of our age: Starfighter

What is the critical problem of our age? Getting people back to productive work.

The economic statistics in the west are the worst in living memory, all the way back to the Great Depression. Not the official, manipulated political advertisements from the Bureau of Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics, but the anecdotes and wails of our friends and companions who are facing obscurity of unemployment or loss-of-soul with the big 5, no choice, nothing in between.

We -- in the aggregate -- have no understanding of how we got to here, what here is and how we're going to fix the issue.

I know one factor, the Spence observation that we live in an insufficient information age where employers cannot accurately predict employees, and employees likewise cannot see past plastic brand to the wholesomeness of their future career. The result is a deadly embrace of spiralling disquality.

This insight has propelled me along a partial journey to create systems that solve the core dilemma, but what I know and do is not enough. So it is with vicarious pleasure that I share with you:

Announcing Starfighter

Thomas Ptacek, Erin Ptacek, and I are pleased to announce Starfighter, a company that will publish CTFs (games) that are designed to develop, improve, and assess rare, extremely valuable programming skills.

Starfighter CTFs are not fantastic Hollywood-logic depictions of what programming is like. There is no "I built a GUI interface using Visual Basic to track the IP address."

You will use real technology. You will build real systems. You will face the real problems faced by the world's best programmers building the world's most important pieces of software.

You will conquer those problems. You will prove yourself equal to the very best. Becoming a top Starfighter player is a direct path to receiving lucrative job offers from the best tech companies in the world, because you'll have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can do the work these companies need done.

We're not here to fix the technical interview: we're here to destroy it, and create something new and better in its place. ...

Posted by iang at March 10, 2015 07:28 AM