Was any Starfighter postmortem ever published?

I have no relation to Starfighter, but I was part of a similar startup almost a decade ago, and learned a few things that are likely similar to what they faced.

We started with this dream of completely revolutionizing the way people hire in tech (with hopes of expanding to other fields).

First of all, we learned that for 99% of companies they don't have a screening problem, but they have a sourcing problem. Our original company was along the lines of HackerRank / LeetCode / etc, and created due to the founder's experience as a manager at Amazon where he'd get 1000s of resumes that needed to be screened and the process was eating up too much dev resource. A product that solves this problem is appealing to companies that get 1000s of resumes per posting, but basically useless to most companies who get very few candidates, and even less appealing to recruiters who care much more about top of the funnel than the screening process.

After that we pivoted to an event format. The idea being that we could attract 100s of applicants to do a challenge in realtime. This reduces cheating risk and allowed us to act as a means of sourcing candidates (instead of just a screening platform). The idea was 100s of candidates would enter and the companies we got to sign up would compete for the top applicants. It sorta worked. The platform was good, companies were interested, and we got some people placed.

HOWEVER, the profile of people that will do a multi-hour open ended challenge for the chance to maybe get hired by some companies largely leans toward entry-level people. We had some experienced people that did it because they were bored or just curious, but generally seasoned engineers aren't going to waste their time, and forget about "passive job seekers" which is what all recruiters want most of all.

Ultimately, the company ended due to a lot of personal issues between the founding team, but the product itself was good, and the market fit was decent, but far from perfect. I'm pretty sure if we would've kept it together we would've eventually became very similar to HackerRank just offering a platform where people can conduct the same crappy tech interviews we've been using forever.

Starfighter was a blast to play, and taught me a lot about the back end of stock trading.

I did a lot of silly things after winning the initial play through.

- Solving the final challenge using a basysian spam filter on trade directions triples.

- Live 3D market visualization in Minecraft

- Buddy of mine built a stock exchange stack, speaking the same protocol, and we had PvP contests on who could market make the best on it. I won with a PHP powered marketing making bot with live code reloading.

- Built a cardboard box out of scrap electronics from adafruit that would let me adjust a market maker bots net position by tilting the box from side to side.

- Was either #2 or #3 to solve all the challenges

On the business side, if I recall correctly, most companies wanted to just shove the winners down their existing bad hiring pipeline process, and a lot of successful contestants who showed up already had great jobs, and so weren't actually looking.

In case the founders read this post: what would you do differently if you could start over and would this idea work today?

Slightly OT: everyone feels hiring is broken, can you list some things that are annoying from the employee and employer perspective? Here are some points:

- the process often stretches out over weeks and often months

- job posts often get 100s of applications, a lot are low effort applications, it just muddies the water for both sides

- ATS systems/job boards are annoying with the need to create an account on many sites, some forms have more than 20 questions, often asking what's already there in the resume.

A question to everyone: What would a good application process look like? For me, it should just solve the above mentioned problems. I send an email with my resume, a few sentences about why I might be a good fit for the role/what interests me about the company. The jobs@.com email address could be linked to some Saas product which makes it easy for the employer to go through the applications and further communication about video calls or take home assignments or whatever are all in this email thread. The employer can set the stage of the application such as 2/5 or whatever, they can mark it as rejected or accepted after all rounds to trigger automated emails etc. Is there any Saas like this? (I can build this in a week if it doesn't exist, but no clue how to market it/get users, any pointers in case me or someone else builds this?)

Nope. We always meant to, but got sucked into new stuff shortly after.

Reading between the lines a bit on the existing postings about it, I'm guessing that they were unable to persuade any businesses to actually relax their interviewing standards for candidates who passed the Starfighter tests.

Which then puts any candidates in the position of, why should I spend time and effort on this little game if it doesn't lead to any advantage at all in actually getting good positions?

And so, the only people who messed with it were developers who had the free time to play with stuff like this and didn't particularly care that it wouldn't lead to any advantage in getting jobs.

Which means, it's a cool toy that was high-effort to build and probably to maintain, but had no viable path to earn money from anybody.

There is a small blurb about it in patio11's year in review.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/12/30/kalzumeus-software-year...

I think I might've been the one referred to as submitting the excel file with the explanation... as I think that was how I solved the last problem on the stockfighter thing.

No one can ever "solve" the recruiting issue. We are exactly where we were 15 years ago - not one thing has changed except certain screen-share coding tests, which are basically the same as white boards.

Can you reduce hiring an airplane engine designer to a set of tests? Or a custom home builder? If so, why is there not just a stack ranking of best ones, or an algorithmic way of hiring one?

Software engineering at elite levels is an art. It is conducted by master craftsmen. On top of it the best people are often quirky / weird and the social aspect when communication of needs is so essential makes it even more difficult to hire "the best".

The business models of recruiting is always either like sales (recruiting firms) or marketing (LinkedIn). I would stay away from the recruiting industry as a software startup - difficult to make any money here in a novel way.

Postmortem:

* Our go-to-market was contingency recruiting; we'd get paid for placements. Our CTF and HN calling cards easily got us added to the recruiting funnels of big tech companies (I'm assuming any of you could have done that too; I'm just saying, we never had to cold call). But it didn't change anything about how those companies qualified candidates, so to make that business successful we'd have had to do the same dialing-for-dollars matchmaking work any recruiter does, with comparable results.

* We took things very personally. You build relationships with your earliest users (candidates, in our case). Recruiting funnels at our clients had no such connection. The impedance mismatch was demoralizing; our lived experience was that every time a candidate we presented to a client got rejected, we had ourselves failed (I mean, really, we had!). Similarly, the idea that we were just another hoop that candidates had to hop through (but only the non-name-brand candidates who didn't know how to skip us to get an interview at a client) grated on us.

* A lot of second-system-syndrome on the implementation side; we'd done successful recruiting CTFs before, and set what was in retrospect a completely bizarre goal of outdoing ourselves at that job. That mistake is all me.

* Japan/Chicago remote founding team was very difficult, most especially for Patrick. There are teams that could handle that, but their members are more punctual about routine meetings than I am. Both the US and the Japan side felt checked out to each other. This didn't kill us; other things did, and we could have pushed through this problem. But it made things miserable for everyone. Again: this is all me.

* Erin & I were self-funding the company, which was expensive (just in terms of paying everybody's personal bills). Towards the end, it had become clear that we weren't going to drive 3 FTE worth of revenue on contingency placements in the next 12 months. We could have switched up the business model, driven user growth metrics, and gone out for seed funding, but none of us at that point were convicted enough of the business to stake our reputations on that. For all 3 of us, our time was worth too much. I think we made the right call.

It's been almost a decade since we did this, and those years haven't been especially kind to recruiting startups. There are knobs we could have turned to keep things chugging, and probably chugging comfortably, for many more years. But ultimately, I don't think there were any significant rewards to win by building a tech-company-specific recruiting firm. I think the company was ultimately fated to wind down sooner or later. If you're in that situation, sooner is always the better option! Life is short!

The underlying idea behind Starfighter, about the right way (or, at least, a right-er way) to hire people, has proven out repeatedly since then. We hired resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Latacora, the next company me and Erin started, and we hire resume-blind and with work-sample challenges at Fly.io. Recruiting this way is a competitive advantage. The degree of advantage varies with the market; when the market is weak you can hire good people with terrible processes. But the advantage is never marginal, because bad hires are expensive, and there's so much hidden talent out there.

They had a great name.

For anyone who didn't see the '80s light sf movie, The Last Starfighter, the premise is appealing and classic: (minor SPOILERS) young adult kid stuck living and working in a trailer park, wants more, there's a Starfighter video arcade game set up in the park, one day he goes for the record on the game, and turns out the game was a recruitment tool for something much bigger than his humble trailer park, and he passed, rises to subsequent challenges, and becomes a hero.

(Co-stars Robert Preston, as a very enterprising and scrappy recruiting headhunter, a bit like his The Music Man film character, but without the musical numbers.)

See also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12415786

Here for the F-104 discussion. Fascinating plane.

It was called Stockfighter, not Starfighter. I played a few levels and then it got taken down unfortunately. Would love to try again.

Edit: patio11 called it Stockfighter, but others didn’t? Here’s the original launch post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10724592

I always wanted to play it but my life was quite busy back then. Is there any chance we could have it released as purely a game?

Seen some of patio11’s comments and they suggest there was some part of the business that wasn’t working. What it is exactly was never said. Could have been a myriad of things: financials, product market fit, founder relationships.

OT, but what's with the weird apostrophe/tick before each name in OP?

Lol I thought this was about the infamous F-104 Starfighter that killed hundreds of pilots in Europe.

And it was only purchased because Lockheed paid millions in bribes to officials for which AFAIK none of them (nor the company) were ever punished.

So in terms of post-mortem I was thinking of something official like that :)

Ps its successor the F-16 was a lot better though and is still going strong today.