It's a recruiting firm. Their business plan is to help companies with hiring (for a price) by matching the people who demonstrate skills in the game and opted in with their partner companies that want to hire people with those skills. The thesis is that successful starfigher candidates are all-star people that companies want on their team, but for whatever reason don't make it through the traditional hiring processes.

I suspect the right answer is to do both.

You would play instead of blog if you have high inhibition... very common in this industry

Great point! I hadn't considered that since I'm not shy at all.

That's not how it works. Enter the CTF and you get supplied as a lead to companies as a potential hire for doing well (if you want), it's not that you use it as a competency canary on your CV.

That's my point. I'm being supplied as a lead for investing time learning something that I will not be able to use in any potential position. Why should I do it? I'm genuinely interested in understanding this because it might blow up and I'll have to learn it anyway.

In addition to the "it's fun" thing mentioned by other commenters: I always learn gobs of transferrable stuff when I do things like this. Just solving different problems with languages and tools I already know usually teaches me a ton of stuff, let alone using it as an opportunity to try out new things in a low-risk environment. Take the difficult, data heavy, level 6 described in the article: maybe you can solve it using formulas you already know how to write, but maybe instead, it's a good chance to deploy a real Hadoop instance for the first time and see if you can get that to work, or maybe you want to learn Julia, or make a really optimized version in C++14 or Rust. I find these sorts of "programming exercise" things to be great learning experiences, regardless of the level of artifice.

My understanding from reading past posts is that they think this could be a great way to discover people who would be interested in roles at companies they hadn't previously considered. Shotgunning everyone who plays as leads isn't a great model as it lowers perceived quality of the candidates they send on ("I got a lead for this amazing developer, but she didn't want to change jobs at all, wtf?!").

Think of it as a game with "new job" as a piece of available loot. Play it because it seems fun (and you still might learn something that you can use later).

Because it'll be fun. Fun. That's a thing we, as humans, do. Some other animals too.

Because its fun. If its not fun then they've failed.

> (because this might turn out to be a niche product that no one outside HN will know about)

If this is the outcome, doing well at starfighter may not translate into much additional career success. For it to be clearly worth your time, they probably have to do reasonably well. But HN-famous might be enough for a tech recruiter.

Well, I think at least one intended reason is: because it's fun. I get to play games/solve interesting puzzles, and I might get contacted about a job that some person in a position to know thinks I might like and do well at? Count me IN.