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.)
I think if we'd survived there would have come a day when we got a letter from somebody's lawyer. But as a kid who grew up below the poverty level, the idea of an epic escape remains near and dear to my heart. I've probably seen it 50x.
Computer programming back then was a great way for a kid to escape to a middle class livelihood, just based on getting machine access somehow, and what they could learn on their own.
(It seemed to change, after the dotcom boom, when the jobs turned into a lot more money that attracted a lot more people, and class barriers were erected to many of the better jobs. There's still a chance for upward mobility, despite artificial class barriers, but people will tend to burn their energy mimicking the shibboleths and practicing for the hazing rituals, rather than on things that would attract and teach them. Which brings us back to this application domain, of helping companies to hire people who would be great software developers.)
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.)