Show HN: CodeBlimp – Code Interviews Without Limits | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CodeBlimp – Code Interviews Without Limits

codeblimp.com

113 pointsmunirusman40 comments

Hopefully this question isn't so out of line, but why is this service and services like coderpad.io so expensive for simple interviews? With coderpad, $50/month for at most 20 interviews with one account. With codeblimp, $14/session. What's the deal? For the probably intended use-case (a screening interview), it seems too expensive.

Maybe I'd be more attracted if there was a free limited version that just shared an editor window. But we have collabedit for that.

Isn't this usual B2B pricing? I fully expect to charge prices like these if my customers are intended to be mid to large businesses looking to "spice up" how they do recruiting, and think that this will help them do it (not to demean the product, I'm sure it does it's job well).

These prices aren't going to work for a lean startup, obviously, because they generally don't have lots of money to throw around, but bigger companies do. Oracle, Salesforce, and lots of other B2B businesses count on it, as they charge more than you would think.

I think another good example is highcharts -- with so many free, decent D3 based highcharts alternatives, why would a company buy a highcharts license instead of using one of the free options? Because they can afford to. Companies that can't will try and use a free option, reduce their scope, or put some engineer on it part time.

Hello, it's $14 partially because we are dedicating some resources on our end for each interview. Also, after the interview is done, we store the entire image for you to go back and see whenever you want.

If you are looking for a free tool similar to collabedit and coderpad, this might be helpful: https://codepad.remoteinterview.io/

50 $/mo for 20 interviews seems pretty cheap to me?

Estimating an engineering employee costs 100 $/hr, then 2.5 $/interview is way less than you're spending on the person conducting the interview. And 600 $/year is a steal unless you think it'll only take 6 hours to implement your own version + yearly maintenance.

I'm the guy that runs CoderPad, and I agree with your assessment. We believe our entry level pricing to be actually rather cheap, and our customers generally agree.

Co-founder here. We charge because this is our full-time job. We will consider reducing price if our volume increases. Btw, I will be happy to discuss discounts for HNers if you email me at munir-at-remoteinterview-dot-io

B2B is generally quite a bit more expensive than B2C, and services are only worth what the market will bear. I would imagine that they did some sort of market research, and found that to be a competitive price. As for why it's a competitive price - well, it's what businesses are willing to pay at the moment.

CodeBunk pricing is pretty cheap compared to either of above. $9 for 20 interviews

I interpreted it as $14/pad, that you can reuse as much as you want. Not per session. The website says $14/pad.

We don't restrict on re-using the pad. Although that's not the recommended way to use it.

I use https://coderpad.io/ for free for conducting interview. But YMMV...

The average IT hire for a permanent role costs nearly $8,000.*

This includes the use of temp workers, recruitment fees and management time.

If lost productivity is included the figure can be $50K or more.

The reason you think the price of the service is expensive is because

a) You likely haven't had exposure to enterprise organisations spending habits. No shame (see anecdote below).

b) The makers of the service have not put the cost in the proper context for you.

What they should have done is re-stated the cost of a bad hire and given a value statement on the splash page.

"The average cost of hiring the wrong employee is $23,000. Get it right first time with CodeBlimp for $50."

"1 in 3 hired employees never pass their probation period. Use CodeBlimp and make it 1 in always."

Etc

>> Here comes the anecdote: I was a coach at Lean Startup London and some guys had a great product offering. They were current/former Cucumber devs. Amazing engineers and super smart but no idea really how to sell.

They had a cool new service that was ready to go to market that weekend and a salesman joined them during the weekend and Skyped some potential customers.

When a charity senior exec asked them "We love it, how much does your new service retail for?"

They shrugged and said "Ummm $250 a year..?"

The exec looked baffled and said "I literally don't know how to give you such a little amount of money. Do you want my personal credit card?"

The moral is don't underestimate how much businesses will pay.

Tell them the cost and if they don't blink...

...say per user...

If they don't blink again then add...

...per month.

It would be nice to have a video demo of it on the homepage. I would like to get a high level overview without having to try it out myself.

Do people ask interviewees to code a node.js website during phone screens. I was under the impression that its usually 'palindrome test' kind of a deal.

Co-founder here. Thanks for the suggestion. Interviews for full-stack developer is a better use-case for this. For 'palindrome test' type interviews, we have https://www.remoteinterview.io/features-interview

A bit of constructive criticism here.

First, the most obvious thing that called out to me - have you noticed that your logo is eerily similar to Linkedin's? It uses a similar shade of blue and at a first glance just seems to be the i and n reversed. I'm pointing this out because you're in vaguely the same domain as they are (hiring/recruiting). I don't know if it's actually an issue.

Second, please add a video. Maybe a quick 60 second one that runs through the features with a bit of narration as you demonstrate them.

Third, I find your "Why CodeBlimp?" section is a little too light on details. Why do I want full-shell access? What aside from that and "real-time collaboration" (that other tools have) distinguishes you from competing products? I don't feel sold enough on this, though maybe I'm not your target demographic.

Another meta-question - what is your market strategy for Slack's inevitable product offering similar features at (likely) a lower price, thanks to the recent ScreenHero acquisition? Is it going to be the full-shell access, etc.?

Thanks for showing us, and good luck.

I don't have much to add to the discussion other than me finding this truly impressive. I hope you can get a sliver of the lucrative interviewing market, your execution is delightful.

Thank you! :)

Seems like a bad idea to allow CTRL+d, you seem to have escaped 'exit' but CTRL+d actually allowed me to disconnect and not be able to reconnect.

Good idea, looks useful. I am assuming it run Debian based OS. Does it also support any other choice of OS or Linux flavor your can work with, maybe I want to interview a candidate for server management skillsets? Like CentOS/RedHat

Does this provide additional features that a collaborative IDE like Cloud9 (https://c9.io/) doesn't?

IDEs like c9 are perfect for working with your team. Interviews require separate set of features like a separate project for each candidate and ease of sharing it with your candidate. Our aim with CodeBlimp is to optimize for that workflow.

It's a great root access shell - world connected - with python. Supercool. May this configure a security issue?

Thanks. About security, each shell is inside a sandbox that isolates it from other users.

Yes I thought that this might be the case. Have you considered that someone could use your demo page to run his own malicious code?

Hey, just wondeiring eh :)

Yes, we limit the resources we give to demo containers. So isolation and limited resources should be enough to prevent most malicious codes (like forkbombs, DDOS scripts, etc). Feel free to play with it. We would love to hear if you find something that can cause trouble!

That's not the point. You are not preventing malicious pad users from setting up outgoing connection and attacking other systems. Hint: exploits.

I was able to do

  rm -rf bin

Maybe don't let your users do that? Uptime on the box was 13 days as well - you should probably just spin up fresh on-demand boxes for this.

This only affects that one interview pad you ran it in. We can make it hard to do stuff like this but one can always find a way. And it's fine too because these commands affect that user only.

Anything looks to mean "anything that can be installed on Linux". How can I install e.g. Visual Studio?

You are right. Although... with some hackery installing VS should be possible too. Not at all recommended!

very cool.. now i don’t have to setup a VM on my machine. quick question: do you ever delete these machines?

Co-founder here. We don't delete but we suspend them if they are inactive for long. They are restored when you access them again. Though you have an option to delete machines.

Really nice concept. Any plans for Java projects?

Thanks. You can install JDK.

Great interface. What is the front end built on?

Thanks. It's based on React.

Great looking landing page, the clarity on the images is particularly good and and it loaded super-fast here in the UK.

The service looks really good too. Good luck gaining traction :-)

Thanks Teeboo!

A great idea for those who have no idea how to hire people!

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com