Show HN: Interviewing devs made easy
codeinterview.me
codeinterview.me
I also looked at the main description:
>Let your candidates code in their own IDE where they >feel comfortable and check the results in Google Docs.
"Ah," I think, "he's about to pull some kind of voodoo so that I can show my interviewer what I can do with Vim and SLIME." Then I actually investigated, and found out that by "their own IDE" you mean a "common IDE", and by "common IDE" you actually were referring to only two IDEs, neither of which I have used or want to use.
The web version is actually cool, and I'll probably use it with my friends (I actually just finished typing some code into Facebook to help a friend out--it would've been great to use this website instead). But I had my hopes built up about my "own IDE", so using the web interface turned out to be disappointing.
So my humble suggestions:
1) Trash both videos.
2) Change some wording to make it clear that most people will use a web interface that niftily allows real-time editing by two people.
3) Since your product is so cool, mention that if the customer uses Eclipse or IDEA, there's a plugin so he can use his own IDE!
Best suggestion in the interest of the business and for the business to remain stable enough to learn the target customer. Can't upvote it enough.
I'm still at my first job (I'm only a HS senior), and for the interview I was asked to bring in some code. I brought my laptop, whose splash screen proudly displayed "Crunchbang Linux". I believe this was the moment that gave the most "points" in their eyes. Then I opened up my code, did some basic-but-impressive-looking flying around with Vim (it's not like there was actual editing involved), popped over to a terminal to `cd' around and then run it, and left a very good impression.
And my PM has a habit of asking me for help with bash. I have a rudimentary-at-best knowledge of it, but he's happy when I kludge together something with pipes and grep and sometimes "after that command, vim will open. You should then press the following to find and replace the text as desired." I'll then include as a footnote, "There's a much better way to do this as a one-liner with sed and awk...I just don't know how."
So of {beautiful code, working product, knowledge of tools} they only value two...and I'm just surprised it's the last two, not the first two. I guess I can't complain though.
The other part is bitmap vs text. If you have use for the text (clever solution for something) or maybe some analysis on it then text wins. Will depend on the case.
Screensharing wins for showing off everything and not just a single editor text. Commandline, keyboard foo, google foo etc.
A little lower barrier to make an interview, although there's no IDE involved.
I don't know who you're targeting, but I certainly don't expect interview candidates to be running the latest and greatest.
Finally, the URL is way too complicated to give out over the phone... oops?
One comment: on both (interviewee & interviewer) page I'd recommend having a box in the right rail with the following:
"Give this pin: * to the interview[er|ee]. If you already have a pin, enter it here:
[ INPUT BOX ]"
I created something like that: http://www.codingquiz.com
I understand why companies would want to see somebody code, but if they can critique some code that they have never seen before that is properly as good a signal and it is easier to give the same test to the candidates.
Interviewers who demand compile-ready code on-the-spot are frankly, insane.
I use typewith.me (an etherpad clone, I think), and it's great. The big win for using real-time typing apps is evaluating fluency. Someone can probably bang out some reasonably looking code if you give them homework (assuming they did it themselves!), but there's no faking the keystrokes of someone who's intimately familiar with the syntax of a language and knows WTF they're doing.
I'd have to be at my home desktop and check my history for a good list of links, but I got to use a handful of competitors when I was looking for work a couple months ago. I'd have to try this one out to be sure, but the extra polish plus the ability to use the interviewee's own IDE could be huge advantages.
[2]: http://trollim.com
[3]: http://www.codeyouridea.com/coders/
[4]: http://www.happyjobsearch.com/
Their approach is different/beyond watching the candidate code.
(I am not affiliated with them in any way.)
I always wanted to make my own challenges that would have to be automatically solved by potential candidates, and here it is! Glad someone else did this already.
Edit: I see codio.com does this as well
Etherpad (and its clone instances) is awesome. Never had a problem.
Try it yourself:
btw the blog link in the nav says "blag'