Show HN: Tired of doing coding interviews on Skype? We've built this
remoteinterview.io
remoteinterview.io
I can see that there are facilities for discussion in the app, but when the examples say "this guy's fast" and show up and down-voting based on scores, and then arriving at a hiring recommendation based on those scores... that seems to point squarely at a mechanical hiring process. Then again it says "top coder" rather than "best software engineer" or "most competent developer". Maybe it's a cultural thing.
Disclaimer: I am part of remoteinterview.io team.
None of the above is to say that I don't think this tool has a place.
Few people challenge this axiom of marketing, but the real insight lies in identifying what's "talking down". It's easy to assume that you must intend to talk down to your audience in order to fall in to this trap, but it's just as easy for down-talking elements to enter your marketing organically.
"This guy is fast" talks down to your audience because it assumes that there is no more subtle way to illustrate the rating feature, which can also be understood by your audience.
You should change this ASAP. The people conducting coding interviews are often programmers, and this overly simplistic means of evaluation will make them feel objectified in a big way. They will associate that objectification with this tool, and they will avoid it at all cost.
The "upvote" I noticed was something along the lines of "very good string manipulation".
The audience of course is people who want to hire "coders" and not simply anyone that might fall under that description. Wouldn't they be doing themselves a disservice by assuming that none of their target market are interested in how fast a candidate can arrive at and implement a solution?
Perhaps you're being a bit too touchy? It is of course a normal human response to being put under the spotlight in such a way as to reduce your worth to basic metrics.
The problem is evaluating a candidate. For that, one likely needs to do some live-coding in some capacity along with several other things. While the existing tools are subpar, they are good enough. The hard part is what questions to ask and how to go about judging the answers as to produce a good hiring signal without alienating candidates.
You can tell that remoteinterview is trying to address the real problem from their marketing copy. However, I am highly skeptical that giving team members the ability to up and down vote with comments on an etherpad + video is a big chunk of it or even an "in".
If I were working in this space I would only worry about how to produce evaluation materials given some information about a company and a candidate. It very well may be that it is not easy enough or possible to do that at scale or cost-effectively, but that seems to be the thing companies struggle with, not having to use skype.
Cool, so have I! Simple web searches produce answers to most of your automatically-generated questions that get by your cheap screeners, and fooling whatever program you write should be even easier.
We let you execute pretty much any code as you write it in real-time, letting you observe how a candidate approaches a problem much more holistically.
Hello! Hope you are enjoying CoderPad. I've added this file because a lot of people have emailed me voicing security concerns. Usually these concerns are to the tune of "programming language X lets me run Y system call."
They're not wrong, you can run any system call! Security in CoderPad happens at the LXC sandbox layer. You are currently in an ephemeral container that will be destroyed upon your departure. You are welcome to run any privileged operation you can get your hands on. CoderPad is, after all, the highest fidelity programming interview tool there is.
That said, if you do manage to uncover something like privilege escalation or data created by other users, I want to hear about it. You can email me at vincent@coderpad.io, and I look forward to hearing from you.
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This is the problem with question based marketing messages. You'd be better off going with something like "Skype isn't the most effective solution for technical interviews." or "Everything Skype brings to coding interviews and more." That way, even if I'm completely happy with Skype, I'll probably still have a look.
Please do have a look, it would be great if you tell us what do you think of our idea :)
I'd prefer you tell me what sausage you want, then you can comment on the taste. But commenting on the way I turn the casing machine handle to the left, rather than the standard right, is going a bit too far.
But I agree with you on the sausage analogy... we just wanted to see how much people sign up for the next beta so we can prepare (technically and mentally) for it.
On the other hand, another part of a good interview should be the conversation surrounding the coding exercise. Seeing if someone can come up with a better solution, or even explaining their thought process. Just because they cranked the casing machine to the left doesn't mean it is wrong either.
Either way you should definitely be reserving your thoughts and evaluation until the end, since people can easily make mistakes and quickly turn around and impress you.
We had a little feature idea to include a screensharing mechanism so developers can use their ide. But sadly, only chrome supports that feature as of yet. We would probably add it later.
I assume that you mean WebRTC, and we have had it for a long time. Some bits are deactivated by default, but you can activate it with preferences if you need. I assume that any interviewee can be expected to reach into their prefs.
Sit me down in front of Visual Studio and I can write code just fine. It's just I do so while consciously thinking about the editor and how I'm using it more than I would in my preferred vim environment, where things are largely subconscious through familiarity.
The feature I like best is the group comments - I would recommend restricting read access by all interviewers until everyone's feedback has been read by the interview co-ordinator, and the everyone gets to see all the comments during the hire/not group discussion among a possibly distributed team.
Also, I'm wondering why take on (what I assume is) the rather onerous task of supporting voice chat? Wouldn't it be simpler to adopt Skype (thru an API?) rather than fight it? My humble two cents: focus on where you're adding value, not call quality, security etc.
I'd prefer to hire like this:
1. Collect resumes/recommendations
2. Ask candidates to implement a simple project (~8 hours)
3. Ask remaining candidates with reasonable/better solutions to come on-site.
4. See how behave during code review of their project
5. Give them a small simple problem to solve
6. Ask them to tell you their solutions time and space complexity
7. Ask them to write a unit test for their solution
8. Ask them to code review your solution to the same simple problem and contrast it to theirs
9. Ask them 1 or 2 simple theory questions that demonstrate their understanding depth. Maybe "How does virtual memory work and why was it invented".
10. Buy them lunch/supper.
I've never understood why employers seem to think asking for 8+ hours free work before even possibly getting an interview is fair to the applicant.
But Skype and Google talk are both terrible for it; there's no easy place to show notes (of the wordy kind or the musical kind), a mock instrument would be great too, to show learners new chord shapes, for example. And the audio encoding on the video streams are optimized for speech, making music a bit warbley at times.
It'd be great to see tools like this adapted to music lessons, and I bet it's more sustainable business with more opportunities to create real value (store lesson plans for example).
http://remoteinterview.io/notBrandedandUgly
Brand your 404, it's part of your site and this generic hosting 404 template with references to WordPress doesn't do you any favors !
But you are very right, I have currently redirected 404 to homepage. Will add a 404 later :)
While the app looks very good as a product, I find what it is pretty useless.
My point is, there are full-featured collaborative tools that an interviewer can use already. {I work at Sococo}
People use Hangouts + Docs usually for this type of work. Hence, our interests in making this tool.
We used that after halfway successfully setting up our own TURN server but not trusting its current reliability, security, and ability to work in the future and not wanting to spend any more time and resources on it.
http://www.tokbox.com/blog/webrtc-and-signaling-what-two-yea...
Disclaimer: I am part of remoteinterview.io team.
The fact that most people still use Hangouts + Docs shows that the problem is far from solved.
Imagine if you wanted to hire an electrician, but before you let them into your house, you ask to follow around to see them connect and cut wires? Then you would judge their skills by how fast they can cut and put back together a wire. Thats the level that this "screen sharing, watch him code" does.
Is this field that much hammered by pretends?
"Top coder" is repulsive.
An electrician is usually licensed, which means they are above a certain, fairly low bar. The average person is far more concerned with avoiding the worst electricians. Beyond that price is the biggest factor and the electricians are interchangeable. Give me the best price for soy that isn't rotten.
In coding jobs, employers are trying to identify the best, worst, etc. You can argue against this as a test of quality & qualities, but the net effect is not commoditization.
It identifies the most needy/desperate engineers.
Anyway, I for sure would not sign up for such a thing, it tells me the recruitment agency or potential employee views software engineering as "typing code skills", like hacker-typer.com. In my opinion a software engineer works more closely to the business and requirements elicitation than just implementation.
Like to me speed does matter, someone unusually fast at coming up with a solution would definitely get my upvote.
At least its an interesting idea to explain this growth in recruitment agencies and skype-interviews.
Big IT consultancies are probably your best allies in this campaign. They would definitely appreciate being able to order their rate cards for coders,licensed programmers & certified master programmers at different rates. They would also be glad to be on the certification and licensing committees. The shoddier schools would also be on board. "Recognized certification courses" has a nice ring to it.
Recruiters would also love it.
Granted, this does not ensure that the electrician you hire won't screw up, but it at least provides some baseline of competency.
How fast you write code or how much code you write does not equal a good programmer.
I doubt licensed electricians remained licensed for long if they don't know the difference between hot and neutral wires.
Plenty of programmers have 2 year certificates or none at all.
That being said, I'd consider programming to be a 'creative' profession in many ways...
I agree that if homeowners are the judge, they might do something like speed of splicing a wire, or maybe wiring an electrical outlet, because that is all they know. However, we're talking about electricians being judged by other electricians in this situation. It's up to the sr. electrician to know what a quality electrician is and judge that effectively. If the sr. or hiring electrician cannot do so, you don't want to work for him/her anyway.
This tool is relatively meaningless without qualified people observing. If you threw them some code tests that were merely timed, I would agree with you.
If it was based on the specific technology and questions and in the context of their business problems, I would understand. I hated memorizing sorting algorithms and be asked to pretend like I'm reaching an epiphany as I'm doing the problem live. Frowning profusely, and slowly writing the solution, and emerging as if you just solved a complicated physics equation.
Tell me to build a small project in the stack you are using, if I don't think I will be able to do it, it will show.