Show HN: CoderScreen – Automated Technical Interviews

two comments here:

first congrats if this is your project, on demand virtual machines with focused tasks and recording terminal sessions to evaluate later is pretty interesting and seems like no easy feat and even, outside the context of an interview, seems like it has a fun puzzle

that said, as somebody that's been interviewing technical candidates for the past three years or so, this doesn't appeal to me at all, primarily because it only time-shifts the "i'm staring over your shoulder problem" that makes even competent developers make stupid mistakes.

and to be honest, i'm not sure that as an applicant, i would be overly thrilled to receive one of these screens, it makes me think that the company can't be bothered to look at my resume, or ask me in person, or do a reference check, or even look at some code that i've provided. arriving here signals to me as applicant "this company isn't even willing to put in a 15 minute screen to ask me fizzbuzz" which, to my mind, is a bad smell to give off.

but mostly coming from the side of "i talk to a fair number of candidates" i never find that code samples or projects or anything really gives me as much insight as talking to somebody about their work, about the things they valued in their sample projects, or the things that they're presently passionate about.

on the spot code interviews are already problematic, but looking at a realtime playback and scrutinizing it feels like a net loss over having a candidate walk me through their thought process for `fib(n)`, a process which is already stressful enough when you can explain yourself. it's great that these eventually run through a test suite, but

that said, i think there's truly something novel here for non-job situations it's like, you have ten minutes to write an ansible playbook to configure a machine with "git+nginx+memcached." that's a scenario where you're testing yourself against some unknown challenge in a domain you're probably strong in. but i don't think i find it an appropriate challenge 'experience' for applicants.

The thing that would make me, as someone who is recruiting heavily right now, not want to use this is that I fear it will be a massive turn off to really great engineers. If I was interviewing with a company and they made me do this before talking to them I probably just never would. If my first interaction with them isn't an opportunity to also sell them on the company/opportunity then the first impression is hugely suboptimal. I'd rather waste time on 5 phone screens and have 1 really great one where I get a chance to build a connection with the awesome engineer, it greatly increases the chance we'll end up hiring him or her.

Neat. How is this different?

Trueability.com comes to mind.