
Show HN: Interviewing devs made easy - AhtiK
http://codeinterview.me/
======
Tiomaidh
I started watching the first video, and it said "Check out the remake".
"Okay," I say, "if it's better, why isn't it on the main site? If it's not
better...why is it so prominent?" And then it turned out that both videos
were, in a word, awful. You lost me after the first 100 seconds or so of each
one. I don't know if they ever advertised your website--I didn't get that far.
PS: The one on the main site has misspellings in the lyrics.

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!

------
ssebro
Why is this free? B/c you're not charging for your product, I'm skeptical that
you'll be around long enough for it to make sense to learn how to use your
product. Remember you're target is businesses, who are much less price
sensitive, and are much more interested in stability. PLEASE CHARGE.

~~~
happyfeet
PLEASE CHARGE.

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.

------
rohitnair
Or just use a screen sharing tool like Skype. That's how I got interviewed by
the company I'm working for right now, and no browser based tool can match it.
I could use my favorite editor(Vim) and show off my command line skills too.
It was one of the best interview experiences I had.

~~~
Tiomaidh
I can't decide if I'm happy or not that non-coding skills can leave such an
impression.

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.

------
gacba
Another alternative: <http://i.seemikecode.com/>

A little lower barrier to make an interview, although there's no IDE involved.

~~~
balaur7
What about Google Docs?

~~~
toomasr
Google Docs is great, especially because everyone knows about it and it just
works. We started off by writing IDE plugins that posted to Google Docs but
latency was horrible. Should give it another shot in a year.

------
iam
How does this work exactly? I'm on Firefox 3.6 and I can't type anything into
the box. Same goes for IE8.

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?

~~~
toomasr
Seems the library we chose is not the best one when it comes to cross browser
support. We'll have a fallback version soon.

------
georgecalm
Looks great! It's very simple and useful.

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 ]"

~~~
toomasr
This sounds good, added to tasklist.

------
ecaroth
Cool idea! I have been going through the dev hiring process currently, and it
is a huge pain in the ass to write up a test and email it to everybody, then
review the answers and try to keep them straight. It would be great if the
interviewers could create specific questions and keep track of individual
candidates answers, as well as comment on specific parts of the answer and
(maybe) even rate the answers or sort them by 'best' answer for internal use.

~~~
amorphous
Hi

I created something like that: <http://www.codingquiz.com>

------
tomjen3
Honestly I wouldn't be very happy doing live coding in a stressful situation
in some random web interface (emacs not supported? heretic) - half of the time
would be wasted on writing import statements, non essential functions, etc.

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.

~~~
potatolicious
I ask a lot of coding questions in my interviews - if the candidate starts
writing imports, they've already missed the entire point of an interview. I'm
not interested in knowing your intensely deep knowledge of Java boilerplate.

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.

------
webspiderus
typo in Why Do You Need CodeInterview: "How do you know his is a ninja?". I'm
assuming this wasn't as intentional as blag may have been ;)

~~~
bkaid
And aren't there such things as female ninjas?

~~~
arctangent
Indeed there are: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunoichi>

------
koenigdavidmj
Any chance of having one of these that works two-way? I have found a need to
type things back to the candidate.

~~~
toomasr
Google Docs document sharing/collaboration?

------
ashishg
Awesome. Are there any competitors?

~~~
shii
Other related projects/sites/products include Blueberrytree[1], Trollim[2],
CodeYourIdea[3], HappyJobSearch[4], OneDayOneJob[5], and the aforementioned
iSeekMikeCode[6].

[1]: <http://blueberrytree.ws>

[2]: <http://trollim.com>

[3]: <http://www.codeyouridea.com/coders/>

[4]: <http://www.happyjobsearch.com/>

[5]: <http://www.onedayonejob.com/>

[6]: <http://i.seemikecode.com/>

~~~
WillyF
I'm the Founder of One Day, One Job. Not sure I'd consider it a competitor
here, but it's at least tangentially related.

------
zbowling
or just use etherpad.

~~~
alphamerik
How does etherpad (acquired by google) compare to just using Google docs?
Recently went through an interview with Google where we used a shared
document, it was a horrible experience. I remember thinking that no sane
person would code with a plain text editor and there should be a better way to
do it. The ideal service to me would be something like a web based
collaborative emacs.

~~~
rorrr
We've tried using google docs for interviewing, and found that the code will
not always sync. The remote developer would tell us "here's my code, it's
ready", and we would see a blank doc for like 5 minutes.

Etherpad (and its clone instances) is awesome. Never had a problem.

Try it yourself:

<http://typewith.me>

<http://ietherpad.com>

<http://sync.in>

~~~
skybrian
How recently? Google Docs has gotten faster at syncing in the last year or so.

------
anonymoushn
Can you select languages other than Java in the web interface?

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kadabra9
looks pretty cool, congrats.

btw the blog link in the nav says "blag'

~~~
masterzora
I'd be surprised if it was not intentional: <http://xkcd.com/148/>

~~~
jganetsk
I find it funny but it makes me not take this company seriously.

~~~
ruethewhirled
After watching the video you'd come to the same conclusion. Doesn't seem to
have anything to do with the product ..and so they code..

------
mmaunder
Upvoted for the ...and so you code.. song. Nice one!

