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I agree with your premise that code reviews are a good exercise in interviews. But I'm struggling to see what this app does that screen sharing an editor couldn
by imiric 3y ago
I agree with your premise that code reviews are a good exercise in interviews. But I'm struggling to see what this app does that screen sharing an editor couldn't do. The Benefits section doesn't really sell it to me.
Another aspect that would be helpful is to let the candidate implement the suggestions they make directly in the code. For example, say that you deliberately introduce a bug or issue, and then in addition of them pointing it out, a follow-up question of "how would you fix it?", the discussion about that, and the final fix, would be very beneficial signals. For this to work, it's not sufficient to have a read-only interface that allows adding comments only[1], but they should have access to a proper IDE.
Of course, they could always game this as they would a leetcode exercise, but I think that allowing candidates to use all tools at their disposal during interviews that they would use during actual work ultimately helps you judge their real performance. This includes their own editor, with autocompletion, AI assistance, access to documentation, online resources, etc.
We'll have to accept the fact that AI tools are here to stay, rather than setup artificial interview scenarios that don't reflect the reality of their day to day work. The actual discussion during the interview will allow interviewers to judge performance, and, perhaps more importantly, whether they want to work with this person or not.
[1]: Why would they need to type in their feedback during a live interview? I saw text comments in one of your screenshots. Are reviews meant to be conducted asynchronously?
- gajus 3y agoI agree with this. I see a lot of benefits in advocating this style of interview. However, I am struggling to think of what good does a SaaS bring here. For one, we use GitHub for all code reviews, and we'd want interview to be as close as possible to the environment that the engineers are familiar with. Any time we tried bringing another tool to the process, it only causes additional stress/friction for everyone involved. Also, I found that constructing example code for interview produces worst insights than using your actual codebase. We have a few codebases that are of lesser importance that we use for interviews. The extra benefit of this is that the candidate gets to see approximation of how your actual codebase is structured.
- CharlieDigital 3y agoWell, first, it's open source and free :) I hope that folks that find it useful fork it and build their own extensions or contribute to the project. Second, it has some basic functionality to manage candidate workspaces, track comments, and originally had some more plans to do side-by-side candidate comparisons of feedback and detection of outliers. I think that generally as AI-powered coding tools become more powerful and more prevalent in their use, productive programmers are those that can quickly review the output for correctness in the domain. (Maybe at some point, with 1m+ context, this won't be an issue!). You mentioned also being able to fix the issue - I'd argue that in most cases, if a candidate can spot the issue, then it's a matter of reading docs, checking StackOverflow, or even asking ChatGPT for a proposed fix. Spotting the issue seems the more interesting and challenging task, IMO.