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Show HN: Tired of doing coding interviews on Skype? We've built this
- xerophtye 13y agoLooks nice, but how is it efficient than screen sharing and watching him code?
- munirusman 13y agoThis tool combines code editor, compiler and Audio/Video/Text chat with powerful rating system. All in web without installing anything. Disclaimer: I am part of remoteinterview.io team.
- chii 13y agoHow well does it deal with java maven projects (if it does deal with it at all)?
- asadlionpk 13y agoWe are currently using ideone's api.
- icemelt8 13y agoYou should mention that I won't be able to access the app instantly and will be notified later.
- munirusman 13y agoThanks for the suggestion. We will modify.
- higherpurpose 13y agoIs it using WebRTC or some proprietary plugin?
- asadlionpk 13y agoHello, yes we used SimpleWebRTC as our base plugin (highly recommended). Some minor modifications though. Other than that, we setup a TURN server as STUN doesn't work at many times. That was it I guess.
- dm2 13y agoI've had good results with OpenTok (http://tokbox.com/opentok http://tokbox.com/opentok). 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-years-has-taught-us/ http://www.tokbox.com/blog/webrtc-and-signaling-what-two-yea...
- asadlionpk 13y agotokbox was our backup plan :) WebRTC is very unreliable as of now. So we will still test how current solution works for the beta users.
- drivingmenuts 13y agoSeriously? Commenting while the sausage is being made? 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.
- asadlionpk 13y agoHello, we are in a private beta and have been using it for our own use for a month now :) 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.
- elliottcarlson 13y agoYes and no - part of a coding interview shouldn't just be can they get to the answer, but how do they get to the answer. If the solution to someones FizzBuzz is simply pre-coding the answers and printing them to the screen line by line, checking that you haven't reached the X limit in the request, then yes - you made it output everything correctly, but seriously, that's not someone who I would want working for me. In this case, you should also be judging how someone makes the sausage, and how they use the casing machine. 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.
- xerophtye 13y agoWhile i agree that personally as the CANDIDATE, i'd probably want to get to finish everything and THEN let them see what i did, but as someone commented what's more interesting than just the code is the analysis and thought process that led up to it, and this product seems to help analyze that better
- dkersten 13y agoWhat languages does it support?
- munirusman 13y agoMore than 10 languages so far including JS, C++, Java, ObjC, PHP, Python and Ruby.
- onion2k 13y agoTired of doing coding interviews on Skype? No. -------- 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.
- asadlionpk 13y agoI agree, we are developers mostly. But I guess you should visit the site (which was our main intention with posting to this awesome place) Please do have a look, it would be great if you tell us what do you think of our idea :)
- afandian 13y agoI've written code in a few job interviews (and been in the opposite position, asking someone to write code in an interview). In all cases they were more interested (rightly so) about the conversation around the interpretation of the question, discussion over the analysis of the problem and logic required to satisfy the problem. The act of writing the code was very much secondary. Like "now prove you could implement what you just described". Decontextualised appraisal of the resultant code written seems somewhat to be missing the point. Perhaps other places do things differently but this seems to be based on a shallow analysis of the interview process as I have experienced it. 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.
- munirusman 13y agoI agree with you that "This guy is fast" is not the right way to judge but we just meant to demonstrate rating feature. Every interviewer can rate and judge in a subjective way. Disclaimer: I am part of remoteinterview.io team.
- afandian 13y agoOf course it's a nuanced process, and how a marketing person imagined using the facility. But if a marketing person interprets the facility that way, people hiring position may too. People adapt to tools. None of the above is to say that I don't think this tool has a place.
- bradleyland 13y agoI once worked with some very, very successful direct marketing people, and along the way gathered some stellar advice on common advertising tropes. One of these is, "don't talk down to your audience." 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.
- asattarmd 13y agoI see you have used Firebase. I am very interested to see how you have achieved this without a solid backend.
- asadlionpk 13y agoGood eye :) We have a thin nodejs server too, we use it mainly for the linkedIn login system (since Firebase doesn't do linkedin by itself yet). Firebase is highly recommended. We didn't have to deal with creating our own REST server and handling the security of the thing. That too when you want to build a MVP to test the idea quickly.
- benjamincharity 13y agoMy biggest problem with coding interviews is not the actual communication tool (Skype/etc) but rather that the developer is pulled completely out of their environment. Take away my vim/snippets/custom key bindings/ide plugins/etc and then ask me to code? Feels like you're cutting off one of my arms right before you measure my performance.
- asadlionpk 13y agoI am a developer myself. I agree that most of the interviews are biased (forcing us to use whiteboard, paper). 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.
- Yoric 13y agoFirefox developer here: if you need a feature, feel free to get in touch. 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.
- TheMakeA 13y agoWebRTC works as a transport mechanism, but does Firefox actually allow for screen capture?
- asadlionpk 13y agoI agree that the candidate should be able to go to prefs and enable features. But I guess that is not an ideal solution. We can temporarily opt for this option though.
- why-el 13y agoIf you are asked a question that you think you can't reasonably answer without your environment, then either you are too dependent on it or the question was unreasonable. In both scenarios just tell the interviewer that and I am sure there will be other ways.
- antocv 13y agoAnd so the commodityfication of "the coder" begins. 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.
- asadlionpk 13y agoBut it all comes down to how an interviewer is evaluating and dealing the candidate isn't it? Coming up with reasonably quick solutions might not be the criteria for some interviewers, but this is just a tool to make the process simple. How one conducts the interview is not something we can control.
- netcan 13y agoI would argue that electricians are far more commodified and that the trend this is a part of is the opposite of commodification. 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.
- asadlionpk 13y agoYes, the objective of this tool and many others is to improve the ability of the employer to identify skills quickly and without false negative...
- antocv 13y ago"Identify skills quickly" thats exactly what this tool does not do. 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.
- vtvs 13y agohttps://codility.com/ https://codility.com/ ?
- asadlionpk 13y agocodility,interviewstreet etc are mainly used to filter out the noise. The usual action after shortlisting from codility is to have a real-time/one-to-one conversation and to analyze the thought process of the candidate. Our tool comes in handy at this point. To have a discussion based test.
- rootuid 13y agoLooks promising until I say this 404: http://remoteinterview.io/notBrandedandUgly 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 !
- dewey 13y agoYou are judging a landing page for a product beta by the looks of the 404 page?
- rootuid 13y agoI judge a book by it's cover.
- asadlionpk 13y agoWe are a small team. We got the landing page ready asap (focusing on the product release more). But you are very right, I have currently redirected 404 to homepage. Will add a 404 later :)
- rguzman 13y agoA few similar tools have popped up recently. Like this one, they look pretty good, and like improvements over skype et. al. However, they seem to solve the easy part of the problem and not the hard one. 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.
- munirusman 13y agoVery well said. We have been thinking how to completely avoid human involvement in evaluation. We haven't figured out how but we are developing a feature to help interviewer in determining what to ask by using questions library. This won't solve the issue you pointed out completely but it will surely help interviewer to some extent.
- username223 13y ago> how to completely avoid human involvement in evaluation. 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.
- asadlionpk 13y agoYes, I have tried fooling many codility/interview street questions by searching around and finding code snippets. For a techie, its very very easy to fool offline/automated tools.
- ndgandhi 13y agosomething similar https://www.hackerrank.com/x/codepair https://www.hackerrank.com/x/codepair
- asadlionpk 13y agoYes. But I guess there is still room in this space. The problem with hackerrank is that they are trying to get their hands in all of the hiring process. The fact that most people still use Hangouts + Docs shows that the problem is far from solved.
- eadlam 13y agoIf this was a website where I could practice solving algorithm problems and people could comment at points during the playback, I would totally sign up.
- asadlionpk 13y agoooh, that is a nice idea! But not within our scope :)
- quarterwave 13y agoI'm guessing it will take a bit of work to support multiple languages/frameworks/platforms. A simpler solution may be to allow an interviewer to spin up a machine with the image/environment of choice (AWS, DigitalOcean etc) and do some kind of screen sharing with markup - easy to circle some code on a touch screen tablet. Interviewers typically specialize in languages and platforms, so every interviewer can maintain their favorite "interview machine image". 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.
- asadlionpk 13y agoHey, Skype API hmmmm that's a nice idea, since WebRTC is in early stages. And it is actually helpful for others to see each others comments. This helps them not make redundant votes and each comment is a unique comment. I understand why you suggest that though.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoTry Sococo for this - share docs, desktop, apps, webpages, or all at once. Use the web app or download the full-featured one. Sign up or participate as a guest. My point is, there are full-featured collaborative tools that an interviewer can use already. {I work at Sococo}
- asadlionpk 13y agoSococo is nice :) People use Hangouts + Docs usually for this type of work. Hence, our interests in making this tool.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoYeah plenty of room in the product space right now. Not sure which will win - purpose-built apps for situations, or general-purpose integrated apps.
- Seldaek 13y agoCSS nitpick: check it out on a large/wide screen, the header is messed up due to (I assume) percentage-based font-sizing + the fact that the logo is not scaling accordingly.
- asadlionpk 13y agoLet me look into it :)
- voidlogic 13y agoGreat implementation for a bad practice, idea. This tool IMHO encourages the worst interviewing practices. 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. This focus of this is 1. Can they produce 2. Can the work on a team 3. Do they grok computer, with 1 and 2 being weighted more.
- Forplax 13y ago> 2. Ask candidates to implement a simple project (~8 hours) 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.
- voidlogic 13y agoIts more fair then the "what can I make you code under pressure, without references, while I stare at you" tests, and its more like what you are hiring them to do. Its also good for figuring out who you don't want to fly across the country to interview with you. It also lets people self select and go- I don't know how to do this- maybe this isn't the right job for me. I'm assuming these tasks are toy tasks and the company isn't getting IP value from them- I'd let your candidates open-source what they build, so long as they don't say why they (really) built it.
- asadlionpk 13y agoAsking people to implement projects seems very less scalable (considering you get 100+ resumes). It is good for small hire... This reminds me of Aaron Swartz's essay about this.
- coledubz 13y agoHis string manipulation is very good!
- mosselman 13y agoHaha you beat me to this. I cracked up when I saw it. While the app looks very good as a product, I find what it is pretty useless.
- devwebee 13y agoI noticed this too. Plus they're using a bad example. Looping an array with "for..in" in JavaScript is one of the most known antipatterns.
- northisup 13y agoYou built it! awesome! I can't tell by the survey monkey landing page you set up. Looks like some awesome graphic design work though. Post to HN when you are ready to launch, not just to gather emails.
- asadlionpk 13y agoWe are gathering emails to see how much signups to expect at the launch time. And then prepare our app/server for that type of traffic. As a HNer, I know it sucks not being able to directly try the app. But we figured this was a necessary step to take :)
- notastartup 13y agoFor me this makes it easier to filter out companies. If I see remoteinterview.io I would simply move on to the next company .
- asadlionpk 13y agoWhy?
- notastartup 13y agoBecause I don't believe software is built around the ability to memorize algorithms from computer science courses and recite it. Even if you apply the algorithm, you are still coming from learned memory, something you read and recanting with slight variations. 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.
- shibbowhat 13y agoI recognize Stephen Merchant's face used as 'Tim Burke' in the 'Hire the Best Candidate' section. Are these all famous mugs, or is that the only one? I don't think I recognize any others.
- colmmacc 13y agoThere's a large community of musicians who supplement their income with Skype lessons these days. For $45 I can have an hour with some of the best musicians in world and folk music for example - heroes whose CDs I listened to as a teenager. Whether they're in Florida, Dublin, Germany or here in Seattle, location has stopped being a barrier. It's awesome. 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).
- asadlionpk 13y agoThis and remote teaching (of code etc) are few of the things tools like these can adapt to.
- aneelkkhatri 13y agoLooks promising! Surely gonna lessen the hassle of conducting a remote coding interview.
- faisalali 13y agoI have used this tool as an Alpha user and I am pretty much satisfied with it.