Making coding interviews more realistic

I’ve written endlessly about the tension between candidates and employers when it comes to technical assessments and interviews. The TL;DR is that engineering leaders continue to need to carefully evaluate each candidate’s coding capabilities. Failing to do so at pretty much any scale leads to overtly biased decisions and unqualified hires.

That being said, most interview processes truly suck and employers need to do a much better job of creating an improved candidate experience. Thankfully, that’s getting easier to do.

Until recently, most coding assessment and interview platforms were essentially digital versions of algorithmic riddles that candidates have long been asked to whiteboard in fluorescent-lit rooms. They’ve had almost nothing in common with the actual job requirements and mostly tested a candidate’s ability to prepare and interview. However, with the advent of cloud computing and containerization, it’s increasingly possible to conduct more realistic code assessments and interviews.

Real-world applications in the cloud

Replit has been a pioneer in enabling developers to write applications in a cloud editor. Now, code interview platforms like Coderbyte offer similar functionality for interviewers and candidates.

Interviewers and candidates can clone repositories from Github, navigate using a file-tree, run commands and download packages in a terminal, and preview their applications in real-time.

Rather than be constrained to algorithmic challenges in an unfamiliar code editor, employers can configure an environment similar to their actual tech stack and evaluate how candidates would perform on the job. On Coderbyte, interviews can include building applications in the most popular frameworks, with more being added weekly:

• Node.js/Express
• Python/Django
• Ruby/Ruby on Rails
• Java/Spring
• MongoDB/Node.js

This is a game-changer for hiring as it gives employers more targeted testing capabilities in order to make more accurate in decision-making, and gives candidates a more familiar and powerful platform to showcase their skills.

Enterprise features for employers

Of course, employers were always able to give candidates access to repositories and ask them to submit projects that they worked on in their own code editor. The difference now is that platforms like Coderbyte purposefully built for interviews offer the same capability with a suite of additional built-in features:

• Library of project-based challenges
• Ability to compensate candidates with one click
• Reports with benchmarking, cheating detection, and code playback
• Anonymization of candidate information to remove bias
• Custom challenges and interview templates

On top of that, employers can finally combine recruiting for various roles into a single platform and system-of-record. For example, Coderbyte offers Jupyter Notebooks and Spreadsheets for data science and analyst roles, and a massive library of multiple choice and video response questions for sales, marketing, product, and interpersonal assessments.