What's with this trend of people randomly inserting the word Zen into things?
Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#12Very interesting to see myself code: see the frequency of typos, see the order I write things, etc...
But do these things even matter? We design and build complex systems. The actual typing part is insignificant.
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#13Just to be clear: I'm not the founder, neither am I affiliated with this platform in any way.
After researching other coding interview tools, I stumbled upon this one (that I'll probably use next week), and wanted to share it with HN.
If the discussion here is interesting (as usually), I'll send the link to the author.
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#14Okay. Tried it out. This has some promise, but I think there might be some issues in actual use. One of the major bonuses of this for me as an interviewer is to see how the candidate solves the problem over time (as opposed to just seeing the finished product). However, as a candidate, the coding process is pretty painful. I tried it out for C# and there is no intellisense, no compilation, no type checking, etc. This…
It's definitely far from comfortable if you compare to your favorite editor/IDE. In my case, I'm fine with it because I just want to assess the overall coding and design skills of the candidate.
For instance, I'm well aware that when you take Eclipse/IntelliJ away from a Java developer, we feel hopelessly lost, so I wouldn't be picky when seeing the candidate answers.
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#15Very interesting to see myself code: see the frequency of typos, see the order I write things, etc...
But do these things even matter? We design and build complex systems. The actual typing part is insignificant.
In the end, they don't matter.
But, as a candidate, once you try it once, and see what the interviewer will see, you become very self-aware of those minor details. It perhaps adds a bit of unnecessary pressure for some.
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#16It's certainly not perfect, but I came up with it under pressure in less than 90 seconds without checking online for the modulo return values, so I'm rather proud of it.
$x = 1;
while($x if((($x % 5) == 0) && (($x % 3) != 0)){ print("Buzz"); }else{ if(($x % 3) == 0){ if(($x % 5) == 0) { print("FizzBuzz"); } else { print("Fizz"); } }else{ print($x); }} ++$x; }
?>
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#17It is a good idea but I'll stick with using join.me (or skype, vnc, or teamviewer) so the candidate can have their own development environment.
Writing code in this doesn't really give you anything beyond watching how long it takes them to type something, which isn't a good indicator of anything (perhaps they have the phone up to their ear instead of a headset and it is hard to type). Also, since there is no way to test your code you may as well do the same thing in a skype chat window.
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#18I've used this in an interview and was very frustrated. Perhaps it was the fault of the interviewer and the way he framed his questions (they were slightly involved questions -- "write a command line utility that converts an image file, include unit tests, etc.)? I would often have to write my code in the online editor... (so the interviewer could observe my "style") and then bounce out of the browser, throw it into…
I think the problem lies in the interviewer in this case. This tool seems to be a substitute for being in an interview room and having a whiteboard to write code on in front of the interviewer, rather than an IDE with a "record-mode". As such, I think the interview question should be posed as if that were the case.
In regards to its effectiveness, I think if you take the above into consideration, this tool works very well as advertised. If I were being interviewed with it I suppose I'd just be thankful it has syntax highlighting.
Questions for this should be to discover a person's thinking and problem-solving style, not the correctness of syntax/libraries/etc. Things like writing idiomatic code, etc. are much more appropriate to test for.
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#19In Internet Explorer 9, the code editor is unusable because you can't change previously entered lines. When you try to move the cursor by up arrow key or mouse click, the cursor jumps back to the last line. Maybe it's a feature to exclude candidates who don't run a modern browser. :-)
Re: Interview Zen, tool for asynchronous coding interviews
#20When I clicked on the play button on the homepage under Chrome (latest) on Macbook i7/8gb, my fans popped on and I thought I was going into outer space. Is that just me?