For the nay-sayers out there: You have <i>clearly</i> not been anywhere near the hiring funnel of a tech company. The sheer number of people with impressive academic credentials, even with industry experience, that can't code a for-loop and reason about it is <i>staggering</i>. Anything that facilitates actual, hands-on coding early in the process and on an actual computer (as opposed to whiteboards or paper) is a very welcome addition.
I've had coding interviews via phone/Skype + browser since I started applying a couple of years ago. I'm not sure why anyone would be depressed.<p>It seems like a lot of posters here just don't like being interviewed on any terms except their own. It's a very snooty position to take, but I suppose there's enough room for those types of people as well.<p>I prefer this over some companies who (seriously) have a great phone-only interview with me, only to reject me after looking at my GitHub. I also don't blame them for not dropping a lot of money to fly me out to meet them when they wouldn't even know if I'm qualified or not. This is a pretty good medium, I think. This is only second to my preference for being given a project and a few days to do it, but I wouldn't fault a company for whatever method they chose, unless it was downright asinine.
This is really cool! A few things though:<p>* You probably have your reasons, but requiring an email to simply test it out is too much IMO. I don't want to go through the email invitation dance, I don't want spam in the future, and I don't want to wait; so, I practically always refuse.<p>* In general, the ratio of marketing info to specifics is too high; in other words, more details would be nice, such as: I see it supports 16 languages; ok, great! So, what are they...? (mind you, I wouldn't be asking if there was a public demo)
One anectdote, for whateever it's worth - Our company adopted online code testing, in which the screening interviewer (as opposed to the entire interview team) tossed out sample coding questions, and had the candidate write code real-time with feedback from the interviewer - it COMPLETELY revolutionized the quality of candidates that started coming in for in-person interviews, and increased the percentage of candidates interviewed in person being hired from around 20-30% up to 70-80%.<p>The single greatest advantage of "pre-testing" candidates is that the amount of time engineers had to spend interviewing candidates was reduced dramatically. A secondary advantage for the candidates, is that they didn't have to waste their time coming in for interviews for jobs that they were really not qualified for - win all around.<p>I don't understand how anyone can't see that it would be useful to determine whether a developer can code prior to coming into an interview.<p>All of the top engineering managers (by that, I mean the ones who are really effective at hiring and retaining great engineers) have always told me, that part of the interview for a developer who is expected to code, is that they should demonstrate their ability to code, during the interview.<p>I'm not sure why being asked to demonstrated this ability online is considered an issue.
We have modified it so that you don't need to signup or provide your e-mail: <a href="https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit2/codepair" rel="nofollow">https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit2/codepair</a><p>Check it out! Thanks for the feedback
Naysayers: This product is not for you. It is for the interviewer's benefit. You are not the one paying for it so your "depression" due to tools such as this is almost a non issue.<p>If you don't want to do a technical interview such as codepair, then don't. I'm sure there will be other candidates who wouldn't mind.<p>Now the question as to whether or not this is effective in gauging the actual resourcefulness of a potential employee - that is a little less certain. I'm sure their are other factors beside one's ability to answer coding problems that play into the overall ability of a potential employee.
I guess I should be impressed with this product but it's actually just depressing.<p>Obviously this is just a tool and it's up to the companies how to use it, but I think we all know how that will work out.
Shameless plug for my sideproject I'm currently working on, <a href="http://hiresync.io" rel="nofollow">http://hiresync.io</a> which is aiming to do much of the same thing.
I'm not sure how I'd feel about doing some coding before I even went through other parts of the interview process or meeting the team I'd be working with. This sends me the message that I'm going to be a COG in some system.<p>Sending a potential candidate something like this might be a turn-off to a lot of candidates (especially in this marketplace).
This is awesome. I always ask people to code in phone interviews and I use Googe Docs.<p>You will be surprised at the number of people who have good resumes but cannot code at all. Watching someone code even a simple Fizz Buzz problem will help you understand the person's programming abilities better.
At my last gig we used Stypi or Google Docs plus a phone to do live code exercises, and CodePair likes like a step up from that.<p>But what we're running at my current gig is sending a trivial problem ahead (after an initial phone screen) and then asking for extensions over a Google Hangout with the candidate doing a screen share. This lets people work their way in their own environment with the language of their choice, and do any boilerplate or other overhead up front.<p>It's not perfect - I'd prefer not to require someone use or make a Google+ account, but it's the best I've seen so far.
I can't help but feel nervous every time the mouse moves to the top right of the screen, narrowly missing the "End Interview" button in the animation...<p>I'm sure there's the a confirmation dialog or something, but I'd be afraid of accidentally hanging up on the person the whole time.
For anyone looking for a similar take with a larger focus on real-time REPL experimentation during the coding interview, check out: <a href="https://coderpad.io/" rel="nofollow">https://coderpad.io/</a>
Why isn't there more information like a list of languages/compilers etc? The site needs to say more than "contact us" or try an interview to figure out what you can do with it.
Impressive. But this product also makes me depressed. It dehumanizes the interview process. My question is why don't you just have a challenge server, like facebook?
This is pretty cool but part of the interface is confusing me. What do I put into the input field? Or is it just using the input defined in the question?