Show HN: Codassium – A better way to conduct remote interviews | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Codassium – A better way to conduct remote interviews

codassium.com

41 pointskarterk14 comments

I've used Codassium for about two dozen phone screens starting from when you posted the prototype last year, and I think it's great. Here are a few thoughts/issues I've had using the prototype and Lite version (I've not yet tried the full version):

I can't select C/C++ from the language drop down.

About half of the time, I don't use the video chat functionality for one reason or another. I'd love in those cases if I could simply close the video conferencing panel to have the editor full screen.

Even if you don't allow me to disable video conferencing for the Codassium session, I would recommend different messaging on the right hand side panel. I've had a few candidates say that it isn't working because the right hand side just says, "Loading..." when we don't use the video conferencing.

There's a typo on the Tour page: "Schedule an interview via Codassium is easy," should be, "Scheduling an interview an interview via Codassium is easy."

I'm not a fan of the pricing plans. I'm unsure of the idea of limiting the number of uses per month in general, but the current limits are very unattractive. It's all basically oriented around each user only doing 3 interviews per month. I would prefer a limit on number of hours per day or number of uses per day over the total number of phone screens. As it is, everyone that I've turned on to Codassium would have to get a Custom Plan.

It'd be nice if the things I type versus the things they type were differentiated in some way. Maybe just a subtly different background color?

Thanks a lot for the feedback about the bugs and the pricing plan. Do you have an email address through which I can reach you (mine is in my profile).

I think you should switch the button labels to something else. I clicked the 'Try Now' button thinking that would let me try out the editor, it's much more intuitive to have the actual test functionality behind the 'Try Now' button than the 'Lite Version' button.

That's good feedback! Thanks.

I had the exact same experience!

We posted a prototype of Codassium last year, and received plenty of positive feedback. We went ahead and built a full product out of it, and we're eager to share it with everyone on HN.

We still have a Lite version of the app which supports collaborative code editing and video chat, while the full version has live code execution and a shared Linux terminal too.

Would love to hear your feedback.

Which languages do you support?

Quite a few. Code execution support for Java, Ruby, Python, C, C++, PHP, Node/JS, C#.

Hey Kishore, I'm a recruiter and developer. My company has been experimenting w/ different options for technical interviews.

Our current tool of choice is GoToMeeting, mostly because it offers video/audio chat, screen sharing, keyboard sharing. Most importantly, GoToMeeting seems to consume least amount of bandwidth, which makes is more reliable for interviewing candidates w/ slower Internet connections. The main problem with GoToMeeting is that it's clunky, and the licensing options are a pain in the butt. It's not uncommon for one interviewer to log in w/ the credentials we use, only to kick out another interviewer. Scheduling is kind of a pain in the butt, too.

I'm going to recommend we try out Codassium. I've played with it a little bit, and it looks awesome so far. I have one feature request that would be awesome for us. Give users the ability to set the resolution for the webcam image. When audio & video become choppy, allowing someone to use a lower resolution could mean the difference between completing or having to reschedule the interview. How well you manage bandwidth could also mean the difference between winning & keeping us as a customer :)

This looks really cool. We're a remote shop and do almost every interview remotely, so I dig the idea. We currently use Hangouts and anything from GDoc to Stypi, depending on the person doing the interview.

I tried testing it out with a coworker to see how it goes but sadly our video dropped twice in <30 seconds and when one person dropped the other could only hear local feedback (every time I talked it echoed until I refreshed), maybe in the future when this is more mature we'll try it out again.

I love the idea though! Being able to execute interview code would be fantastic, currently most people type it into a webpage then open up their IDE and copy/paste it to check it.

After looking at the front page I had no idea what this is - a website? A program? And then the "try now" website told me to pay money and I lost interest.

Anyway, I think I'd rather use a shared tmux session with regular vi, than a "collaborative Linux shell" with a "collaborative vi", whatever that is. I also prefer to let my window manager handle displaying code here, and video conferencing there. Reinventing "notes" and "calendar" is also curious. Does codassium really solve an actual problem?

If you're looking for a more fully featured version of this product, check out CoderPad (https://coderpad.io). We've got live code execution coverage across pretty much every programming language you'd be interested in, and live REPLs for programming languages that support them (Ruby, Python et al).

It's really exciting what we can do in the browser these days. I can't wait for WebRTC to get better, too.

Interesting project, when I saw the headline I was like, "welp, someone totally built what I built"

https://echoplex.us

Though looking more closely, they're not quite the same project.

Here's a similar project by a colleague of mine:

http://hiresync.io/

Why not just have a remote desktop session and see everything someone does? Someone might code best in eclipse. And interviewer might even allow the interviewee use the internet to search. You get to see the entire workflow.

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