Codidate: an Advanced Online Technical Interview Platform

Over the past decade, tech companies have been shifting to using online technical interview tools for first-round technical interviews. And the benefits are obvious:

• it’s more precise than the traditional phone-only screen, as the candidate can’t fake it with technical jargon and handwavy reasoning;
• it’s more lightweight than an on-site interview, saving a great deal of time and money:
• a typical online interview takes 45 minutes to one hour, while an on-site interview takes the company a dozen man-hours and the candidate one day or two;
• an online interview costs a few bucks, while the company has to shell out hundreds, if not thousands, in cash for an on-site interview;

Consequently, it comes as no surprise that tech companies armed with such an online interview tool are able to perform more screens and get better hires on a tighter budget, within a smaller time frame, compared to their counterparts who aren’t.

However, the status quo of online technical interview tools is underwhelming at best. Such tools are often built atop legacy technologies, and they lack certain desirable features. While some of them do attempt to support modern features like code intelligence, these often result in partial implementations and clunky user experience, and it almost feels like they are stuck in the last century.

We think both interviewers and candidates rightfully deserve something better, or at least different. So we take a crack at it, and Codidate is born.

Codidate is a next-generation online technical interview platform with support for over 30 popular programming languages, a lightning fast code editor, code execution, and the best code intelligence built in. Think of it like collabedit, but with code execution capabilities, advanced code intelligence, and interview playback.

Codidate allows you to instantly assess a candidate’s coding skills at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Codidate is the only online technical interview platform that offers advanced code intelligence for these popular programming languages: Bash, Clojure, C/C++, F#, Go, HTML/JS/CSS, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, PHP, Python 2, Python 3, R, Ruby, Rust, Swift, and TypeScript.

With code intelligence, interviewers can better assess candidates’ coding skills, their knowledge of libraries, packages, and/or the ecosystem, in both breadth and depth, in an environment similar to their day-to-day IDE.

As a candidate, you probably don’t have time for document searches during an interview, and want to avoid being tripped up on small details. Code intelligence comes to the rescue!

An example of code intelligence in C++

You can take Codidate for a spin here.

Code intelligence

Code intelligence in Codidate comes in four forms: auto completion, hover info, signature help, and diagnostics.

An example of signature help in JavaScript

Auto completion, or autocompletion/code completion, presents the programmer with a list of variables, functions/methods, and classes appropriate within the current context, when he enters a member access operator (. or ->).

Hover info shows a help popover with detailed information when the cursor hovers over a token, e.g., a method.

Signature help shows the signature of a function or method, when the function/method is entered.

While the programmer is entering the code, Codidate constantly analyses it, and offers contextual help inline wherever it finds any issue (undefined variable, incorrect arguments, etc.). This is called diagnostics.

The benefits of code intelligence are twofold:

• assess the candidate’s problem-solving skills in greater depth and breadth: you can go beyond basic questions like Fizz Buzz by posing a technical challenge that is more realistic, more related to practical problems which engineers face everyday, since now the candidate has code intelligence at his own disposal.
• the candidate is less likely to get tripped up on trivial details, since he is working in an environment highly similar to his day-to-day IDE, and shows his real problem-solving skills.

Code editor

The editor we integrate into Codidate is lightning fast, and immune to UI glitches found in many other code editors. Say goodbye to clunky code editing experience!

30+ programming languages

We offer support for all most all mainstream programming languages, their essential libraries, and test frameworks. For a complete list of supported languages, check languages out.

More features

Codidate has more features like interview playback, video calling, service, REPL (read-eval-print loop), customizable DB Schema, interview notes, question library, and editor/terminal settings. For a complete list of features, check features out.

Thank you for making it this far. We hope you find it interesting and/or useful. If you find any issue, like language/library/framework is missing, or want to suggest a feature, do drop us a line at: support@codidate.com.

Originally published at https://codidate.com/blog/codidate-an-online-technical-interview-platform/.