Codility Avaliações 8

The IDE was terrible.
I recently did a coding interview on Codility, and it was terrible; the corrections were always wrong. For example, I was writing in Java, and it would say that I'm writing a function without a return, while the return was there, the coding experience was terrible. I would put the return value as something like an int, and it would say that the type doesn't match the function, while it was still correct. I only started suspecting the IDE was buggy when I literally erased a line that was "wrong", copied it, and for some reason it recognized that there wasn't a problem there. When I ran the program, the IDE itself had corrections all over the place, saying that my syntax was wrong, all the tests were correct, and I ended up losing 30 min of an interview trying to correct something that was right while spiralling, thinking that I didn't know the language that I was writing.

The IDE is terrible, next to no intellisense, and what little there is often completes the wrong thing.

The "problems" they present to do not give you enough information to complete the task fully and then they will mark you down on their "correctness" (Hidden test cases for the code). In the real world, you don't get given half the specifications for a project so not sure what their angle is on hiding all the test cases.

The english on the tests is poorly written - questions often require multiple re-reads to even understand the sentence let alone the problem they want you to solve.

Better platforms out there.

The platform can not be trusted.

I took a coding assessment on Codility earlier this year, I found the platform to be flawed. For example, some multiple-choice questions didn’t allow selecting more than one answer, even when multiple selections were clearly required. Additionally, one of the provided dependency files had a formatting error that caused valid code to fail unit tests, and that file couldn’t be edited.

I reached out to them about these issues, but they denied any problems, even though I had proof.

With issues like these, it’s practically impossible to pass the test fairly.
Just something to keep in mind when choosing a third party platform

From an applicant perspective, Codility is poorly designed.

I have no doubt, from a recruiter perspective, it gives confidence. But it hides the randomness of the results.

1. It is not possible to test all the cases. They are hidden. Performance is evaluated only after you submitted the task.

2. The number of tasks is not indicated. You cannot manage your time properly as an applicant

3. You cannot come back to a previous task. Meaning, any spare cannot be used for a task you would like to improve

Either you get a perfect score, or your score is immediately low, as you get no chance to correct the code.

The UI is more unintuitive than others :
- the output from test run is not as clear and intuitive as other platforms; in Coderbike, for example, it took me very little to familiarise with the UI and start debugigng my functions (e.g. using print statements).
- tasks which require data do not allow seeing the data themselves.
- there is not clear specification on the custom test inputs formats.
- The instructions for a data task where not really clear: I kept getting fails in the test for a simple scaling operation, which is trivial.

Overall my experience has been poor, and it is frustrating because the tasks themselves were not hard.

The IDE that the service provides is terrible. It's very poor and uncomfortable. The employers should try it themself before sending the tests via the platform.

The critical points that I noticed:
- Preview updating works badly. It updates for every code change. There isn't clear the status of the preview that you see in a moment. Sometimes the build UI just disappears. The reloading time of the preview can be feeling uncomfortable for real-time testing;
- Code hinting is too poor;
- Debugging of the code is uncomfortable.
- Nothing syntactic errors were displayed;
- A lot of freezes without Incognito mode. But even with incognito, the problem will not be completely resolved;
- Bad interface ergonomics;
- Tests run work slowly. Their output is not enough clear. Custom logs are missing there. Also, data mocking works every other time.

Codility has been a steadfast tool in our candidate screening for almost a decade. While it has proven reliable, the evolving landscape, marked by the rise of tools like ChatGPT, suggests the need for some enhancements. Adapting to current trends and incorporating user feedback could further elevate Codility's effectiveness in candidate evaluation.

The experience is great until you find out the score is not reliable: I used a built-in function in Java that did EXACTLY what was required in the description (that I read thoroughly). Codility gave it a score of 50% for correctness.
Quite frustrating to be crossed off the candidate list just because of that.