We first started Kodethon as a solution to the many problems we saw in Computer Science education. With the rapid increase in the popularity of Computer Science, we saw classroom scalability becoming a major issue for instructors. Many struggle to balance providing useful grading feedback and adequate help for their students. This leads to many students not receiving the individualized attention that is necessary for future success. Having been both students and instructors, we understood this issue too well. We sat through office hours where the line stretched down the hall, and were the TA’s who had to turn a student away because answering their question meant not answering two other students’ questions. Now imagine having to hand-grade each of their programming submissions - even with a script, the TA needs to manually verify the grade and provide feedback. We wanted to provide an assignment that properly resembles the course material, but were limited by grading them in a timely manner.

The difficulty of creating an assignment that closely resembles a specific skill set is the exact same problem with hiring in the software tech industry. Recruiters are pressured by hiring managers to find candidates that fit a specific role. They receive hundreds and thousands of resumes that match the job description and send out emails inviting candidates to a phone screening interviews. Now each of those candidates have to be screened.

The current state of the art in screening candidates is great for what they do. They offer data structures and algorithms assignments that are difficult to solve, but simple once you know the answer or the pattern. However, these assignments that are essentially clever puzzles fail to properly demonstrate that candidates are actually proficient software engineers. Instead they show that candidates have spent a lot of time studying for the interview and in some cases, memorizing solutions from problem banks. The common saying for fresh college graduates applying for a job is, “read Cracking the Coding Interview and do problems on HackerRank and LeetCode”. Using these resources to generate an interview does not answer the fundamental question in every interviewer’s mind. Does the candidate have the right experience and aptitude my company needs? Yes, a passing candidate has demonstrated grit in practicing interview problems. But how often does a software engineer need to determine when a linked list contains a cycle?

The everyday tasks of an engineer rarely involve finding optimal ways to manipulate elements in an array or realizing that a bit operator magically finds a unique number. Instead, these tasks are more more often than not: applying CRUD to a new resource, testing and debugging components, and finding the bottlenecks of a system. The current interview process can be improved to better resemble everyday tasks.

With this in mind, we are excited to announce our release of Kodethon Interview. Kodethon Interview allows hiring managers and interviewers to create assignments that assess candidates on skills that the job actually entails. Imagine sending a prospective Ruby-on-Rails engineer, a Ruby-on-Rails assignment rather than asking them to invert a Binary Tree. You can have them create a new endpoint, debug a broken model, or write test cases to inspect pre-written code. If you are looking for candidates with a particular skill, we can help create an assignment for your needs.

Moving forward, we will keep Kodethon Courses at https://kodethon.com and Kodethon Interview at https://kodethon.com/#/work. Kodethon Interview will be focused towards tech companies and technical screening, while Kodethon Courses will be for education. Rest assured, we will continue to support both services and will let you know if we change this policy.

Lastly, thank you for reading our post and to all of you that have supported us over the years. Your continuous support and love have helped us continue our journey and mission to improve Computer Science education and now our new mission of improving technical screening and hiring.

If you have any questions about this new direction, feel free to reach out to us via our social media channels or our support email at kodethon.cde@gmail.com .

Until next time,
Matt, Michael and Martin
The Kodethon Cofounders