What do you like best about Codility?
What stood out to me from the start was how Codility lets you focus on what really matters—understanding how a candidate thinks, solves problems, and writes code under time pressure. It’s not just about getting the right answer. You get a real sense of someone’s logic, coding style, and approach to debugging.
I’ve been using Codility as part of the hiring team at Zalando, where I work as a Senior Software Engineer in Berlin. We’ve used it to assess candidates for different roles, especially in the early screening stages. And honestly, the platform has made that process a lot smoother.
The timeline feature is one of my favorites. It shows how the candidate progressed through a task—from when they started, to when they copy-pasted code, or paused—helping us understand their thought process better. It’s been a great way to tell whether someone rushed, took time to plan, or struggled at a certain step.
Another big plus: the detailed playback view. You can actually replay how a candidate solved the task, with the question and code side by side. This keeps the evaluator in the right context and helps us evaluate not just what the candidate wrote, but how they arrived at the solution.
The platform also flags suspicious activity, like tab-switching or copy-pasting, which adds another layer of insight during evaluations. And the dashboard shows per-task scores, time taken, and complexity indicators. All of this helps us go beyond just a score and look at the full picture.
Codility does a solid job for backend and general coding assessments. The test variety includes real-world engineering challenges, and live sessions have worked well for remote interviews—we’ve had good experiences collaborating with candidates live and observing how they think out loud. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Codility?
The UI can feel quite cluttered. There’s a lot of information packed into the dashboard, but not all of it feels necessary—or easy to navigate. Sometimes it’s hard to focus on what really matters.
Also, as a frontend-heavy team, we’ve often felt that Codility leans too much towards backend-style assessments. There’s limited support for evaluating real-world frontend skills—things like async logic, UI reasoning, or performance trade-offs. We've had to build and use custom tasks outside the platform just to evaluate frontend engineers more effectively.
While Codility does surface things like time complexity for solutions, a human review is still necessary to judge the actual quality of the code—especially for senior roles. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
