You'll need to make sure the user agent isn't something too bot-seeming or WAF will block you. This user agent works: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
I work at a small startup trying to hire engineers and got tired of looking through resumes. As Joel Spolsky points out, they're not great indications of technical ability.
Instead, I decided to throw together a take-home challenge that applicants could access via an API. "If they can't solve the challenge, I don't need to see their resume," I told myself.
FizzBuzz.md is a better version of the solution I built for work. It lets applicants send questions and submissions to configurable email addresses via API so the email addresses aren't exposed directly. (Less spam, FTW)
Avantos.ai | Frontend Eng | Full-time | Remote (USA)
Series A AI Fintech Startup headquartered in NYC. If you’re outside of NYC, we'd like you to make quarterly visits and are happy to support higher-frequency visits.
You'll get a sense of what we're building during the coding challenge, which you can start by sending a POST request to:
You'll need to make sure the user agent isn't something too bot-seeming or WAF will block you. (Sorry we're a startup no time to fix.) This user agent works: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Asking for a take-home challenge is a big ask without any form of human interaction first. Are you open to me asking a few questions over email or a video chat so I can gauge if your company would be a good fit for me?
OP here. Yes! Thank you for seeing this! I make this point explicitly in a previous post called "Conflicting employee vs. business incentives slow B2B SaaS growth rates"
iirc, dropbox was actually very technically challenging, which is why they tested the idea with a mock landing page first before building it (source: Lean Startup) and steve jobs famously spoke with drew about what he'd built early on
OP here with a friendly reminder that we should also look at the denominator when evaluating how useful the "internal tools make good startups" heuristic is.
Also note that I'm not claiming they are never good ideas, so pointing out instances where they've panned out isn't very interesting. It'd be more interesting if you could show that the hit rate among these types of startups is better than I'm suggesting (for that we need to consider the denominator).
Apologies, I was actually going to finish my comment with “does anyone know how the fail rate of such startups stacks against the fail rate of startups at large?”
But I got carried away with trying to recall all the companies that started out as internal tools, that I forgot
Avantos is an AI platform that streamlines client onboarding and servicing for financial institutions. Its a Series A startup headquartered in NYC.
Tech Stack Languages: Typescript, Golang Frameworks/Libs: React, Next.js, Vitest, Playwright DB: Postgres Infra: AWS, Terraform, Docker
React experience is a must have. Experience with the rest of the stack is preferred, but not required.
You'll get a sense of what we're building during the coding challenge, which you can start by sending a POST request to: https://apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net Payload should be this: {"email": "<your-email>"}
You'll need to make sure the user agent isn't something too bot-seeming or WAF will block you. This user agent works: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36