Hi sixdimensional, thank you for the insightful comment here. I've been researching this area, and I'd love to chat more with you, would you be open to that? My email is on my profile page, feel free to email me on that address and I'll follow up.

Thanks for the shoutout :)

This is great! To anyone else delving into CSS, I also found this tutorial on CSS selectors helpful: http://flukeout.github.io/

Credentials through phone # is more of a deterrent. We're also going to have an in-person coding exercise as a next step, which would be much harder to game :)

are you saying you go straight to a in-person coding exercise as the next step? seems odd, there is no phone interview between then?

You can also email test-help AT a16z DOT com and we can send you a direct link (where you won't need to receive credentials by phone)

I love that people do this. Do you really thing someone is going to write a web scraper and NOT include obvious things like converting AT -> @ and DOT com -> .com?

Also, who even worries about spam any more? I haven't seen actual spam in my inbox in years.

Should we just go "AT AT AT" or something instead? Or perhaps adapt from Mandarin speakers, who literally call the @ sign "the little mouse" ;)

Spam remains an issue if for whatever reason you're still using rulesets/blacklists/greylisting and the like, instead of Bayesian filtering.