I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Toptal (Palo Alto, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
TL;DR:
Don't waste your time like I did. I should have listened to the other reviewers!
If you were wondering how the heck they claim to be "the top 3% developers", that's it: They reject 97% percent of the candidates. Somehow they believe that the way they interview candidates is universally accepted as the best method! They are completely delusional! They should rename the company to Trumptal! lol.
PROCESS:
- Short introductory interview (apparently only to check your level of English).
- A Codility Test (3 problems, you have 30 minutes to solve each).
- "Whiteboard" interview (through Google Hangouts or Skype, sharing your screen).
You need to solve 4 short coding challenges (15 minutes to solve each) in the programming language of your choice. Somewhat like "Codility", but with 10 times the pressure... Dude with broken English and a funny accent is watching and letting you know how much time you have left (10 minutes! 5 minutes!... 2 minutes!...).
- A programming challenge Project (40 hours to complete) with a portfolio quality code that you would show to a client.
**** Note: All interviews were online.
NEGATIVES:
Pretty much the same negatives of all the other negative reviews at Glassdoor (note also that they all have been upvoted a number of times)...
I'm not going to list all of them again here, but I confirm all of them. Just sort the reviews by the number of upvotes (descending) and you will have a good picture of how terrible their process is...
IMPORTANT:
Another thing you need to be aware of is that you are not interviewing for a job, but you are interviewing to get accepted into their network of professionals. Joining them doesn't guarantee work. That might come later on (my understanding is that you will need to interview again for every new client they might introduce you to). In my opinion, that's a scam.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They don't spend too much time discussing your experience nor knowledge. They didn't even look at my portfolio! It's all about the time-limited coding challenges.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Toptal in Mar 2018
Interview
Garbage, don't bother.
Online coding. Easy/Medium algorithmic problems that you need to implement in 15 min each. The thing is, they don't care about your code or thinking process, as you would expect from a coding interview. Forget about all this "speak out loud", "time complexity", "code readability". I spent a good chunk of my time explaining the complexity of the proposed solution and trying to keep the interviewer engaged, but apparently, all they care about are test cases. Basically, the guy went completely silent for the whole time and at the end it was: "one of your 7 tests is failing, rejected, bye." Like wtf?) I can't stress enough, your code/words doesn't matter. Even if it's a typo or something that can be fixed with "i+1" or "arr.length-1". Pathetic.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
To calculate the longest binary gap (sequence of '0' in a number's binary representation).
Ex: input x = 1041. Output: 5, because there are 5 of 0 in 10000010001.
I applied online. I interviewed at Toptal (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
1. Initial screening for red flags (video chat)
2. Codility excercises, which are timed math-y questions (not representative of engineering work)
3. More mathy questions over a video chat, but timed at 15 minutes
It's bizarre to me that their interview does not screen for engineering skills. After the codility interview I thought "okay, maybe they want to ensure basic programming skills". But it doesn't make sense to continue to screen for rushed math programming. Having designed and iterated on engineering interview processes, the toptal interview process is lazy at best.
They offered to let me try again but I already have offers to do remote contracting work for other folks so I won't be back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Count the number of carry operations given two numbers to sum.