I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Toptal (Moscú, ) in Apr 2020
Interview
I am a software engineer with more than +12 years of experience. Had a really bad experience with this guys.
At first place, I could barely understand the english speaking in each instance. Most of them had a strong russian accent and had to ask several times "Say that again, please".
Most of the engineers that interviewed me are supposed to be top paid but their walls didn't have paint, like if they were living in really bad conditions.
I had an initial screening, a 3 challenges codility task, a live coding task in which I was rejected.
The last interviewer had a really bad english level. Had to solve 2 algorithms, in 15 minutes each, the first one went fine. The second needed 2 more minutes, I finished ok. 1 hour later a received a rejection email.
Solved 5 challenges total.
Avoid this sweat house at all cost in case you are not in a 5th world country. Even in that case, my advice is to postulate over HR webpages like stackoverflow.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Toptal
Interview
The interview process is lengthy, but everyone was friendly, responsive and communicative.
It starts with a video interview to assess your communication skills in a remote-work environment. Next, there's an online coding test on the Codility platform. They have a preset threshold that I didn't quite pass, but they moved me to the next stage anyway. This was a live skills test over video chat. I found the questions substantially simpler than in the previous stage. However, this one is pass/fail and you need to complete each task before moving on. I failed one of the tasks and didn't get any further in the process. I believe they are generally happy for you to wait a few months then try again.
I'd recommend prepping for the skills tests via the Codility website itself.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What do you think are the most important aspects to pay attention to when reviewing another team member’s code?
I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Toptal (Praga) in Feb 2016
Interview
(1). Short call with recruiter, discussed salary expectations - I asked for 25 USD per hour.
(2). 3x ACM - level tasks on Hackerrank to be solved in 90 minutes. I was participating in ACM before, I sometimes can solve those riddles quite fast, but I just did not expect to be presented such a test for a plain simple developer position.
(3). Solved one task and a half. :( Ran out of time.
(4). Then I was told that the score is too low for the salary I asked for.
(5). In the year 2020, four years later, I still cannot reapply, as TopTal remembers me and says "unfortunately, you were already filtered out".
Summary:
(1). Nice to apply as a wild bet.
(2). Don't expect it will work out. Take it as one day wasted on just another unofficial ACM contest. Unofficial - means even if you solve all the tasks better than everyone else, you don't get any medal or recognition.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a square chessboard of N x N size, the position of Knight and position of a target is given. We need to find out minimum steps a Knight will take to reach the target position.