
Applying to Toptal: My Retrospective - toptalthrowaway
I recently applied to Toptal while also applying to remote-friendly full time software engineering positions.  I gave up in the 4th step, which I&#x27;ll come back later.  This whole process took 2 months, partly because I started before a 2 week period of travel, and partly because of the Christmas&#x2F;New Years.<p>Step 1: A Skype call.<p>- Listen to some marketing about Toptal taking top tier developers and pairing them with prestigious companies.<p>- Evaluate my English.  I talked about my experiences briefly.<p>- I was asked for my rate.  I read some stories about people who were told to lower their rates, so I lowballed myself.<p>Step 2: Codility challenge.<p>- 30 minute example to understand the format.<p>---  caught me off guard with tests around run time and memory complexity.<p>--- passed the correctness tests on first try<p>--- ran out of time working on the performance tests<p>- The sandboxed environment didn&#x27;t show the tests, just test results.<p>- I had the option to repeat this example.  This was useful.  I did the example twice to have some more practice coding for time and space constraints.<p>- Real challenge: 3 problems, 30 minutes each.<p>- I correctly answered one.<p>- I was stumped on a &quot;base 10 to base negative 2&quot; converter<p>Step 3: Live coding challenge.<p>- 2 problems, 15 minutes each.<p>- Hangouts screensharing to monitor my activity.<p>- Google was allowed.  StackOverflow was expressly not.<p>- I joined our Hangout with my camera on.  His first words were &quot;You can turn your camera off, you won&#x27;t need it for this.&quot;  I&#x27;m not sure if he ever said hello.<p>- After I passed, the reviewer asked me for my rate.<p>--- I saw in my notes that I talked about it before.  I casually mentioned that I talked about my rate already.  He said there was nothing in the system about that.<p>- The interviewer let me defer Step 4 until after the holidays. That was nice.
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toptalthrowaway
Step 4: A demo app with a hard 2 week deadline

\- First step: evaluate requirements, make an estimation, and make a promise
of its completion to the next evaluator

\- The app spec was a dozen bullet points in an email. They included:

\--- "REST API. Make it possible to perform all user actions via the API,
including authentication"

\--- "All actions need to be done client side using AJAX, refreshing the page
is not acceptable."

\- I budgeted a week for this.

\- I gave up when I saw that I didn't give myself enough time.

\- They said that I could apply again in 3 months.

Looking back

\- The repeated prompting about rates was suspicious.

\- The hard deadline and "make an estimation and promise" part of Step 4 was
strange.

\- My time was not valued with the project in Step 4. No other company has
ever asked me for a 1+ week unpaid work sample.

\- By the end of step 3, I knew I didn't want to work with them. Step 4 was
described as "a simple CRUD app". I considered doing it for an excuse to build
something in a Clojure.

\--- When I saw the Single Page App requirement, I felt it was out of my
league. I decided to go with Rails and Backbone, since they were familiar.

\- I don't regret applying and going as far as I did. However, I would try to
stop any friend from applying.

\- I only regret not trying to do the Step 4 project in Clojure, so that I
could have learned something more useful out of all of this.

Overall, 3/10, would not recommend.

~~~
gregjor
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