The process starts by creating a profile on Toptal's website. I honestly didn't realize that filling up these forms would lead to a technical assessment, so I was somewhat taken aback when I'm brought to a page that details this assessment.
I figured I wasn't in a rush to do it, so I could leave it for later and focus on more urgent assessments for the week. A few days later I got an e-mail from Toptal urging me to start their assessment or I would lose the chance to do it.
After reading some of the reviews on reddit and this very page, I realized the technical assessment would probably be impossible to complete for a developer of my caliber. So I decided I might as well bite the bullet and use this assessment as practice for other more realistic goals.
I was pleasantly surprised at first. The challenges weren't as technically complex as the many horror tales online had led me to believe . Although they were challenging, I wouldn't say they were on the difficulty level of a company like Google or Amazon. No, the challenge on these assessments comes from elsewhere.
The main problem really lies with the volume of tasks and the time limit you are given to complete them. You are only given 90 minutes, which is frankly more than enough time than I want to spend on a technical assessment, but this is not nearly enough to complete 3 very different tasks. All of them requiring medium to highly complex algorithms to solve.
Still, this could be excused, perhaps Toptal doesn't really expect you to complete all these tasks, maybe they are more interested in how much you can do in that short span of time. Which would be acceptable, if not for the fact that after you answer their survey asking for feedback on this very same process, you get a report card essentially telling you how inadequate you actually were for not perfectly coming up with 3 different algorithms and test case each and every one of them in the 1 hour and a half you were given.
Like most of my peers, I am accustomed to technical assessments. Hell, I'm even accustomed to the ridiculousness of completing tasks with unreasonable time limits. But there's something else about this process that will guarantee most developers will fail from the get go: Toptal challenges provide very few test cases. You are expected to create your very own test cases, and you better not forget any edge case. This again, wouldn't be a problem if instead of 90 minutes to complete 3 tasks, you would have 90 minutes to complete a single task. That would give you time to architect your answer, think of edge cases and even improve on your code. But instead you are given 90 minutes to do all this for 3 different tasks.
I wound up scoring approximately 35% (because apparently my code failed some hidden test cases that even after you finish you are not allowed to know about). I don't know about anyone else who has taken these tests, but I would love to see what a developer who actually completes these tasks to an acceptable degree looks like. Furthermore, I would like to know why they want to work with Toptal instead of a bigger player.
