My Toptal Interview Experience
If you are looking to work as a freelancer for some top companies like Google, Microsoft, etc., this is the right place. This was me in 2019, when I had recently moved to Europe and thought that Toptal would be a good solution. However, fast forward to 2022. I live in North America, and I don’t share the same idea. Although Toptal would give you a great wage and you would be working with some of the biggest companies in the world, you would never be considered a full-time employee at those companies (you’ll be a contractor) and therefore you won’t get the same benefits (stocks, etc.). In this blog, I will walk you through all the steps of interviewing with Toptal—yeah, there are quite a few steps.
First step: You will need to have some years of coding experience. Since I started participating in coding competitions when I was 14, I leveraged my coding experiences.
Second step: You will have a personal interview where you will try to sell yourself and your skills. Try to cover as much as possible—I mentioned projects that I had been working on up until that point.
Third Step: They will give you some take-home coding exercises (three in total). They are a bit challenging, but Google and Stack Overflow are your buddies.
Fourth Step: This is a challenging one. You will have to perform live coding, and you have 20–30 minutes for each question. You will have to explain your thinking process and how you came up with that solution. There are two questions. I passed this one on the second try, as I got too nervous on the second question for the first take. You can retake it after 30 days. The second time, I passed it right away. I did lots of OOP and data structures questions in leetcode.
Fifth Step: They will give you the full project requirements, and you have 10 days to solve them. It covers everything from the front end to the back end database, security, and testing. I got to create a restaurant rating app for different restaurants and users, admins, restaurant owners, etc. I had created the full project and tested so many parts of it, but one of the routes of the pages was overpassing and I had totally missed it. I was very disappointed when the interviewer pointed that out during the presentation, and I was refused on the spot. You don’t get another chance to repeat this phase. To be honest, it is both a good and discouraging experience. It is good because you prepare a lot and learn a lot along the way. But, it is very discouraging to go up until the end, having spent already six months on different interviews and refused because one of the routes in the last project is overpassing. I understand that this is a security issue, but when you work on a project usually you get to work as a team and there are different people responsible for testing, etc.
Conclusion
Overall, it is a good experience to put into practice if you want to go for the big companies. But if you could pass all the steps at Toptal you could also pass all the interviews at Big Tech directly. Take your time to think about what works best for you and go for it. All in!
