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I approached them as a data scientist. 18 years professional experience, working on military and finance projects. Spoke with a salesman on the phone for a few

I approached them as a data scientist. 18 years professional experience, working on military and finance projects. Spoke with a salesman on the phone for a few minutes. I explained I was taking on data science projects, but they thought there might still be a fit there. They asked me to do a fizz-buzz/filter test in a cut down web based IDE. I did the questions in a language appropriate to my trade - Mathematica. Their entire filtering process is automatically scored. I got back a nice form letter saying I'd failed. Executive summary: Words don't match actions. Nice website, but you're still a piece of meat.

bbeneschott 11y ago
Unfortunately, I think this comment is misleading and incomplete. Only one part of the screening process (detailed here: http://www.toptal.com/top-3-percent http://www.toptal.com/top-3-percent) is scored automatically, and we still go over ever submission manually to look for cheating and misleading scores (e.g., were you on the right track but just missed something small?). Our job is to minimize false positives and false negatives. Almost all of us are engineers here. We all know you can't give an automated, standardized test to fully judge anything. The automated test is simply one of several steps, and it does provide helpful information. Feel free to email me directly at breanden@toptal.com if you'd like more information.
- krainboltgreene 11y ago
  > Our job is to minimize [...] false negatives Every part of your "interview process" suggests otherwise.