[bonzoq]

I work with TopTal and this is no throwaway account. I see very little reason to publicly slam a company one failed to get into and no reason to call it 'stupid'. Most companies do whiteboard questions during interviews, and Codility challenges are equivalent to that.

[MCRed]

What he's relating shows a lack of competence in the interviewing process from toptal.

This indicates that the people running the company are junior engineers who think brain teasers and algorithm challenges are how you test for a good engineer. This is based on the common excitement that young people get in completing these kinds of tests.

When you get sufficient experience, you come to realize that this is not what makes a good engineer. Very few companies and very few projects are cutting new grown algorithmically. But building a system that can be maintained and extended without being brittle, this is much more important.

Very hard to find white board questions for that.

Also, while many companies to white board questions, any well run company with a good engineering culture will make that less than %10 of the interview process. On toptal this seems to be the extent of them actually learning about you as an engineer.

For that reason, his comments are very good... and your smear that he "failed to get in" and the implication that he's somehow biased is, in my view, a punch below the belt.

[bonzoq]

I don't agree that testing algoritmic skills shows 'a lack of competence in the interviewing process'. Quite the opposite, but I respect your right to have this opinion so let's leave this aside.

On the other hand though, publicly calling a company 'stupid' because one does not like the way they recruit employees is more than a punch below the belt. If I don't like someone's recruitment process I don't apply for a job with them, but don't go to Hacker News and call them 'stupid'.

[bonzoq]

It would be cool to know why the downvotes.

[CJefferson]

I didn't downvote you, but seeing as the whole point of this company seems to be to hire good coders, if one thinks their method of ranking coders is stupid, so is their whole company.

[it_learnses]

Why not? How else would the next guy know not to apply for them? If I had known this before, I wouldn't have wasted my time with them in the first place.

[it_learnses]

Thanks, this was exactly my point. I used to like doing these kinds of problems when I was a second year comp-sci student. I was also a C purist. But then I grew up and learned that there are far bigger problems in software development world than some puzzle or making 100 line programs as efficient as possible in C.

Now I think about usability, design, etc. of a system and wonder what the trade-offs are when choosing one design over another, not to mention time and cost trade-offs.

Isn't this what any respectable client submitting projects on Toptal should look for? I don't think I'd want a junior dev diving head first into my project without first understanding the requirements and presenting me with different trade-offs, etc. Unless ofcourse Toptal wants to be a platform for lazy college kids asking help on their assignments.

I know you understand these points, but I'm just adding this for future readers.

[whitenoice]

I have done codility tests in the past (with another company) and I would say that its the worst way to interview someone. You need to code your solution to accuracy in the defined time and pass all test cases. Its not that the problems are super hard, but the fact that the company is not interested in understanding how I solve problems and does not have time to interview me is a huge turn off.

[it_learnses]

Yeah I've done many whiteboard interviews and I'm well aware of algorithmic problems, complexities, etc as I have a BSc and an MSc in computer science. Codility problems do test for those, but their problems are usually some sort of puzzle or brain teaser type of questions that I have hardly encountered in my work.

It's not that I "failed" to get into Toptal. I refused to take the codility test after seeing it as I didn't see any point in doing so. I'm sure I could solve those codility problems in 30 min. each if I practiced similar problems for a couple of weeks, but why should I?

I told them this, and their condescending response to me is why I called them stupid. Programming is a vast field, and not every programmer is going to find such puzzles "interesting and challenging".