[StavrosK]

My experience with Toptal wasn't great, I tried to join and got a programming puzzle for the first interview (actually an online coding test), which was barely tangential to actual programming experience. They also want you to complete an unpaid project, which I heard takes around 30 hours.

[EduardoBautista]

From my experience, they weren't puzzles. They were pretty straightforward to do if you are familiar with arrays and hashes/dictionaries and when to use which.

[StavrosK]

Mine were different, the solution to one was literally "return len(x) - x.count(a)". If you didn't realize that, you spent an hour battling off-by-one errors.