Toptal Frontend Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Horrible experience, with arrogant robotic interview process. Glad they took the recording of the interview as well. So this is what is their reality. Zero empathy for the efforts spent by the candidate. One spends 10-15 hours completing their Full Project with Frontend + Backend + Graphql Backend. and which has Login , creating users, app features about 4 solid features, and with all the validations. They will say UI needs be fancy, but you are going to demo it to the Client. How stupid is that. Worst part, they will have zero courtesy to the candidates time spent. Rather they will count all the validations missing, things not implemented, and how I was hiding the feature that was not implemented.

It was a good interview process with standard UI questions you'd expect for a front-end role. Nothing out of the ordinary was asked. I passed the first two interviews, which mainly focused on my English skills. After that, I took a 70-minute test on Hackerrank. Even though I was familiar with the material, I didn't pass because I tried to answer every question without realizing that incorrect answers would deduct points from my score. Luckily, I've been given another chance to retake the test next month. I've been brushing up on my front-end skills since last month to hopefully secure this job.

In January 2020, I started with a recruiter call where we discussed my experience and salary expectations. The recruiter didn't ask about my thought process, work approach, or organizational skills, which are key differentiators for great engineers. Next was a technical test, which I found to be a flawed part of the process, unlike how Toptal and others do it. This test felt like a C.S. degree-focused academic exercise, not reflective of a front-end developer's daily tasks, which involve UI elements and handling backend data. As a React.js developer experienced in complex applications, I haven't encountered such challenges. Nowadays, the focus is on building products and contributing to company success. The test instructions included a strange graphic, and after a few minutes, I decided to close my laptop, as I'm past the stage of doing algorithm puzzles. There are many excellent engineers who either can't or won't do these types of puzzles.