Ask HN: What do developers earn on toptal.com? 11 years ago
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.