So I didn't do it. I can get other offers where I will not be made to dance like an unpaid monkey.
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.
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'.
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.
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".