With a strong tailwind of practical experience, tremendous passion, and a newborn baby I founded my company ModernUp in 2015 with one goal in mind: to help startups and early growth-stage companies get to market fast.
However, keeping my schedule full (and money coming in the door) became an early challenge. I worked hard on finding unique ways to work with new clients, and came across TopTal while browsing LinkedIn.
Shortcut to two years later and I've booked thousands of hours with TopTal across multiple projects. Ask away!
Latest comments (26)
Should a fresher having good knowledge of his domain , apply for toptal. Will toptal hire freshers ?
I put in a rate of X/hr and the client interviewed me and selected me. The toptal recruiter setup a zoom and congratulated me and then said hey the end client is asking the rate to be lowered to X-20/hr. Is it the recruiter is getting a cut to have my rate lowered as the end client knew beforehand that the rate would be X/hr ?
I have been working as QA engineer for 3+ years. Now I want to work in top tal. Can anyone help me how to get preparation
Thank you ☺️for taking time to do this ,
Is toptal a right place for a freshly graduate with 1 year of experience ?
Thanks for taking time to answer questions!
I've had some really bad experiences with some other freelancer platforms like Upwork, where there are fake middlemen, super low bids forcing you out of the job (then same job being listed a month later due to failures etc.),
Accounts being frozen because of bidding to often! Haha, I can't build a website for $2.
So, how do you rate your user experience on TopTal vs. the other platforms?
Me too! Those networks are free-for-alls and it's all about first touch points. I remember back in the day there was a project on UpWork (from a developer) who wanted to build a bot to auto-bid on new projects (facepalm)
Back to TopTal, it's a much better experience from the talent (engineer) side. I set my availability and TopTal recruiters (who are full time employees) work to match my skillset to open positions. It's a mix of pro-active (I submit a request to learn more about a job posting) and re-active (recruiter actively reaches out to me about a job posting).
Haha, that's funny!! Yes, so you know exactly!
I almost gave up the idea of freelancing after that fiasco.
So, that approach sounds a lot better.
Do you build a relationship with 'your' recruiter or is it a team that helps you?
Toptal still uses those horrendous algorithm tests akin to codewars, how do you think that is a fair technical test?
With TopTal, I went through two rounds of technical assessments: an algorithm test and then a small project build.
I personally despise algorithm tests. They are are impractical, too academic, and not a great measure of real-world skills. But, they do provide an interesting backdoor into your thought processes, requirements gathering, and communication skills.
Ultimately... I bombed mine.
However, I understood the problem and talked through how I approached it. At the end, I felt the interviewer was more interested in my attempt than my code.
Okay, interesting that they would still talk to you after failing the test. I dropped it as soon as I saw they had an algo test. At least you're getting great jobs from the platform, congrats!
What do you think if dev.to offered you the capacity to list yourself as a contractor/consultant, and folks could find you through the site and get the low down via your profile?
I've had this idea in the back of my mind for a while, wondering what your opinion on something like this would be, given that your experience.
It's tough without a significant investment in vetting engineers. I have been a part of many networks where it's a free-for-all and often times my profile was lost in a sea of less-qualified engineers.
Looking at it from a job poster perspective, it can be hard to really drill down to the most qualified engineers. About 1/2 of my new clients (through ModernUp, not TopTal) come to me due to a really bad experience with a previous engineer or dev shop they found at one of the common freelancer sites.
However, dev.to can use follower count, articles, etc as a proxy to experience/knowledge. That would also encourage someone like me to post more frequently if it meant being able do distinguish myself to drive new business.
What level of experience should i have before registering for toptal
That's a hard question because experience can be measured differently. I would suggest applying and seeing if it's a good fit for you. The recruiters are really candid and fair, so you should receive that feedback from them pretty quickly.
Given that you have your company (I guess it's a software factory-like company), do you use TopTal to bring projects/work-hours for your company or just for projects where you (and only you) will be working on?
How much is the price/hour rate average that projects in TopTal use to give?
All TopTal contracts are with me personally. They do not include any of my subcontractors.
Your hourly rate is set within the TopTal ecosystem and jobs are billed at the rate. Your initial rate is a combination of many factors, including experience, but you have full control of what you want to charge.
Thank you for taking the time to do this! A couple questions if I may:
What's been your experience with working across time zones? Do you generally work with clients close to your own time zone or are you expected to work whatever hours the client requires?
For instance, with TopTal if you lived in Hawaii, would you be expected to attend a 9AM EST Standup if that's where your client was located?
Thanks!
I have worked with clients in my timezone (EST) and on the opposite side of the world (Qatar which is +8 hours). For everyone involved, it's usually better to be in a close timezone but it's ultimately up to the engineer and company. In my case, the client in Qatar had flexible hours to work around my schedule so I didn't feel much of an impact.
What's great about TopTal is they often post timezone and overlap requirements with the job description. For instance, a job posting might say PDT and requires at at least 4 hours in "overlap" (meaning the company and candidate must overlap 4 hours work each day).
I have never turned down (or been turned down) for a job because of timezone with TopTal -- hopefully that helps answer your question!
It does, thanks!