Ask HN: What has been your experience with TopTal (and other similar agencies)?
I'm looking into becoming a developer-for-hire through them. Is the company legitimate, ethical, etc? Are there any hidden issues or things that one should be aware of? Any other general bits of information? Are there better places for this kind of thing (I'm basically looking into consulting, freelancing, telecommuting, remote working, etc), and if so, then where specifically?
22 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 58.5 ms ] threadI have found the entry tests not easy to pass, although fairly chosen and well representative of a developer's expectation. The "recruiters" there are very helpful and responsive, and getting new missions through the website is a real breeze. In addition, I don't know if I have been lucky, but all the people I have been working through TopTal so far has been (and are) really nice people to work with; and I managed to keep a fairly good rate even though the TopTal commission.
As a remote worker, it has been amazing to work while visiting some wonderful places of this world. One drawback, it may feel isolating at some point and you sometimes need to push yourself to move out and discover some new coffee shops / co-working spaces. It's worth to be mentioned, but hasn't been a cut off for me at all - so far.
If I could give one advice, be well prepared for the admission tests and pay attention to well designed code and details.
Hope to see you there as a workmate :)
Spent quite some time in passing all interviews just to figure out that hourly rate is very low in my region. Then got the client who pinged every hour for updates. TopTal did not want to change the client for me.
To summarize: low rate, negative client and TopTal don't care
Unfortunately the jobs skew towards web dev and there isn't much work for my skill set (game development, C++) and the hourly rates are quite low by North American standards so I haven't found any contracts I'm interested in taking on so far. I've had better luck seeking out freelancing work directly myself. There's no major downside in signing up with them that I've seen though - it gives you another channel to find work if you can't find anything on your own for a while.
Once you are in, you sign one contract and create a very detailed personal profile (another time sink) and that's all the admin done for any role. This seems to be one of the benefits - you don't need to interview and agree contracts, etc. for each new role.
They match candidates to roles based on skill overlap - typical recruiter style. If you don't have substantial experience in a particular technology that is deemed important for a client then you won't get that role - which seems fair, but if you have lots of experience, but none in funky web technologies, which is where many of their roles are, then it could be an issue.
You can choose your rate and commitment level (e.g. 10 hours a week), but that potentially limits the roles available to you. I've been told that average rates are around $80,000 for the UK region. It makes little sense to me that there are regional rate differences as it's all remote working, but I think it relates to keeping the working day in sync with clients.
All the people I've spoken to in Toptal seem friendly and competent and the interview process is relatively polished.
I've had a cursory look at what contracts they had on offer, and unfortunately it looked like there was not much for data people, and even less for finance. Most of it seemed to be web and apps.
That said, besides the job, there are other benefits from joining: you get access to a network of people who can help. And I think they give you free access to some teaching material if you write for the toptal blog. And also, you get to show publicly that you went through the screening process. So that can help to get other jobs.
You set your own rates / availability, so if you don't want to be cheap, you can.
All in all, the screening process is a bit long, but not crazy long, so it doesn't cost you much to give it a shot.
I work as a marketing analyst doing pretty much what I expect you do in finance - developing statistical models. I've always wondered if I can make a transition into finance. Do you have any resources/blogs you can share that talk about workflow or the details of the job, foundations, etc.?
Lot's of jobs available, mostly serious clientele, almost entirely web related though.
Mostly it depends where you are from, regional rates differ (a travesty, but it's how they make bigger margins). I doubt you will get amazing rates if you already live in a wealthy country (US, UK etc), for us plebs in the rest of the world the rates are good.
Payouts are regular and can be via Payoneer, Paypal or wire transfer. Never had a problem with this aspect.
The bad bits, they take massive margins (up to 50%, as in half of all earnings, though that depends on your rate, they will sell you for as much as they can, and try to convince you to lower yours "to have more chance at landing a job", which is fine, they are a business).
Apart from providing a way to find jobs (which is very big deal), you won't really get anything from them. Once you're working you'll probably have no contact with them whatsoever if nothing is going wrong. Their platform is very automated though, so this is actually a positive.
Overall, a good experience, IMO more geared towards talented programmers in "second-world" countries.
A popup takes over while I'm still having a look. To exit the popup is a small link that reads, "No thanks, I’d rather not hire the best.".
I think I have seen enough.
I'm recruiting with Toptal right now. The interview is long and arduous. I realize when it comes to global freelancing living in London puts me at a disadvantage. Lack of details about rates makes it challenging to make an informed decision on whether you should even bother. [UK, London]
Since region matters, someone in the UK will get more, I don't know by how much, depends on experience and skill-set. I doubt, best-case, it will be an integer multiple of the maximum above.
Then more recently talked again. They used an online system for initial coding problems (timed, unsupervised). These are google style "solve X algorithmic problem". That was pretty good, but I quit the interview process when I realised they were going to do essentially the same thing with a human and were using the online process for filtering. I felt they undervalued the interviewees time.
So I'd characterise the process as disorganised, and inconsiderate.
I refused to do any coding exercises if they couldn't openly state that my requested hourly rate was within reason.
From everything I have read online, the rates are low for US based freelancers.
You're better off finding your own clients and skipping the middleman.
Furthermore the interviewing/recruiting platform is a rails app and it had a serious bug. Time zones were off between the confirmation email and the app and there wasn't any way to tell which was the source of truth. In the end my interviewer was given a different time for our interview by one hour, and I was forced to wait for her.
I made it to the next step but dropped out due to these two reasons
I find the experience pretty nuetral. Most companies are looking for better talent then the other freelancing sites but still not willing to pay $100/h for work.
On a side note.. Dont trust a lot of the positive comments here. I haven't checked the slack team for toptal but they are very good at monitoring sites like HN for toptal releated posts and asking a whole room of like 1500 people to come and post positive comments about the service.
So it probably depends on where you're from.