I recently was contacted by a recruiter at TopTal. He began by telling me about a potential role for one of their clients and if I would like to submit myself for review by TopTal engineers...
Any one who is intersted can see my Toptal.com profile
After reviewing the web site in some detail, I quickly became intrigued. Having helped build several service contract marketplaces, and of course, having had to bid for projects that are literly worth thousands of dollars against developers who are doing work for pennies on the dollar....I had an "ah ha" moment.
What a novel idea! Clients who are looking for quality, connect to developers who can provide it.
What a novel idea! Clients who are looking for quality, connect to developers who can provide it.
The vetting process that TopTal employs is pretty hard to squeeze through if you are not a more then completent web developer.
We started out with a coding test @ codility.com. It is a pretty tough exercise, not so much in complexity, but in the time alotted. It consisted of three questions in thirty minutes in which you need to write working code and keep in mind the edge cases (billions of operations, and other boundary cases, etc).
After that, you have a technical interview. This consists of yet another coding/algorithm test where you do another example but this time its live with the interviewer over Skype (or similar) where they can watch your screen.
Last, they have you write an application from scratch with authentication, Ajaxian UI and RESTful interface.
After all that and in combination with your resume and experience they decide whether to allow you into their network and put you forward for development roles and give you access to their posted job list.
Its a far cry from Elance, Odesk, Freelancer.com, etc. As far as I am concerned provide an essential service to both startups and web and software developers who work extremely hard to be the best they can be.
