Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?

CEO of Toptal here. If you like, I can ensure we review your profile and client matching history to see if there's anything we overlooked. I'm available on Slack or taso@toptal.com. We’ll see if we can optimize your visibility to clients needing backend/data optimization experts.

While we look into this, Opire (an open-source bounties site) has lots of short-term opportunities.

I quit using Toptal because I was living in Western Europe and got extremely lowballed at a given point. As if I simply had to match the rates of people from Eastern Europe or Northern Africa.

I got a better hourly rate through the platform when still living in Latin America. Before Covid, it was amazing.

I hope Toptal has changed since I interviewed with them in 2015, because it was one of the worst tech interview experiences I had in a while. The interviewer was rude and clearly inexperienced in the tech stack he was asking questions about. I did a take home excersise and it was clear that he didn't even bother to read the code and just wanted to outsmart me.

I'm doing my last engagement on toptal rn as well. Will quit after. The company I m working for is awesome but toptal part not so much anymore. From staff to FUD. They cut down my rate to 1/3 of what I used to charge few years back. (They still bill client 2x what I get, of course).

Curious, are there any exceptions to your coding test (I applied back in 2021 or so, not sure if this is still a requirement)?

The test didn't like my solutions/speed (which meant I couldn't move forward), however, I'd say I'm more than qualified to be a Toptal dev (see projects in my HN profile [1]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/rglover

In addition to Opire for short-term opportunities (aka bounties), there is Algora.

In fact, there are a few of such bounty platforms in my notes, but Algora seems to be the one with the most traction: in terms to new tasks to work on and the bounty amounts being competitively priced.

https://console.algora.io/

Here’s an example of a 2-3 month bounty offering up to $20,000 on Algora, for someone with React Native skills: https://github.com/BasedHardware/omi/issues/1944

I only passed the coding test because they asked me exactly the same question the second time. I was definitely one of their top developers there, got great reviews and got approached directly for some great projects so it was pretty obvious I was an above average performer there.

Coding tests suck for people from countries that have a more practical mindset at universities. I remember needed algorithms exactly once where I had to apply algorithms to cluster 100,000's of map pointers and every built-in solution was completely slow.

Got it to an agreeable performance, which was cool. However using the Geo capabilities of the database directly was much faster, and could be cached for all users, so I just used that instead in the end.

Well, that ended well!