I have to admit it was a pain to get into TopTal. It took a lot of time and effort. But it was well worth it. I've worked with TopTal for a month now. I'm an iOS dev living in Eastern Europe. I make twice more what I would make working for a local company. I love the money and love the company culture. People here are extremely friendly to each other. There's a lot of work here, way more jobs than devs.
I know it can be frustraiting if you waste a lot of time to get into a company but in the end you don't. Someone here mentioned having to solve three codility challenges in 90 minutes. Well, if you have a degree in CS you will know the basics such as the pros and cons of arrays and hash tables, what computational complexity is, or how to implement a sorting algorithm. If that is nothing similar to what you do working as a web developer that's fine, but you need to know the basics to get any programming job done well. No wonder most interviews begin with white-board questions.
I would never slam a potentional employer on the basis that you didn't get a job there.
Also when it comes to rates, if your rate is $100/hour but you're only able to work 50% of your time, because you spend the rest of it finding new clients, then I guess you should be more then happy doing the actual work for $50/hour full time.
I know it can be frustraiting if you waste a lot of time to get into a company but in the end you don't. Someone here mentioned having to solve three codility challenges in 90 minutes. Well, if you have a degree in CS you will know the basics such as the pros and cons of arrays and hash tables, what computational complexity is, or how to implement a sorting algorithm. If that is nothing similar to what you do working as a web developer that's fine, but you need to know the basics to get any programming job done well. No wonder most interviews begin with white-board questions.
I would never slam a potentional employer on the basis that you didn't get a job there.
Also when it comes to rates, if your rate is $100/hour but you're only able to work 50% of your time, because you spend the rest of it finding new clients, then I guess you should be more then happy doing the actual work for $50/hour full time.