I applied at Toptal recently, but withdrew my application when I heard about how the CEO is hoarding equity that was promised to investors and the co-founder. Now they are suing the co-founder as well (and disputing that he is actually a co-founder). (He seems to be within his legal rights, but ethics is another matter entirely.) https://www.theinformation.com/articles/at-booming-toptal-no...

I'd suggest looking at Facet (facetdev.com) or Arc.dev as alternatives.

Humiliating machine disguised as a freelance platform

I thought that too while looking over their "screening process", but now I'm really curious to see how hard it is to get in. Did you go through it?

I started it once when I was super under-utilized in my day job and was looking at ways to stay stimulated.

I figured I'd start out getting approved as being able to do useful work in a particular CMS in a particular language (Where I expected the acceptance criteria to be low (and the size/complexity of engagements to be low) -- customize a listing of content, build a custom form, customize how content is themed, etc...

After typical screener quiz etc. and a Skype interview, there was a take home challenge that resembled "build a minimalist custom ERP with <such and such acceptance criteria> and <such and such custom business logic> shoehorned inside of WordPress" , probably a good 20 hours of work minimum if you were using an MVC framework with decent developer experience, let alone trying to bang it together inside a CMS without much support infrastructure for such things.

I declined to complete the challenge.

I might have had better results going straight for a language + framework actually suited to creating custom apps, but it didn't give me a great impression.

I had the same experience with the take home project applying as a Python/Django dev. I would have normally billed around $2k for what they wanted for a throwaway test.

I also declined.

I declined to complete the step where interviewer was about to watch me coding online almost the same quiz they gave me on the previous step. I have just rebelled inside and said "no thanks" almost automatically.

I have felt myself like inside some stupid adult movie.

Several weeks later I have found a freelance gig (which later turned to be almost 2y job) and the business owner told me he have approached Toptal before me and was shocked by their attitude, fees and especially by something around $50k coder take-away fee. Definitely not freelancing.

I'm seeing that dysfunction pattern in a lot of industries. Irrelevant middle-man creating a lot of drama and fees to justify their existence when they can be easily bumped out of the way digitally....

I did, it was the default coding challenge you find in other companies, with a take home project for the last project. There's 4 steps, which can be time consuming.