Thanks. This is the only article on the blog? I was actually intrigued by the site and was wondering if anyone on HN has used this service as a dev or a client....
OP here, and Director of Community at Toptal. This is the first live article, but we've got loads more in progress covering a bunch of different projects and technologies.
Ballsy to lead with an article about porn. I'm glad you did because I know they must face scaling challenges that only a handful of services have to deal with, but rarely do I see articles about how they overcome the challenges. Thanks.
I'm glad you liked it, it was a lot of fun. I also implemented on the fly transcoding, but that's probably for a different article.
For the tech, well really at that place we used pretty much what everyone else did. Not a lot of big secrets, as far as I know the porn driving the tech revolution thing is ridiculous.
I was in talks with them as a dev. Their requirements were a bit weird, so that's why I didn't sign a contract in the end. I think there was one requirements which asked that the developer answer the employer's message within a pretty short time frame, not matter the timezone difference.
Hey Elbear, that's not in our contracts, at all. We do make sure our developers communicate within 10 hours regardless of the timezone. We feel that is more than reasonable and it's worked extremely well for Toptal. However, that's not in our contract, it's actually something we simply stay on top of as a company. Our requirements are not "weird" at all, they enforce high integrity, and in most places in the world, the concept of high integrity is "weird". The type of people who will not conform to such standards are precisely the types of individuals who we would never want to work with in a million years, and that is precisely why freelancing platforms have such a pervasively bad reputation.. because they're filled with low or even medium integrity individuals. To us, that's unacceptable. As it is to any A-player team. -Taso, CEO, Toptal
You're right that it wasn't in the contracts. It was in an internal rulebook for developers. Too bad I didn't keep it, so I could quote from it exactly.
Anyway, my final experience with TopTal was that I asked some questions about the contract that I was about to sign and never heard back.
Your version of "on call" is not congruent with ours or most of the world. When a doctor or DBA is "on call", they have to get up, fix something, and spend hours if not days doing it. We simply enforce communication. If you want to call that "on call" then your decision, and we disagree with that definition. To answer you question, yes, if you're responsible (in our subjective definition of what constitutes responsibility), you will answer within around 10 hours. In practically all communication you can reply "I got this I'll answer you later." or something similar to show responsiveness. The word responsibility stems from "response ability" and we believe that everyone should be... responsible. That's in our DNA.
"For example, if the in-house engineers start their workday at 11am PST, our Eastern European toptal engineers will start working at 7pm EET and work through the night."
"During work hours, they are expected to respond to any client communication within 10 minutes; during non-work hours, they are expected to respond within 3 hours."
