Why freelancing?
I’ve worked as a software engineer for the last 3+ years, and the projects I’ve been involved in have ranged from simple desktop applications to complex web applications used by thousands of users every day. Most of the applications that I’ve worked on are still in use today, by companies, organizations and individuals. Whenever I’ve worked in a team with other engineers, I’ve always been one of the people that have worked the hardest, and who were responsible for making sure that the applications actually worked. That led me to help and collaborate with other people (who had other responsibilities on the same project), so I got to learn various technologies.
I have experience in a myriad of frameworks and technologies, including big data, MongoDB, JSON, Apache Kafka, Apache Storm, Hibernate, SQL, Spring framework, AngularJS, jQuery, Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS etc and mobile apps, iOS and Android.
From past 6 months, I have been involved with a lot of freelance work on different kinds of projects. I’ve researched a lot of sites that enable freelancers to find work (such as Upwork, freelancer), and I’ve worked on a few projects there. Needless to say, it’s very difficult to find an interesting project at those sites, because most of the work that is posted there is for short-term easy-to-do tasks that aren’t paid well. However, I’ve been lucky enough to catch an occasional good project there, and I believe that I’ve done well on all of them (I enjoy 100% Job success and 5-star rating). I really like freelance work, because of three things: no need to travel to work, you can get a decent pay if you’re doing your job correctly, and you get to work on different projects so you learn a lot of new things, and to top it all, I have a nice home-office.
I am a full-time freelancer since last 6 months and now I have heard about TopTal. At first I thought that it's just another freelancing website, but after reading a few blogs, I realized that it's only for the top 3%. So, it gets work from the most reputed clients.
Another thing which separates toptal from other freelancing websites is that it provides long term work. It's also the reason I don’t like freelance platforms such as Upwork (formaerly oDesk+Elance) is that it’s hard to find long-term projects for a good salary there. Most of the projects are low-paying short-term projects, and you have to be on their site all the time, so you can catch and apply quickly for the occasional good project that is posted there. That is very time consuming. TopTal changes that.
I have applied for joining Software engineers community and first skype interview is scheduled soon. Wish me luck.
Written by Alok Shukla












