Pros
- Toptal is a hyper-growth company, so there is plenty of opportunities for learning, promotions, and cross-team projects that have massive business impact - Compensation is highly competitive, specially for those who live outside of the SF or NYC bubbles - Toptalers are great. You work with people from all over the world, and they are really smart - Working remote is life changing in a positive way, yet not for everyone. You need self-discipline and the ability to communicate without burning yourself out (some people get messaging anxiety) If you have that, you will never go back to an office job - Toptal is doing a massive transformation and its culture so much better. 1.5 years ago I joined a different company. Full of dirty politics. However, some bad execs and their followers left and things are much better now. Moreover, I am happy that we got rid of that sense of entitlement from some young and unexperienced employees who were "friends" with some execs. They used to get away with anything without consequences
Cons
- Ambitious growth comes with hard and smart work. If you like your cozy 9-4 job with nap pods, probably not the place for you. I have seen a few people fail dramatically because they expected to join Toptal and get "trained" for 6-12 months before driving any impact - Toptal's CEO is a super intense guy. I would argue that is the classic hyper-growth CEO, but I have seen plenty of employee coming in wanting a charismatic corporate CEO who just makes sure things continue the same. Not the case here - Benefits are limited. However, for those terminated employees who write some dramatic statements about it, we actually get a high base salary to make sure we do have money for our equipment and a home office. Nevertheless, I hope the company soon restructures its equity and/or profit sharing plans - Building culture and strong teams is hard if you work remotely. You will need some emotional strength to overcome the lack of meaningful human interaction in the day to day - We have an unlimited PTO policy that was abused in the past. Thus, we had two buckets of people, some people were taking up to 50 days off/year, and some barely took only a week/year. Luckily, the execs who were pro "never take time off" are gone
