How I got into the most exclusive remote working platforms for developers in 2 months

Photo credit: Thomas Litangen.

This is a story of how I got into some of the most exclusive remote working platforms for developers, engineers, and designers (TopTal, CrossOver, and BairesDev) in less than two months. All these companies claim to hire only the top 1 to 3 percent of talent and employ extensive testing before accepting anyone.

I have to say, I’m the least competent, average guy you’ll ever meet. I’m not bragging about anything in this post because I haven’t achieved anything worth praising in my life yet (impostor syndrome is hard on me today). I’m only writing this because you might be in the same position I was a couple of months ago: unemployed, living in a third-world country, applying to jobs at local software companies, attending local meetups, and looking at developer positions abroad with salaries you can only dream of.

I’ll never be good enough

I was sitting in front of my computer, checking out how these sites claim to have the top 1 to 3 percent of global talent in their ranks, and I couldn’t have felt more unqualified. I don’t consider myself to be in the top 1 percent—hell, absolutely not. I thought I had to work 10 more years to be at least at the top 15 percent.

But one day, I was approached by a TopTal community manager who told me, “Just take a stab at it. You don’t have to study the whole MDN spec to be qualified. None of us do that.” Although I knew I wasn’t fully qualified, I decided to apply. But I knew I had to follow a plan.

You want it, you work for it

So, I made up my mind to apply to TopTal.

I wasn’t that knowledgeable on algorithms, though, so I decided to study for three months while doing some minor freelance work. Every day for three months, I woke up early in the morning (I’m a natural night owl) and studied algorithms for four hours. I ordered the book Cracking the Coding Interview from Amazon and used it as my study book, and I totally recommend it.

I also completed 42 coding challenges in HackerRank and more than 15 challenges from Interview Cake in the same time span. If you’re dead serious about something, you should be working your ass off for it. The TopTal interview can be quite tough with algorithm theory, so be well-prepared and you’ll be ready to go.

Be in the loop

I knew that if I wanted to get to the top 1 percent (or at least fake it), I had to read about, listen to, and watch people I consider 1 percent in the world of front-end development. Twitter and YouTube were my friends on this journey.

I won’t go through specific recommendations for people on Twitter. Just check who I follow and you’ll find a bunch of pretty smart people. For YouTube, if you really want to level up your front-end game, you should be watching at least one video a week from the Google Chrome Developers channel. They talk about almost everything from A11y to the latest Javascript features. It’s a great resource.

I knew this was going to be a ton of knowledge to process, so I started a personal challenge to learn one new thing a day for 100 days.

#100TIL Day 100: Can’t believe I completed the challenge! 💪🎉🎊⚡️😎⭐️🎈 today I learned about binary heaps and C# Hashtable. So happy!!! 😬😄

— Carlos Roso (@caroso1222)December 1, 2016

T-minus-0

Applying to CrossOver

Applying to TopTal

Applying to BairesDev

Cool. But why go through all that hassle?