Once again I am there in that situation, you know, finishing the current contract and thinking about what’s coming next. This usually happens once a year or six months, depending on the contract, but this time I’ve been working for the same company for almost two years.

To be fair I need some fresh air, but at the same time I’m pretty tired having to look for a new project.

First things first, I started by updating my CV, my website, doing some housekeeping on my github repos and starting to post some new things to make some advertising.

As usual I’ve started by reviewing the typical web sites and applying for those job offers I believe could be interesting, sending emails to the agencies I’ve worked for before and telling my friends and colleagues that I am ‘open to new opportunities’.

But then the worse part of all this situation comes in. I started receiving every day up to five emails from agencies. Most of them didn’t even take five minutes to read my profile or the email I sent them, which I took my time to write hoping it would help on filtering what I was going to receive, but no, that was not the case.

Of those that matched my profile, casually or by reading it, many of them are urgent and almost all have these things in common:

• It’s going to be the next social media cracking app.
• An amazing project with young and dynamic people.
• Working with the most advanced technologies.
• The next generation app.

Some of them contained very different font types between paragraphs, which clearly means a copy and paste from a previous email or document. Even a couple of them were for a different person or at least my name was not in the email but another one’s was. Also most of them were looking for permanent positions, and that’s something I’d like to avoid if possible, I love to work as freelance.

They all looked like a factory with no interest in the quality of the product or the offer.

With a few good exceptions which I keep in my records, the rest are not of my interest or at least aren’t what I need to have the future I want to have.

At this point I realised that something was going really bad. That was not the way and there should be better, different way to find the next project.

After some enquiries, a friend of mine told me about Toptal App engineer community. He told me that it’s a company that does it differently.

I took some time to make my investigations and they seem to be the answer. The first thing they do different is the kind of questions they ask to start applying. No silly and unrelated questions, no filling questions with no sense, just the right questions. That form is destined to be the starting point for an interview, not to opt to a position but to opt to be part of the team, the pool of engineers.

That seems to be a new way of doing things and ensuring only the best engineers are part of it.

I don’t know how this new adventure is going to end, but I promise you to write a following post telling you what happened and what the experience has been for me.