Toptal is the opposite to the sort of answer I'm looking for. Their model is to vet the "Top 3%" of employees to prescreen them for prestigious employers. Turing is similar. I'm looking more for how the bottom 50% can find something quickly at some random employer.
It's an idea. In the past I haven't had good luck with these sorts of vetting situations. Also Toptal/Turing seem aimed at employers who I suppose would reject me now if I applied directly, so applying through these sites feels like the long way around toward more rejection.
Not to criticize you specifically, but I was hoping to get much more general advice from this discussion. There are several million developers in the U.S., how are the bottom 500k of them finding jobs? They're not all using Toptal, Upwork or Wellfound/AngelList. These are very HN answers, which I guess we should expect here.
Toptal has a wide variety of work, not really many big names that I've seen. A lot of MVC-type stuff, six-month-ish projects, and also a number of long-term contracts. You apply to be considered for a project with a 200 word description of why you are a good choice, if you get shortlisted the company has a half-hour chat with you, and if they like you, you're in. The chat has rarely been technical, I'm kind of surprised.
I don't see how general advice is going to help you, though. My general advice is: update your resume to highlight themes in areas you want to work, discipline yourself to apply to one or two jobs every M, W, and F, and practice algorithms for interviews. I expect that's not going to be very helpful for you, though, since I assume you're already doing that.
Do Toptal placements feel like FTE positions elsewhere, meaning you work on a team with other people and work of varying levels of specificity is assigned to you after a ramping-up period on an existing codebase? Or it is more like what I understand Upwork to be, where you individually hustle for one-off engagements to create standalone projects?
The general advice I was hoping for was about hiring for jobs at the lower end of the market, since the jobs I've been applying to have been inaccessible to me. For example I asked a month ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33696004 regarding "regional trucking companies and retail chains", "How are these companies trying to find employees?" I would really like to have a discussion on how hiring works for these companies because I'm definitely open to that work, updating legacy line-of-business or payroll software or whatever it happens to be.
I agree with your other advice, though I recommend that anyone seriously searching apply to many more than five jobs a week.