Yup. And this is "actual work we need done" - and get done at well below market rates - of which they only hire 37% of those.

Now, certainly, people will do the trial who were able to comfortably "talk the talk" but not "walk the walk", and there's some attrition there. But for the others? Cheap labor!

While trial projects are actually useful things that need doing, I'd hazard a guess based on my experience that the majority of trial projects never actually launch. Some do. Some get passed off to the person after hire to further polish, and others go to another team to review and tweak and evaluate shipping.

I can say that the trial I did nearly three years ago took me 3 weeks to do, and I put 6h30m in the first week, 8h in the second week, and 6h45m in the third week, for a total of 21h15m.

Also, just to be clear, everyone gets the standard $25/h rate, it doesn't matter if you're a developer from San Francisco or customer support from the Czech Republic. It's something that's easier to standardize, is typically for a short period of time, and has zero correlation to final pay -- which is normally above market rates for wherever you happen to live.

I took a ~4% pay cut when I came aboard at Automattic, which was more than offset by company paid benefits (Health, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance all company paid at 100%, I just took 12 weeks paid paternity leave, 401k matching, work trips and conferences are 100% expense-able, etc), and got more than that raised back on my first year's annual salary review.

Source: I've worked for Automattic since May 2013. It's a great place to be.

Bah, I might just have to learn PHP again - were you a PHP developer beforehand?

At the point when I applied to Automattic, I was working for Speck (phone and laptop case manufacturer) as a Senior eCommerce Developer specializing in Magento, and had been an active contributor to the WordPress open source project for probably about two years?

That being said, please don't think you need to know PHP to work at Automattic. I mean, it's useful, sure, but JS knowledge is huge as well, and we have some folks on our Data team that just do Python. Our Mobile team works pretty much purely in the languages for Android and iOS. Elasticsearch is something we also do huge amounts of work with (as @gibrown can testify)

If it's interesting to anyone, here's my resume as I submitted it with my application (with personal information redacted) (yes, I wrote it in markdown) -- https://gist.githubusercontent.com/georgestephanis/a5095ca4f...

George was, but not everyone was. I had done very little PHP before Automattic, though I've certainly learned a lot of PHP since joining. We're also hiring for a lot of other development positions:

- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/javascript-engineer/

- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/code-wrangler/

- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/mobile-developer/

- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/data-wrangler/

Lotsa fun problems to solve and 25% of the Web runs WordPress. Big impact at a moderately sized company.

Their interview process seems to take multiple passes to filter for people who are willing to get lowballed. In a previous thread, Matt claimed not disclosing one's salary history demonstrated "we probably don't have the level of trust needed to work well together."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476070

I love how he ignores the top response to his question: "If knowledge of a candidate's previous salary doesn't influence your offer, why do you ask for it and what do you do with it?"

> But for the others? Cheap labor!

Yeah at this level and in this market, this is not an acceptable practice.

Why such a low rate? This seems like it would automatically disqualify any but the most desperate job seekers.

It should be noted that per the article, this is for a single project for which the candidate has up to a month to complete. It's not a whole truth to describe the $25/hr as compensation for a "full month's work".

This is also, per the article again, undertaken while one has a job.

Not playing sides, just adding context -- I have no affiliation with the company.

I can see why companies want to do this sort of thing, since it gives them a decent look at how people really do their job, but it almost entirely rules out people with a life outside of work. I'm already working a more than full time job, and Saturdays are entirely spent looking after our son so that my wife can get some work done.

That leaves one full day off, and a few hours each evening, by which I've likely been up since 5am, done a full day's work, got our son off to bed, and cooked a meal. Even if I thought I was likely to produce anything worth submitting, there's no way I want to give up the few hours of time my wife and I get together as a couple for the sake of a glorified job interview.

I guess I could take some time off work and treat it as my day job for a week, but then I've given up a decent chunk of my leave allowance in return for a job interview, and the addition of some tax paperwork to my life because I've been doing freelance work.

Yea, I recently turned down an interview with a company that included a similar 'trial' period as part of their hiring process.

From now on, any long, drawn-out interview process gets a 'pass' from me. I've had my time wasted too many times (employer suddenly goes dark after the final interview, no communication, no responses to any attempt at contact, etc). In fact, I've given up on my most recent job search after experiencing two of those in a row (need to save my vacation days for an actual vacation at some point).

On second thought, I suppose if I were unemployed and desperate I might be willing to put up with an onerous hiring process.

Or, conversely, if you had very little commitments outside of work, time to regularly hack on side and sufficient interest in the job to say "ok, this month, my side project is going to be for someone else". But the point remains that this puts an uncommon expectation on applicants, one that maybe Automattic can afford to select for, but that would potentially cause untold problems if all employers hired this way.

For at least a few people, interviewing and job hunting will probably eat into their life outside of work regardless of if the company is paying them to complete a contract project or using traditional days full of interviews on site.

That said, maybe it's supposed to select against people who are ultimately unlikely to block out the time to go through the screening and hiring process regardless of its form. It's some tens of hours either way.

I've got no problem with interviewing and job hunting taking up time outside of work, I expect that to be the case. However companies need to be respectful of that time, and see the difference between a day or two off to interview, and a month's worth of free time.

I respect that they at least pay for that time, which softens the blow somewhat, but at least for me the extra money isn't anywhere near as valuable as some free time. I know what burn out feels like, and there's no way I'd risk it for the chance of a job.

One assumes that it's not a month worth of free time, but a few work-days worth of time distributed over the span of a month. Basically, it's one thing if that trial period takes you 15-20 hrs of paid 'extra' work during the trial month, and a very different one if we are talking, say, 120 hrs of "after work" time. Now, many people will pass on the 15-20 hrs of 'contractor' work as well, but some people will consider it a reasonable deal.

The only point at which this becomes a problem is if the industry expectation shifts so that you can only find a good job by performing contract work for a month before knowing if you'll be hired or not.

As long as there are options, well... the people who prefer doing algorithmic puzzles will interview at the puzzle-interview companies, the people who prefer doing side-projects will interview at the contractor-then-employee companies, and so on and so forth...

The example project is a redesign for a single web page. With a month to let ideas percolate, that's likely to be less than 15 hours of work for a person who has made it through portfolio and resume review for a position designing web pages on the employer side and who is still interested in the job after several rounds of interviews on the employee side. To me that seems more pleasant than a couple of days in the airport and hotels to travel cattle class.

My take is that if it selects against candidates who view remote employment as just another free lance job, more the better for both sides. Remote employment is not another form of freelance work. The relationship is different.

> My take is that if it selects against candidates who view remote employment as just another free lance job, more the better for both sides. Remote employment is not another form of freelance work. The relationship is different.

I'm not really sure how you've made that leap. It doesn't seem to me that hiring people for a freelance job selects for people who don't think of remote work as a freelance job. If anything you're selecting for people able to make that commitment.

The company's goal is not contracting with free lancers. It is hiring remote employees. I suspect the natural inclination of many people would be to treat the sample work project as free lance work because that's the short term form. The long term form is not free lance work. It is remote employment.

If the company is guarding against false positives in hiring, then what they are looking for is people who are able to reframe the short term form in terms of the long term form. That is people who treat the trial as trial employment rather than as strictly a free lance proposition because people who have made that transition are a safer bet than people who at the end of a month are still thinking like free lancers.

Putting on a suit and tie for two days of travel and job interviews is just as much a mock business situation as a trial project. It's just likely to be less informative to both parties. And it's still selecting for commitment to the hiring process.

I've had multiple companies expect me to take 8+ hours of PTO for a job interview. I ended up taking an entire week to fit in all the interviews and I could easily see myself having filled in the down time in that week with ~20 hours of work while I sat on planes/airports and such.

I'm not seeing this as much different and I get paid twice for the twice. I doubt they want more than 40 hours of work out of you in one month while you work full time on a separate job.

$25 an hour is paltry for this type of work, no matter the duration. The duration of one month is from the article.

Yup, my trial took a grand total of about 20h to complete, spread over three weeks. Mostly weekends. (just as an example)

Not saying your conclusion is necessarily accurate (though I don't disagree), but anecdotally my own experience was similar. I interviewed for a design position with Automattic 3 or 4 years ago and made it to the contract stage, and ultimately had to decline because the $25 contract gig was just so off-putting. Not to mention the super-intimidating terms and intellectual property agreement that came with the trial gig.

$25/hour as a straight invoice (subject to self-employment tax), is roughly equivalent to a $40k/year salary at a company that gives -0- benefits, at all.

I have no idea if this has any correlation to the salary they ultimately offer.

You're right though...it would seem to narrow the field down to those willing to severely undervalue their work for at least 30 days.

Yeah - say you're working already and making, say $90K as a developer already. You're going to be taxed 25-28% of this $25/hr at the federal level alone.

Money is money, but I could think of more things I could be doing than work for a highly profitable company for what might about to $15-20/hr take home pay.

"Yeah - say you're working already and making, say $90K as a developer already. You're going to be taxed 25-28% of this $25/hr at the federal level alone."

That's a good point. Never even occurred to me.

Nope. There's no correlation with the actual salary.

As a contrary opinion, that its really not so bad, I'm old enough to remember job interviews where they use the interview as an excuse to take the whole team out to their favorite expensive restaurant for lunch, and I'm stressed and frankly not going to enjoy it because its an interview full of people I don't know well, whereas a day or two's pay at $25/hr works out very well to "date night with my wife at our favorite steakhouse". For people who don't like steakhouses, or wives, they can find a similar enough way to entertain themselves in compensation for time spent.

It feels like a relatively tasteful way to say "thanks for your time, now go out and have a nice evening to celebrate its all over".

I'm not sure how much time it takes, just that they said it's a month long contract.

But let's assume it's 30 hours total. I often turn down contract work because I'm booked full, so I could have worked those 30 hours at $100 per hour. This "interview" will cost me $2250--in addition to the time spend doing the actual asynchronous interviews.

I'm not willing to spend 2 grand for the chance at a job with this company. I might be willing to lose $500 or so in lost income to spend half a day interviewing.

Do companies really want to limit their potential applicant pools like this?

The reason they give (I applied, but wound up taking a different job before completing that month's trial) is that the $25/hour is a flat rate they give to anyone applying for any position they have, not just the comparatively well-paid development positions. So a CSR, a web developer, a deployment engineer, whoever -- all $25/hour.

They further elaborated that they wanted a flat rate like this because they wanted to avoid what would effectively be salary negotiations before they even knew if they wanted to hire someone.

I can sympathize with that position, though I think it might be more reasonable to do something like paying trials the lowest hourly rate given to anyone in the company doing that job. That'd provide context, while still being a vaguely appropriate payment for the work done.

Id want a lot more than that for such a short contract say $500 a day.

It sets an important precedent.

Also, that you accepted it tells a lot.

We debated a 'trial' or take home work as part of our process after reading similar blogs touting their success. Then we talked to our most talented engineers about how they would receive such a challenge and almost all said they would be put off by the notion of doing either free work or low paid work. I myself feel like it's a chance for me to see if I even want to work at the company... but for many the mere suggestion can answer that question for them...

And probably encourage prospective employees to violate employment contracts / confidentiality agreements in the process.

Not exactly the best thing to do and/or broadcast. How do they think it is ok to have people moonlight for what is almost certainly a competitor, most likely leaking out a lot of techniques and work that they have been developing for their current employer.

Got a source for that?

If you work in a related field (e.g. digital agency, web development company, devops), check to see if you signed an employment agreement or confidentiality agreement.

Read it carefully, then imagine if you did a side project relating to what your current expertise is, for Automattic on the weekends.

Then ask yourself if it would violate your agreement.

It might not, or you might not have such an agreement, but we do and I think (although IANAL) this does not sit well with that agreement.

If you do have a conflict, they're normally willing to work with you on how the trial is structured. If I had been under such a non-compete, personally, I'd probably have just done the trial unpaid as a targeted contribution to an open source project or something. Which is very rarely going to be a conflict of interest. :)

tl;dr: they're normally willing to work with you if there's a problem.

Most Anglo Saxon legal systems do and with the US at will they could sack you just like that anyway.

Would have been nice if he gave an idea of how long the typical projects were. A 4 hour project at $25/hr is a lot more palatable than a 15 hour project.

It's better than nothing (lots of companies ask applicants to do this home work gratis), but seems curiously low.

The whole process is really geared towards finding people who are dying to work at Automattic. And that's fine if that's who they want to pursue. Truly high caliber people with experience are going to be put off by this process (I actually had to stop and think about whether billing at $25/hour is even worth the effort to invoice it and complicate my taxes, and it is, but not by much), but those people are probably too expensive for Automattic anyway. So it works out.

I don't know about Automattic, but in many larger companies, super-stars-with-nothing-to-prove go through different hiring experiences than most other employees. I can't imagine Google or Dropbox sat Guido Van Rossum in a room and asked him to reverse a linked list in 'whichever language he was most comfortable in'. Although I might be wrong, of course... ;)

For people who have something to prove, well, the only question is which particular strategy the company will use to ask them to prove it. As far as it goes, 20 hrs of paid labor outside of work if your contract allows it, is not the worst I can think of.

I think there's quite a difference between your average no-name senior developer and someone like GVR. Of course they didn't ask him to do coding exercises; the whole world knows his work. But as a member of the population of senior developers who would have his abilities tested in an interview situation, offering me $25/hour for a significant amount of my time is a bit insulting. I understand that they aren't actually attempting to value your time at $25/hr and it's more of a show of good faith than an attempt at complete compensation, but come on, last time I did a short term contract was 9 years ago and I billed $150/hr. I haven't been in the world of contracting lately but my salary has more than doubled since then, so my feeling is that $25/hr is like saying "do fizzbuzz for me. I'll give you a dollar."

On the contrary, Max Howell, who wrote HomeBrew for Macs was asked by Google interviewers to invert a binary tree. To quote Max: "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."

To the best of my knowledge, everyone at Automattic goes through a trial process, even up to Director type positions -- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/director-of-business-wra...