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.