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...