Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?

Last year, I was contacted out of the blue by an Automattic recruiter who encouraged me to apply for an engineering position there. I was intrigued for a few minutes because I recognized the company and knew they did some really terrific open source work once upon a time.

But then I regained my senses... I don't have any kind of reputation or extensive proof of accomplishments or character outside of my resume and real-life social circle. Any company that would cold-contact someone like me is 100% dealing with either abnormally low offer acceptance or abnormally high employee turnover, or both. I also remember reading (on Reddit and such) from previous employees that the CEO was best described as "mercurial."

There were enough bright waving red flags that I did not bother to respond.

Heh, like that old joke "I'd never join a club that would have me as a member"!

Groucho Marx for those that are interested.

If it was a recruiter encouraging you to apply, chances are it was a mass campaign to fill the recruiting pipeline.

In my experience that’s how recruiters work and the only thing it indicates is that the company has open roles to fill.

Automattic's recruitment process is also... "involved":

> Write a thoughtful cover letter, and thorough responses to application questions.

I've seen these kind of application questions before. These are not from Automattic but comparable to what I saw from them: "Describe in detail, including the metrics, KPIs and reasoning you used when you launched your previous 0 to 1 product to ensure a good fit to your customer", "Describe in detail the biggest challenge and obstacles you've overcome getting a product to market, including both the technical aspects and business/people components, and be specific about the role you played in making sure these were surmountable" and so on.

> a Slack interview

This is actually novel and kinda cool, especially when it's one of the primary ways you might communicate day-to-day.

> 30-60 minutes Zoom interview

> Code Test for engineers - We expect the code test will take no more than a couple of days, and this is done asynchronously over the course of approximately a week

That's starting to add up.

> Trial "can last anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. Most candidates complete the trial while working full-time and we know life is busy"

Better check your existing employment contract about moonlighting / outside employment (I am not saying I agree with such restrictions, but given how common they are, maybe this should be called out a little more....)

Sounds like canonical.

Plus the recruiter adds your name to their file and tells future employers that they have x number of great programmers from which to select. You just ++x for the recruiter

It's not quite as bad. At least A8C doesn't ask you to talk about what grades you got in high school.

There's a good chance the recruiter was just spamming anyone and everyone they could find. At least 50% of the cold recruiter messages I've gotten have been for roles that had nothing to do with my background.

A code test that takes a couple of days?! That's an awful lot of unpaid time for a single interview step, and that's even assuming it's not one of the many companies that underestimates how long the exercise will take. Open application pipelines have a low success rate, so anyone going through this process is likely going through many others as well. Most adults currently in a full time job don't have time for that much nonsense.

Cold outreaches from an employer's recruiters can be from sourcers doing dumb keyword searches.

But can also be because your name was put in the hat by someone at the company (either because they know you, or because they saw something you said online).

> Code Test for engineers - We expect the code test will take no more than a couple of days, and this is done asynchronously over the course of approximately a week

Doesn't that run foul of minimum wage laws and social security laws? At that point you're doing unpaid work.

Canonical accepts my PR's but won't hire because I didn't graduate high school :-)

I've worked for quite a few recognizable organizations and let me say this: Basing hiring decisions on past employers is just plain dumb unless you are looking for someone with extremely niche skills. Earlier in my career, some local jerk told me I hadn't worked with "prestigious" enough institutions to join his startup, despite having the exact skills he needed in a candidate. His startup failed while I, coincidentally, went to work for those "prestigious" organizations he was chasing. It's all very silly.

How is it legally different to sitting a one hour interview? You're not getting paid for that either, that doesn't make it a minimum wage violation because its not doing work.

I think their code test / interview process sounds terrible, but the two days of code test is part of the interview, it's not producing code for the company to use.

(I do think that any company that wants applicants to spend that much time should pay for that time, but only for ethical, not legal, reasons.)

Hah, I was literally thinking of that as I was writing the comment.

Sure, I've had that happen too. In this case, I didn't know anyone at Automattic.

Under US labor laws at least, you only have to pay someone if they are doing work that benefits the company materially somehow. They would be forbidden from grabbing bugs out of their queue and saying, here go fix this and maybe we'll hire you. Same with unpaid internships which are _supposed_ to be training and shadowing opportunities only, no actual work being done.

That said, I did just peek and my notes and I read that candidates are paid two week's salary for the coding assignment.

I've been building sites on WordPress for almost 20 years. A couple of years ago I ran into an old friend, and it turned out she worked for Automattic. She encouraged me to apply there, so I did.

The initial interviews went well, so I moved on to the code test. It was a slog; I was working full-time and raising a three-year-old. But I loved the idea of working for the keepers of WordPress, so I powered through. During this process I got a peek inside Automattic, and there were some concerning oddities. One that stuck out to me was that there is an annual week-long gathering of employees, and it is mandatory.

Then my "trial" began. It was certainly within my technical capabilities, but it was something like 2 weeks worth of full-time work, all to write code that would ultimately be thrown away. I was instructed to invoice Automattic $30/hour for the time I spent on it, and told that taking too long to finish would result in rejection. I got a few hours in before I concluded that it was just not possible, and I withdrew my application.

There was also a fair amount of weird forced corporate jargon in the materials. Instead of "employees" it was always "Automatticians," and things like that. It felt a bit cultish. In retrospect, I think I dodged a bullet.

Reminds me of the (sadly not apocryphal) stories:

"Required: 10 years of experience in X"

"Sorry, Joe, while your cover letter told a good story of how you created X 5 years ago, we are looking for people with more experience in X. Good luck on your search!"