Hacker News Reader

Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

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?

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.

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...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com