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.