Me postulé en línea. El proceso tomó 2 meses. Acudí a una entrevista en Automattic (Portland, OR) en oct 2017
Entrevista
The first couple of interview steps are a low pressure slack chat, followed by a technical take-home test. I found the interview process to be slow, confusing and inconsistent. My interviewer would sometimes go as long as 2 weeks between responses, which made it hard to have a very engaging conversation.
I actually enjoyed the initial slack chat screen. It was a great low-pressure way to demonstrate how I function in a remote environment, and I was able to play music and be more myself than I usually am in an interview.
However, it became clear that the company has no process for hiring for javascript skills specifically. The take home test consisted of a broken WordPress plugin written entirely in PHP, with the simple instruction of "make it better." It was such a non-sequitor as I was applying for Javascript, and PHP was nowhere in the job description. I was able to hack my way through it enough to at least get it working and up to internal code style standards.
I was asked a few followup questions, to which I responded in a general way of opening new conversation. I got no response for followup. Then after a few weeks of silence I was told they would pass on my candidacy because I haven't contributed to open source projects much in the past.
Overall I found the Automattic to be disorganized, and I was never given the opportunity to actually demonstrate my technical acumen and how I could actually serve the company. If the hiring experience is any indication of how they run the company, than frankly I am happy to pass on the opportunity anyways.
- Was mostly done on slack
- There was a take home assignment that should be finished within a week
- After the take home there'll be a review of the codebase by an engineer
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Describe a difficult programming challenge / bug you worked on and how you managed to solve it
The process started with a slack conversation, followed by a take home code challenge, then phone interview, then paid trial. It was a fun process but very time consuming. The staff was nice, and you were able to join a real Automattic slack channel to talk to employees.
Me postulé en línea. El proceso tomó 3 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Automattic en ago 2020
Entrevista
The interview process is outlined on the Automattic website, the first stage is an interview with a developer. The next step is a code test and the last stage is a trial.
My initial interview had very little to do with JavaScript and was about general programming aspects like testing and problem-solving. I was asked a system design question, which caught me off guard, but otherwise, it was straightforward.
I did not make it past the code test stage, but some notes about it:
1. You're invited to a Github repo with a 'broken plugin'. You're given 6 hours to complete a large variety of tasks, both frontend and backend.
2. They say to 'not spend more than 6 hours' but in reality, if you want to pass the test and impress them, you'll likely need to spend 12+ hours on the test. This is all unpaid work.
3. Vague feedback is provided if you fail the test. I mostly got vaguely defined nitpicks about my submission - 'error handling could be better' etc.
I would say, clarify with them what you're expected to do and how far you're expected to go early on, that's something I didn't do and I think that made a difference.
I will say that communication was great and everything happened in a timely fashion. I would just set expectations rather high if you're applying. They're looking for a seasoned developer that's willing to spend the time to impress them.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Given a nested object, remove an item, add an item, correctly increment the ID based on all the other ID's in the nested object.
