I actually negotiated an extended audition as part of a recent contract. The decision makers were starting to say things like "we definitely want to hire you, but we need to flesh out requirements on the project" and "we'll get back in touch in a few months to get things kicked off". Code for "wow, that's a scary looking bill rate" perhaps, but certainly not the sort of talk that tends to lead to gainful employment.

So I suggested that we do a quick R&D project at a reduced rate just to see if the thing they wanted to build was in fact buildable. We'll just run for a few weeks and see where we stand, then reevaluate whether we want to work together.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that they get to see the "other variable" in the salary calculation. It's not just Bill Rate * Hours. It's Bill Rate * Pace. A fast, expensive guy can turn out cheaper in the long run, if the Fast bit outweighs the Expensive bit. 3 weeks to a Month is enough time to see whether a given dude is in fact good and fast; not just in bursts, but steady state.

Granted, that's one datapoint. And it just happened to work out nicely. But I think it's a good way to prove to a company that you are in fact worth the rate you've quoted them.

I somewhat agree on having "auditions" or at least a quick try before you buy, if you will, but at least pay a decent wage.

What would work best imo is to technically vet the candidate early on and over the phone. Perhaps a 30 minute pair programming session done in stypi where you're both working on some code. After that do a group skype chat session with some other teammates and the candidate to see how well a group conversation goes. Nothing extreme just a 30 minute to an hour pow wow about the job, the company, etc.

If the candidate is still in the running then bring them into the office, if you actually have a physical office, and give them a couple hundred dollars to work on some code for 3-4 hours. See how they fit with the team and how well they perform in person. You'd be surprised at how quickly you can get a feel for someone. It doesn't need to take weeks. If you're remote you can do the same thing, in fact it'd be much cheaper without having to cover the candidates travel expenses.

So how many people would even make it past the first round? 10%? lower? After that you've got a nice number of qualified candidates and plenty of opportunities to weed them out before anyone wastes their time.

If over half the developers are worthless and you are buying an unknown quantity this seems equitable.

Tell your barber that you're going to pay him 1/2 from now on because half the other barbers in the city are worthless...

You've got bigger problems, tho. A headhunnter fee is 30K.[1] Take 30K and divide it by 50, and you have over 600 hours to play with. Lets save ~85% and take 100 hours as your budget @ 2x the cost. That would cover how many work-sample tests? (take your pick) 20 peple x5hrs or 24x4hrs which should be a good funnel. What's wrong with this approach?

[1] Assume a 100k position., which is also $50/hr on 2000 hrs/year.

You shouldn't care about the extra money, just finding the right developers.

If I have a choice between working for the company that wants to try me out ... at a rate grossly below market, and a company that can look at my experience and examples of code I've written - well it's a no brainer.

I feel like a company that hires like this has no respect for the potential employee.

A few hour interview may not tell you much about the candidate, but as the candidate, it doesn't tell you much about the company either. The future boss/colleagues could appear pleasant for the hour you get with each of them, but could be real jerks when you actually work with them. Maybe they just have a different style of work than what you prefer. Or maybe they said "agile" when you asked them, but they are anything but. I could go on.

For me, I really like companies that hire this way because it also allows me to try out what it's like to really work at that company. And get paid to do it. No one wants to be the guy who quits after 2 weeks coz the job sucks.

But if you're a talented developer then opportunity cost comes into play.

If they are paying me $X an hour to audition but I could be making $X*3 otherwise, the fact that they are paying me for the "try-out" isn't much of a positive factor.

Edit: BTW, I disagree with the rate (flat $25/hour for everyone) mentioned in the article. IMO it should be closer, or equal to, what the candidate will eventually make at that position. Compared to what companies pay recruiters and the lost money/time on dealing with a bad hire, 2 weeks of full pay is nothing.

Besides are you really going to get a good feel for a company by working remotely and are you going to be doing your best work at 9PM after a full day of work and other obligations?

Based on many of the terms of employment I've seen for creatives (designers/developers), this suggests that you don't legally own parts of your code. That's kind of a dangerous position to be in.

> Automattic employs 225 people...maybe 10 people leave the company, and another 25 or 30 we’ve let go

Is the audition really working if you fire 10% of the people you hire? 10% feels really high. That said, the rate of people leaving is lower than I'd expect. Together, those numbers make me think its working for the employees but not the employer.

There's a huge difference between "here's something that should take you a day or two, but take your time" and "come work for us for $25/hour, with no benefits; but as a perk, you don't have to quit your current job"

I think the other key part is that they're not just evaluating you on the bit of work that you're doing. It's largely about your communication during the project. If you just took the project and banged out a perfect feature without talking to anyone or asking questions, I'm guessing you wouldn't get an offer. In order to make an all-remote workforce work, communication is incredibly important. "Communication is oxygen" is the mantra at Automattic. And the channels we use for it are IRC and our yammer-like system. We rarely talk to each other and almost never use email. That's really non-standard, and you can't easily get a feel for that in an interview or with pair-programmed fizzbuzz.

In many ways, I think working at Automattic is somewhat similar to contributing to an open source project (to be fair, I haven't done a ton of this). And that makes sense, given its roots in and continued investment in open source. In fact when one developer asked if we could open source a particular component, Matt's response was that he was pretty much ok with open sourcing everything except our passwords. Given how open source works -- your voice in a project basically equals your investment and contribution to it -- I think the paid-project interview makes some sense in that light.

Anyway, I'm kinda responding to a few posts here, but I hope that gives a little more background into the process.

At the end of the day the only system I've been able to think of that gets around many of these problems is a contract hire (3/6 months depending on prevailing employment conditions) that at the end of it has a lump sum payout of the equivalent time (so a 6 month contract would end with a lump sum payout of another 6 months) regardless of if the contracted employee continues with the company (either by their choice or the companies).

The advantage of this system is that it will not remove candidates from the pool who would normally not take on the risk of a contract position, yet allows for an honest assessment of the candidate/employer relationship.

This seems expensive up front but is often just accelerating bonus payments for employees that are kept, and is a small price to pay for removing bad employees quickly.

Why not at least give the appearance of trusting while still making internal judgements and while holding some sort of casual conversation about technical topics with the candidate?

OTOH, I hate having interview "homework" because they take a lot of my time but cost the company almost nothing - they can easily have a hundred people doing the homework, get one engineer to spend a day evaluating them, and then only hire one person.

A lot of people under-perform in a whiteboard/monitored situation, and for most it does not represent a real-life work environment at all.

You're still beginning by submitting a resume - they are replacing parts of interviews with auditions, though they suggest there are interviews too, so it's more of a supplement than a replacement.

So Automattic is adding something to the process, something non-trivial in time commitment. I think I can show that this hurts them.

~~~

Employers need to keep in mind that there are some vast asymmetries between employer and the (prospective or not) employee. For instance, some common cases:

* When an employee is fired, they are at 0% productivity until they find a new job. The employer on the other hand is at 99% or 100%[1] productivity. This is in short why we have things like unions, because negotiating power in terms of productivity lost to both parties (employer and employee) approaches equal when the employer has all employees at stake, not just one.

* When an employer wants to fill a position, they have one spot and can try out several candidates (even with auditions) simultaneously. When an employee wants to find a job, they need to spend time choosing to fly out to places to interview. These decisions are hard, because there's opportunity cost involved: When you fly to place A to interview, you're spending that time not looking for other, potentially better jobs and/or flying to place B.

This ups the ante of the opportunity cost significantly. It's becomes an awkward gambit: "I'll pay you $25 an hour to pause your search for a job (you'll do our tasks instead), and after an indeterminate amount of time, perhaps offer you one." That would get some strange looks on a job board. It becomes an odd form of speculative work.

You're trading a lot more of your time (that you could be spending evaluating other jobs) to hone in on this one, and then they may not accept you. It seems to be a good deal if and only if you're certain this is the job you'd prefer over the others you'd seen so far, or that you have hopes of seeing.

Otherwise, this is the one prospective job you'd want to entertain last.

So this might look good to Automattic since they are capable of handling the load, but they are forgetting that such a load is not preferable from the employee's perspective if you have many decent job offers. A shorter, more streamlined hiring process will probably win out, since they're likely to try interviewing anywhere else first (easier) and since the opportunity cost anywhere else is less. I'd like to think we're at least a little rational about this, at least those that feel somewhat time-constrained when job searching, like the currently unemployed.

I think this gives other companies a slight edge against Automattic, at least for prospective employees who have options. I think by doing this they will lose good candidates, even ones who might (eventually) entertain their lengthy interview process.

Am I off base here? Or does this seem sound?

First, As an individual evaluating opportunities, how much more likely are you to learn if there is a not a good fit and therefore avoid months in a sub optimal job?

Second, the concept of a company still being at 99% or 100% productivity doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you leave a job, the company is at 0% productivity for that specific job you were filling.

Third, based on the comments, this will push certain people away from Automattic (e.g. "I don't do anything for free") and into the hands of the competitors. Automattic gets a double win: lower probability of hiring people who aren't willing to put in effort to find a good long term fit and they raise the probability that their competitor does. Awesome for Automattic and for the entire team, who gets to work with higher caliber people.

Finally, from a behavioral psych perspective this has some similarities the Zappos "pay you to leave us" approach. When someone goes through the effort to get the job, they are more likely to stick around AND feel happy about it. It's just human nature. Google "The Ikea Effect" for another example.

It seems that somehow in the startup community, doing things for free (unpaid overtime, unpaid internships, unpaid working 'interviews') is considered a badge of honor. I don't understand how that became the expected and accepted situation.

And as someone looking for work who is just very good you need a way to differentiate yourself from everybody else who is also very good. A history of being willing to work ridiculous hours for free is a pretty good differentiator.

OT and internships are post acceptance of a work offer. Interviews should be used by the individual to find the best fit for themselves. If you think spending 10-20 hours making sure your top choice really is where you want to spend the next several thousand hours of your work life is "free work" I think you misunderstand the value that the individual gets out of the diligence.

If I spend night working, I'm tired next day. Not sure if it is shocking. If I spend weekend working, then I just lost most of my free/family time and not surprisingly, I'm tired during next week and produce less in my regular job.

So, the hourly rate is better be competitive with salary. Otherwise I would just consider them freeloaders trying to get some cheap labor.

$25 per hour for overtime work = apparently not that well.

In my opinion, they would likely get better results paying $0, and avoiding this negative signal.

Also, the usual stuff about any "non compete" agreements with your current employer.

Your remark only applies where the job is one of a kind in the company (like the team of one or two who takes care of the 150 computers in the company). Most employees are not that critical, and their load is mostly shareable.

EDIT: my bad, i thought you had said this to the GP not the parent

You're assuming nobody picks up the slack and everyone is 100% utilized.

The fact that the interview process is a fairly sizable investment in time and effort from both ends is an important positive signifier for me - this means that all my potential colleagues will have been thoroughly scrutinized and are thus much more likely to be solid.

And his point is that if you are getting rid of that employee, because they're a bad fit, anyone is pretty free or cheap to lose in the first few months.

They suck, you're firing them. Why would you lose productivity?

Not that I totally buy it, hiring and then firing a lot of people trying to find an amazing person instead of just an ok one will be bad for morale, get you blacklisted by agencies who can't collect their fees, getting a bad rep in dev circles and other consequences I probably can't think of.

Of course it's good to have experience, (good) github repo, foss contributions and so on. But which one is better and why I guess depends on the specific:

If Google needs to deploy large private Git repositories, they will search and hire Git core-team members. No matter if they have experience or they are students. They are able to work hands-on, from day one.

If MS wants to compile the universe, it hires D. Robbins, creator of Gentoo linux which has a soft spot for compilations (joking of course, but you get the idea ;-) ).

So it's a case-by-case scenario, not some generally accepted truth that applies here.

IT is a huge field with very diverse technologies coming into game (programming languages, frameworks, network structures, databases, robotics, etc.)

Where I feel hesitant is - they hire "all" their employees on contract basis. Wouldn't a great work place want their 'employees' be their 'people'? Would you feel like the product belongs to you? And the tone of the whole article also makes it a little dry - check out the comment by "Eugeny Brychkov" and may be you'll understand what I'm saying.

I'm sure they've thought of this, but I can see a situation where you default to a 'standard' audition task in it's own sand-boxed environment just to mitigate any theft issues.

Considering that Wordpress is open source and any candidate applying at Automattic as a developer will most likely be familiar or know of it, the chance of having a developer not being familiar with it in one way or another are slim, even more so if it's someone actually wanting the job.

If I was looking to be hired by a company working with open source, I would most definitely do my homework up fornt and familiarize my self with their "flagship product" as it were.