Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 4 mesi. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Automattic
Colloquio
The initial Slack screen went well, and the person interviewing was professional and courteous. After that they gave me a WordPress plugin to fix/improve, which I did, and the person who reviewed it was also a pleasure to work with. The next step was the trial project.
I was told to wait for approval before merging any pull requests in, so I created a pull request for a piece of functionality and pinged the person who was supposed to review it (a different person from the above 2). Unfortunately, he disappeared for a month without telling me he was going to be gone or where he was going. No responses were given to my messages. When he came back, he finally reviewed my pull request but at the same time told me he was prematurely ending my trial project mainly because I wasn't "proactive" enough.
The overall timeline:
- September 26: initial application
- October 18: invite to Slack screen
- October 22: Slack screen
- November 1: plugin coding test
- November 4: plugin submitted (this was followed with some back-and-forth with the reviewer which lasted over a week)
- November 19: invite to trial project
- November 27: trial project begins
- December 5: trial point of contact goes MIA
- January 3: trial point of contact reappears and ends the project
- 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
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 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.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 3 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Automattic nel mese di ago 2020
Colloquio
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.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 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.
