The whole process took around 3 weeks to complete. It started as a referral from two current Automattic employees, so I was put straight into the code test part of the interview.

During this process, I took a few days off due to being quite ill, but I made sure to check in and update on my progress as much as possible. Most of the messages I sent into my interview Slack channel went ignored, which made me feel quite uneasy about the process.

I submitted my finished code test, which took about 8 hours to complete. A week later, I finally heard back and was greeted with a disappointing rejection. The points raised for why I was rejected were all very minor, in my personal opinion:

• Exception handling could be improved.
• Testing could be improved.

These were amongst the reasons. The expectation to go above and beyond for an unpaid coding test that already took 8 hours to complete (with a possible 40+ hour trial in sight) felt quite unnecessary.

All in all, the whole process was very disappointing, and I really feel like the people assigned to my interview were very disinterested in hiring me, which again is another very upsetting feeling to be left with.

Why do you want to work at Automattic?