Chapter 2
The First Day
I was hired as employee #58 at Automattic in August 2010, three months before my team would visit Athens. There are no formal interviews for positions at the company. No one asks trick questions like why manhole covers are round or how many Ping-Pong balls fit on a 747 airplane.1 Instead they hire by trial. This means you are asked to do a simple project. You get access to real tools and work on real things. If you do well, you're offered a job. If you don't, you're not. The many phony parts of hiring, from inflated résumés to trying to say what you think the other party wants to hear, disappear. Rather than fumbling in abstractions, you prove your ability through doing tasks you'd do in the job. It's simple and brilliant. ...
Get The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
