Honestly, that’s a bullshit way to interview someone. WP is a complex animal of its own and if they were advertising for a specific WP skillset, they should have said so. You could be a Laravel/PHP master but that doesn’t mean you know anything about WP.
@Luca
I am really comfortable with Laravel and working with other PHP frameworks. If someone asked me to do something in WordPress, I would be at a total loss. Never touched it before. Only ever heard about it and looked at their site.
It happens man, I blanked in an interview with Shopify and looked like a total fuckin idiot. Wasn’t even difficult. I just choked 
Oh well, life goes on!
My first job interview out of college was in a services company building .NET applications and websites for large enterprise companies. In my interview, I had to do a live coding test in the room with the two interviewers watching. The worst part was one of the interviewers said half jokingly that they’ll help if needed but would deduct points if I got stuck.
Well, I was so nervous, I forgot how to write a for loop, and an if statement. To make matters worse, the interviewers kept helping me out and all I could think was “I’m losing points!” My nerves were showing so bad that the main interviewer gave me a break and simply said it’s ok, we’ll just leave it there 
. I was so disappointed in myself and had the same thoughts as you — so much so that when he asked if I had any questions, I shot my last shot and asked straight up if I had completely shot myself in the foot with the interview. The main interviewer laughed and said we can see you were super nervous, don’t worry about it; you’re still learning, we’ve got some other candidates to interview so we’ll be in touch later this week.
Anyways, 10 days later I got the job — they said I got it because while I was shit at coding, they saw a big potential for me because I was so upfront with them and communicated well. If I needed help, I’d ask… and to be honest, 13 years later that’s how I weigh and interview grads as well — you look for their potential and their willingness to learn and ask questions. It’s probably not the right fit if the place you’re interviewing at is expecting you to be able to deploy services to the cloud and develop solutions straight out of college; that’s an unfair expectation for juniors. Don’t be discouraged mate, we’ve all had to run the gauntlet at some point in our lives; you’ll get there!
It happens. When I was super young I had to ask the test giver for help because my API wouldn’t work with my cURL: I set it up as a GET and was curling with POST. So embarrassing. We all freeze from time to time. It’s all good 
Don’t be so hard on yourself! It’s completely normal to feel out of your depth with unfamiliar tech. Use this as a learning experience and keep pushing forward. Everyone’s been there!
Yeah, we have all been there at one point. You gotta just look past it. Interviews are brutal.
But every time an interview goes bad, you gain experience in what might be asked and what you can prepare for in the future. Sometimes there will still be nothing you can do. Keep coding, keep learning, and eventually, things will work out.
Fellow devs, is it advisable to pick up WordPress in 2025, especially after all the insecurity and drama surrounding it?
Noor said:
Fellow devs, is it advisable to pick up WordPress in 2025, especially after all the insecurity and drama surrounding it?
Imo nah, you want to be getting dirty making full stack solutions with React or a similar well-known framework. People who are willing to pay more for good developers generally need a custom solution, while people who want a developer to just maintain a simple WordPress site will pay far less.
I personally would not want to be pigeonholed into something like WordPress, but I suppose at the end of the day how you phrase things on your resume and how well you can interview to what’s on your resume counts more than what you actually did. Get some good cloud experience and get a grasp of full stack development, and you’ll never be hard up for a job again (in my own experience and opinion at least).
Noor said:
@Aris
You sound knowledgeable. Is it okay if I DM you to pick your brains?
I can only speak to my own experience, but sure.
I once was asked to explain polymorphism and mixed it up with something else and they let me go off for like 5 minutes. I felt so dumb afterwards, but there will always be another interview.
Because of that, I never get that wrong anymore. You learn from these and improve; it happens all the time.
I once interviewed and confidently gave all the wrong answers; it wasn’t apparent until after the fact. Such as answering a database question with, “denormalized” instead of the opposite correct answer, “normalized.” It was infuriating. This was with 5 years of experience at that point.
It’s a rite of passage. You will do better if you want better, and will learn from it.
Did the job description say WordPress? Does your resume?
If both of those are no, this is 100% on them. If you told them you didn’t know WordPress, it’s mostly on them. But they might have been testing your learning skills.
Either way, there’s lots more interviews out there.
There were two interviewers, and they gave me a WordPress task. I completely froze.
Because having two randoms diligently looking over your shoulder is exactly how devs work in the real world. No wonder you froze; I would’ve too.
I swear, some interviewers are fucking terrible at interviewing.
WordPress has loads of quirks and although I’ve worked in it a few times, I wouldn’t feel bad.
There are loads of ways you can build WordPress; we primarily use ACF or some form of custom fields as it’s faster than Elementor or other builders.
It’s not hard to pick up though if that’s what you fancy doing. It just has its way of doing things.
I really can’t understand how that says anything about you. So they asked you to do a task that in order to do it, you had to have WordPress experience, and since you don’t have any WordPress experience, you couldn’t do it. Are you supposed to know every single technology that exists in the web development space? I don’t even get the point of live coding tasks to be honest. Most people that answer them just memorize solutions from LeetCode. Solving tasks like that is completely meaningless. In interviews, the only thing they need to figure out about you, in my opinion, is how you think and how you approach a problem. Writing code live or pair programming shows they have no grasp of what makes a good developer. They just want a coder.
Guess what WordPress uses…? PHP/MySQL.
You bombed it, but not in the way you think you have.
The most important thing is never to panic. If they’re asking you to do something you’ve literally never seen before, that’s their mistake. There shouldn’t even have been an interview if this was a hard requirement. But the interview might be salvageable if you are transparent that you’ve never used WordPress and can communicate with clarity. It might have been a mistake on the interviewer’s part and they just straight up give you a different question. But sometimes asking questions yourself and talking through things is in fact part of the interview. Doing your best to puzzle it out with them in the room might impress them with how you can learn on the fly.