Got an interview request for a new job. They mostly do WordPress. I don't want to touch WordPress.

Talked to the Project Manager woman on the phone about the job, seems decent.

Sounds like a nice place to work at, but I just can't do the WordPress thing, man.

Why? It is good money.

I saw someone mentioning on a reddit post concerning the current epidemic of dev layoffs that if devs would stop being elitist about the things they can develop for then they would not be having such a hard time finding jobs.

Not saying this is you, but nothing good has ever happened to me from being an elitist in the tools I have worked in.

My highest paying job at one point was doing VBScript with classic ASP, massively hated and neckbeards took away my cool dev points I guess? But i care more about money.

If I was you - I’d be honest and tell them up front you don’t wanna work with WP. Then maybe ask to speak to a member of the dev team - to get a sense of what they really spend most of their time on in daily work.

PM:s can have an overview of a large team - but can be really poor at describing where most work is done and how it is distributed.

For example I worked in a team of 7 devs where 2 maintained a soon-to-be-obsolete dotnet site and 5 worked on a nodeJS site and once heard them say ”It’s a mix of dotnet and js” and I had to interrupt to correct that dotnet was entirely irrelevant for any new hire

I worked with WP for a year. It’s shit for many reasons, so I’d only take a WP job if it paid me like 3 times what I earn right now. And only as a temporary job while I prepare something else to jump ship.

The reality is that WP is used by a ton of non programmers. This means that whatever bad experiences you have had with shit code from other programmers will be eclipsed by whatever you’ll face in a CMS project. Unless the team is composed of programmers that know what they’re doing and more importantly, can keep the business people from setting the thing on fire.

@AleCx04 I agree, however I've worked with WordPress before and I was miserable, I hated the work. They pay isn't significantly higher that what I currently get paid.

I enjoy the work I currently do so I don't *really* want to leave, but it's just the weird micromanaging culture they've got here now that's frustrating (not my project, but I am part of their rigid SDLC thing that is supposed to make life easier for everyone, which it is not).

I don't think I can give it up for less than 5% salary increase and a technology that I hate working with (WordPress and React).

@jiraTicket Yeah, I talked to the PM, she said the job would mostly involve building custom WordPress themes and sometimes maintenance on client websites. They're a super small team, only about 4 people, including a designer.

@ars1 Yeah I've worked with WP for a couple of years on and off and it always left me feeling empty and miserable and reconsidering my career. I've migrated some WP sites to Statamic CMS and my clients are happy, I am happy, so I would avoid any WP work, unless the salary is, like you said, 3 times higher than what I currently make.

WP can be a fantastic thing, IF handled with care. I've used it in headless mode with Nuxt and it was fine. I just don't think it's fair to start a new job and rock the boat, just because I like working with it in a particular way.

@dissolvedgirl gotcha, I hear ya. That makes sense, in my case I do not mind because it is easy money. The most interesting things I do are not even related to my work, they happen at home when I get back to my game code.

Everything else is meh at work for me, so I get wanting that extra omph from the things one does at work.