Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

Finnish jobs typically have a trial period like six months. It's easy to not continue from that to permanent employment / I've heard that happen in IT business. People are also regularly fired for basically company financial reasons. So I would not say parent poster is strictly correct.

View on HN

Gravityloss is correct.

It is quite trivial to fire a person if there are economic grounds for doing so.

It is somewhat complicated and laborious, tho, to get rid of an employee if they are underperforming or acting in a toxic manner.

If it's like in Germany, you can reduce your staff for economic reasons - however there are rules to follow: if the choice is between a junior dev you hired last year or another who has been with the company for 10 years, you'll have to let the junior dev go first...

3-6 month trial/probation is fairly common. While it does help both sides familiarise with each other, it can't prevent a conflict in the future.

I've dealt with long time (15 years) employees suddenly or gradually going completely nuts - refusing to perform any meaningful task, accusing others of abuse and just playing dirty for months, sometimes years.

It's no fun, I tell you what! 6 months trials are useful but to a point

Letting people go after a probation review is probably more likely to result in changing the hiring process, rather than treating it as some kind of initial warranty period.

You don't want to invest in hiring and onboarding someone if you're outright saying they might not make it beyond 3/6 months.

Denmark is 3 months probation, where you can fire with 1 day notice. You can fire people for underperforming, but you have to warn them first, and tell them what they need to change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com