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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Or how impressive their GitHub is.

Or another mostly (rightfully so IMO) choice you see here. Set a low bar to hiring but have a probationary period after which you fire a notable percentage.

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I agree with your second sentence. Your first is much less of a thing for people like me. Sure, an impressive github is...impressive. However, I have never posted anything publicly to github, so my existence would look sparse which is also the same description for my social profile. I just don't use github for side hustle type of projects.

I have a decent amount of commits to my Github, but it's to 98% private projects. Things that may become products someday. Don't have a whole lot to show potential employers. My day jobs have always been private or onprem repos.

Yeah probationary period would be great for companies, maybe better for people trying to break into industry (unless they can't fired and can't get their old job back), and not so good for most people already in the industry.

From looking at job postings, there's no shortage of jobs for people already in the industry, and a proportionally much lower number of positions for entry-level. Every company has open positions for seniors, but no one wants to train them up.

I think this is mainly a side effect of the kind of work being performed at companies has leaned over the decades towards an increasingly bimodal skills distribution, and the entry level work's sophistication is eroding from advances in automation and continuous improvement feedback loops.

For example, I see at all of my clients entry level help desk positions to do things like help with provisioning a new employee's Wintel laptop, answer internal software packaging problems, intake VPN trouble reports, that sort of activity. But not nearly as much as when I entered the industry, because so much has been automated away or folded into centralized management systems, and the trend continues with advances in desktop engineering. On the other hand, I see an explosion of demand for the desktop engineering team positions.

This is being reflected in many other IT areas as far as I can tell. There is a constant push these days at all my clients to automate all repetitive work, and a much bigger appetite from leadership to automate entry level work even when the ROI payoff is longer than 1-4 fiscal quarters than when I started. The push isn't due to direct labor savings though: it is to drive down variance of configurations exposed to the more senior and expensive roles, so the real high-payoff automation can really shine, and they can reduce business-as-usual work hours remediating the impact from those variances.

You still have to decide who gets the probationary period and who doesn't. To figure that out you still have to do interviews and filter. Probationary periods don't solve anything except it makes it easier to fire people before the end is over.

Firing people is not exactly hard in the USA.

It's perhaps not hard but the expectation if you take a new job is that you won't be randomly fired in a few months because you don't meet some unstated high bar.

Every new hire has a probationary period to it. If you go into a new job thinking you'll make it past 6 months automatically, then that's a big assumption. While it shouldn't be hard to just do your job and get past the probation period, it's hard to know if the company didn't just hire a bunch of people to get past a crunch without an intention of keeping them.

Implicitly. But there's a difference between "wow, you're a bad hire" and "you're not an 80%er."

"Does not meet expectations" is always a cop out, but a great catch-all if aren't an 80%er.

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