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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

There are strongly asymmetric risks for an employer in a hiring situation. Hiring a bad candidate is much more costly than rejecting a good one. The goal of the hiring process is to find a good candidate; there can be quite a lot of wasted time in interviewing before it comes close to the expense of a bad hire.

An implication of this is that the optimial interview process -- from the employer perspective -- will have a lot more false negatives (good candidates rejected) than false positives (bad candidates accepted).

So it could correctly be optimal for the interview process to be so onerous that most job-holders would fail their own interview!

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This is absolutely true for Google (or companies of similar scale), where it is 1. hard and slow to just fire someone 2. The production of a good (average?) vs. great programmer doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things (due to massive scale, and robust quality control systems).

A process where you optimize for avoiding false positives makes sense.

Most companies are not Google though, and if they are <50 employee - it's absolutely the opposite. 1. It's fast to fire people 2. Missing out on a great programmer for an average one makes a huge difference!

So, it follows that they should optimize for avoiding false negatives (rejecting a great candidate), without worrying too much if they got a bad apple snuck in.

> This is absolutely true for Google (or companies of similar scale), where it is 1. hard and slow to just fire someone 2. The production of a good (average?) vs. great programmer doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things (due to massive scale, and robust quality control systems).

This is true also for places like Germany (and Europe in general afaik) where the cost of firing someone past their probation (6 months) is very very costly, especially for small companies.

IMO, at-will employment should be something the employer and the employee should negotiate and not imposed by the state or the employer. Unfortunately, it's usually the employer who has the upper hand.

The fact that non-at-will employment is always the result of legal burden and not negotiation between employer and candidate should make it clear that that cannot work. As an employer it is extremely valuable to be able to arbitrarily fire someone, so since there are always candidates that are job hunting with purpose and not just casually on the side of their current job, it will be very hard to find one to agree to it.

"I'll work for you but only if you can't fire me" is something only the most desperate companies would accept unless they are forced to.

> "I'll work for you but only if you can't fire me" is something only the most desperate companies would accept unless they are forced to.

Yeah this would be a red flag on the candidate immediately. What I meant was that the negotiation should be on the notice period not on being unfirable. I see it's a huge burden on the company to not be able to fire someone and what ends up happening when you have a bad apple is other team members start leaving.

We did a hire fast and fire fast trial at work and it was not pleasant. The person comes on the team and we spend a lot of time onboarding, people form bonds, and then frustrations start to mount and the person is let go and now the whole team morale is lower. Lower team morale is not something to take lightly.

>> Hiring a bad candidate is much more costly than rejecting a good one.

Sure, but the really bad hires usually aren't bad because they lack technical skills. They're bad for reasons that end up in HR. You can always reassign someone with people skills but short on algorithms.

There are plenty of really bad hires who cost a company lost time and money because they simply are not competent. It's made even worse because many incompetent people are genuinely nice and pleasant people, they are open minded and may even sincerely care to learn, and it's very hard and demoralizing to fire them and can take a big emotional toll on many people.

Firing an asshole who is incompetent is one of the easiest things to do and it can be done well within the probationary period, heck even an asshole who is fairly competent isn't a big deal and can be a complete morale booster and likely will not have resulted in much lost productivity.

I'd say most of the people I fire are not so called "HR liabilities", and in general most people are good people. But most software developers are not competent and in some cases that realization can take a year or longer in domains that require a lot of ramp up time, training, and investment. It's often a lot better to avoid hiring people who have even a 20% chance of not working out.

Is the concept of a probation period not universal? I mean if a new hire is terrible, it will show in the first 2-3 months, and during this period they can be fired without any repercussion whatsoever.

Most bad hires can be rooted out in a few months, yes... but a not insignificant number of them can take years as well. Also many, if not most people, simply stop learning and allow their skills to stagnate and that can become a liability after a couple of years.

That assumes good engineers could pass and bad engineers can't. But I come bearing a single data point! The worst backend engineer I know just got hired at meta. He knows stuff! But his execution was always horrible/careless and he spent most of the day on YouTube / reddit when we were in an office.

This is peak bullshit jobs

Make it too onerous and good people will not apply or duck out when they find this. In a world where good talent is limited and finding it is requires effectively a marketing department in most companies, having too many tests might be a bad idea. Unless you are paying FAANG salaries.

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