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Comment by s1k3s | Hacker News Reader

It's not that simple unfortunately. Some jobs have onboarding, which can last for weeks or even months. While in theory you can figure out if you're being screwed by an employee during onboarding, it would make the entire process a living hell for the employee. So most of the times you go with "they're new, they're learning, let's keep them for X months". If the person decides to slack it off after onboarding than you've just given someone free money for nothing.

Also firing people is not easy everywhere. In EU this is a complex process that can involve unions, trainings etc. While it's mostly a ton of paperwork that you just do it just adds up to spending money on a person who didn't want to work there anyway.

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This is what a probation period should be for. Even with all of the above you normally still have to pass probation. I've seen numerous people in the EU get let go in their 6 months for not meeting expectations.

I think that is a risk with hiring regardless. Both sides have an information gap.

I joined a place and within a week realized it was a disaster and I didn't want to work there. If the company had informed me half the teams had quit / was in the process of quiting I would not have joined. It's not like I could go back and get my old job

it would be one thing if dishonest employees simply underperformed, but they also often suck up other people's time.

It sucks being a manager and pumping tons of time trying to get someone up to speed and not knowing if they just need more investment and support that will pay off or if they aren't reciprocating effort and working other jobs.

After being burned, my default is little compassion and investment in full remote employees. Ill train in office employees because I have more confidence I'm not wasting my time.

This is on top of the fact that multiple employment usually requires directly lying to your manager and coworkers, inflating task difficulty, or creating problems for others to slow the overall pace of a project.

Pair programming has upsides and downsides of course, but one big upside in this particular case is that onboarding goes a lot faster and there's no chance of someone working multiple jobs, or slacking.

In EU we have 6 months probation mostly everywhere and you can be fired easily within that time. Also you can’t be legally employed twice, so the employee should be doing a freelance job on the side, which is also an inconvenience for most considering it would force you to make an additional tax report with some added taxation that isn’t worth it unless you earn a lot. This double remote job thing seems like it’s really just a US “problem”. Which is weird, considering how this hustling to get more for yourself should actually be incentivized in a society that promotes self reliance and getting rich as a core value.

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