Nothing amazing about. CEO retain lawyers to draft custom contracts with a company before taking offer. This is mutually agreed negotiation and neither company nor job seeker is obliged to agree to such negotiation.

No one is stopping you from trying it.

Too many of them think they are doing us a favor by allowing us to work for them at glorious random company rather than realizing that glorious random company has no value outside of its employees.

There's truly a different set of rules & norms, once you're high enough up the social-status ladder.

That used to include the so-called "professional class" but the story of the intersection between social status and work for the last few decades has been MBA types pushing those positions downward‚and preventing them from ever rising, in the software world. They may not be doing it consciously, but a lot of stuff about work-life for software folks sure looks like what you'd do if you wanted to squash the social status of a cohort that earns enough money that they'd otherwise be on their way to solid membership in the upper-middle, like micro-managy "methodologies", avoiding giving us personal offices, widespread and oft-expressed but IME rarely-accurate stereotypes about software folks necessarily being bad at everything except fiddly computer shit, and the way interviews are run.

Professors and doctors were two big groups that held high status and had a fair amount of freedom and trust to run their own affairs, once they'd paid their dues, but both those worlds have been invaded by MBAs who've taken over running everything and brought the same contempt for "mere" workers that we see in the rest of the business world. AFAIK lawyers have held them off, so far, but I may just not be aware of MBA-ification there.

CEOs play checkers with people. Every piece is identical and thus very easy to dehumanize. I'd bet the best direct managers you ever had were playing chess, actually trying to understand the difference between people and how to best apply them. This difference is both required, because of scale, and inexcusable at the same time.

what's the problem with bare minimum? i get paid the bare minimum my company is willing to give me. it cuts both ways.

I guess the clause in the contract would mean a leap of faith by the company that they have vetted the candidate and trust the outcome. They just have to evaluate the risk of bad actors against the gain from good actors. Actually I like this as it makes the hiring company put some skin in the game.

The Netherlands have a system in place to handle these sort of problems. When hiring anyone a contract is signed stating a minimum length of employment. If an employee is to be fired before that minimum length is up, a meeting with a mediator (typically an employment judge) is held. The company has to prove they've tried everything to get the employee to work at their expectations (re-training, moving departments, etc). If the judge determines the employee is doing more harm than good at the company, then they are let go before their contract ends.

Granted, I don't think a judge needs to be the deciding factor on letting an employee stay or go. But I do believe a contract stating expectations, a minimum employment contract (if employee meets those expectations) is necessary and should be enforced in today's business world. Even apply it to salaried, or "skilled workers". A busboy at a restaurant doesn't need a contract, but an accountant with 5 years experience should at least have that safety net.

It works in plenty of countries all around the world. Not sure why it couldn't work in the USA.

There would obviously be fine print.

> Now you're going to have courts deciding what constitutes grounds for firing and what doesn't

Courts are slow and cumbersome, but also mostly designed for this purpose. Any notion of a bad actor would be a legal one eventually.

> I can do zero work at my job and I'll get paid regardless? Or they do a super bare minimum, being incredibly unhelpful to everyone and their whole team hates them?

Lots of people already do this.

There is no point in playing devil's advocate when the practice in dispute is evil to begin with.

Laying people off after coercing them to abandon stable means of sustenance is indefensible. The devil doesn't need sympathy.

> Now you’re going to have courts deciding what constitutes grounds for firing and what doesn’t

You mean, like they already do (ultimately, with administrative agencies as a first line) because of public unemployment insurance?

But what if executives could just pressure workers to do more and more for less because they know about the fundamental difference between how hard it is for workers to relocate compared to companies finding new workers? strokes chin Oh wait that’s already the reality.

Firing becomes dismissal with generous severance. Europe seems to do just fine.

Then the company is out a year's worth of one employee's salary and has hopefully learned to put a little more effort into vetting their potential hires. Investments have risk, including investments in human resources.

Would you destroy your professional reputation and make yourself unemployable for one year's worth of salary?

As an employee, I face exactly the same risks - psycho boss, unproductive team members, stupid leadership, fraudulent CFO, company about to die, market crash... a lot of these are impossible to know before starting the job.

The difference is, of course, the company can afford the risk. The have hundreds/thousands of employees. You have one job.