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Comment by goethes_kind | Hacker News Reader

Talking about the whole labour market is not useful in this case. There are labour shortages in trades, because they do not pay well, so Germans these days prefer to go to university. One of these "trades" is nursing, btw. Other such trades include elderly care.

The German labour market is also very peculiar. Employers are very risk averse so even though they might be lacking personnel they are not willing to hire easily, partly because firing people is also not easy. Then there is the obvious hurdle: most jobs require German.

Finally, in many job markets, like IT for example, there is a shortage of skilled professionals and an abundance of new graduates. And oftentimes employers are not willing to take on a new graduate and train them. So for example there are a number of C++ positions looking for people with 5+ years of professional experience which won't give a new graduate a chance.

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Sounds exactly like the labour market in Finland. The shortage is there, but only for jobs that either don't pay livable wage (or have junior-level pay to seniors), have horrible working conditions, or both. Doctors are the only exception, they have good pay and decent working conditions, and the shortage is caused by successful lobbying to keep university intake low.

I don't see the risk. It seems German companies are making weak offers with "probation periods" even for international hires. One problem might be that such offers are not very attractive.

The probation period is pretty standard. Once you're through it you become much harder to fire, and your job becomes quite secure.

It's pretty bold to give a trial period to an international hire. Employment security is a good thing, and since wages are much lower than in the US, there is not much risk.

Every country does it, except countries with no job security. The notice period of two weeks is more than Americans and Canadians give as a courtesy. What is the alternative, hiring everyone forever?

That's very courteous, 28 days is plenty of time to find a new tech job. A real courtesy would be a golden parachute worth at least 6 months wages if you get laid off without cause. That's probably not more than a US sign-on bonus.

The alternative is giving real contracts to international hires, who already have a proven track record (otherwise why would you hire internationally).

Trial contracts were meant for people straight out of college, but in a race to the bottom some companies have started pushing that line further and further, even having people move across the world for temp contracts. You can't complain about labor shortage while behaving like that.

You don't seem to understand German work contracts well if you compare them to temp contracts.

The probation period also applies to you, the employee, if you choose that a company is not for you. Once that period is over, a three month notice period is quite common, so both you and the employer are locked into a relationship.

The probation period balances out how stable employment is once you both agreed that you're a match.

You don't seem to understand them. German law does not force you to have a three month notice period at the start of your employment, you can negotiate for a shorter period without the at-will part.

Why employers don't want to train fresh German graduates? Makes no sense

Probably because most new grads suck and have very low skill ceilings.

It is possible to identify candidates with low skills but high potential who can be trained. But most hiring managers are too lazy and incompetent to do this so instead they take the easy route of filtering based on education and work experience. Back in the early days of computing before it was really taught in most universities, IBM used to hire programming trainees based on the results of an aptitude exam. This worked pretty well and a similar approach could still be used today.

No, it's because as soon as they are trained they move on. And an increasing salary doesn't stop that.

People want to job hop to build up a diverse experience and no company wants to be the mug that pays an engineer during their bad years so that someone else gets to take advantage of it.

Mamy (most?) people would prefer to not have to job hop if the meager slary increases didn't make it almost mandatory. Even then, many people stay because they hate the idea of changing jobs so much.

I am - on paper - a new grad, but I am [demonstrably] outperforming not only everyone on my "level" in my org, but most at the level above me.

This sector's obsession with YOE as a metric of skill and thinking that nearly every new grad is useless is insulting.

Isn't it directly related to it's being an investment than to hire staff? You can't expect inexperienced people to do work that an experienced person has to do. So to train means you need to have the main work carried out by an experienced person, you have extra training capacity, and over on this you have funds to hire new graduate to train. You also would not expect a return on this investment quick.

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