Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The harder, riskier, and more expensive you make it to hire new people, the more companies will play it safe by avoiding junior hires and putting more headcount in less restrictive countries.

A few jobs ago our mobile dev team was in an EU country with significant protections against firing people. Their interview process involved a take-home problem that would have easily taken 80-100 hours, more with polish. I couldn’t believe anyone would actually do that, but they had a long line of applicants requesting to apply. They said they couldn’t risk hiring anyone who couldn’t demonstrate that they were very good because firing them would be a huge ordeal involving lawyers, months of time, and very expensive payments if it didn’t work out.

View on HN

That doesn’t really pass the smell test. Countries with employment protections still have probation periods during which the company can fire you without hassle. For example in Germany 6 months is a common duration.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/probezeit

If you cannot evaluate an employee’s worth in 6 months that’s pretty problematic.

Some bosses don’t love firing people and give people too much of a chance. We hired someone and I told the boss to fire him the first day, he was that bad. He didn’t, time dragged on and he never improved, he only got worse in new and spectacular ways. By the time it reached a breaking point it had been well over a year and they had to do a ton of paper work, track performance, give him a PIP… so many hoops. I think he ended up working for us for 3 years. We even caught him red handed lying to skip out on work, and his lie to HR to cover it up involved him using company equipment to run a side business during work hours (somehow they didn’t see that as a red flag). This was I the US, where when I was hired I was told flat out they could fire me with no notice and no reason. The company was always worried about lawsuits around firing people, so they liked to have all their ducks in a row.

It seems like it could be easy to make it through 6 months unless the company takes it really seriously.

In a large company, it's more likely for a manager to inherit an employee than to hire them. Often long after this six-month period.

At that point, the manager is just stuck with the net-negative employee.

After 6 months the employee is then free to do the bare minimum.

You can still be fired, the company needs to justify it and in practice it isn’t that difficult to do. But employees can for sure always do the strict minimum, implying they do the their job correctly. I don’t really see the issue with that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com