Hacker News Reader

Comment by daok | Hacker News Reader

>At AppSumo, we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on full-time to ensure they’re the right fit.

Not sure that is something I would personally enjoy. While I understand you must fit in, having this process highlights that leaving your current company is even riskier as you might not make the cut and end up with nothing. The trial is one-sided, with all the risks for the new employee, not AppSumo. I understand that any change of job is similar where you may stay forever, however, saying that way make it worse somehow.

View on HN

I wouldn’t never work for a company that does this.

I don't see how it's much different from working at a company for any period of time even as a fully onboarded employee, aside from specific legal obligations that possibly protect your employment. In any place where firing at will is legal, they can toss you at any time for almost any pretext and claim you weren't a correct fit. It applies in general even if you're fully hired, barring some specific contract (that they might anyhow wiggle their way out of).

Note the phrasing is "we run paid trials with potential teammates before bringing them on".

While at-will employment does mean you can be fired at any time, the default assumption is that your job will continue, barring something happening (like poor performance, or the company being unprofitable, or your boss being in a bad mood that day).

The phrasing here makes it sound like the default is that it's time-limited and an extended interview. Sure, technically at-will and "a tech interview" both have the same amount of job-security (exactly zero), but there's social expectations around employing and firing people, and overhead for the company, which lead to full-time employment having more security in practice.

> full-time employment having more security in practice

Not sure about other at-will states but in Utah one can apply for unemployment after losing their W2 gig. If this trial period doesn’t involve W2 paperwork then I wouldn’t think it’s comparable.

I’ve yet to find a way to deposit social expectations in my bank account.

I certainly agree that we shouldn't bank (figuratively or literally) on positive social expectations, such as expecting an employer to treat us fairly.

However, AppSumo is apparently promising the opposite - they are setting the expectation that it is quite likely new hires will not work out and you should be fully prepared for termination.

Now that's an assurance I'd take seriously.

If the company follows normal at-will employment practices, there would be no need to mention it.

The fact that they explicitly call out this practice is probably a sign that they lay off a larger percentage of new hires compared to the average company. Otherwise, why mention it?

Legal, medical insurance, and the general understanding that you're an employee of the company and it comes with all the benefits of being one. True, you can get fired at anytime for no reason at all, why would anyone with any option choose a place that says they will maybe explicitly fire you after a certain period? Might as well get hired at Netflix which has a similar perform or out culture where you are guaranteed a very high salary and a generous severance.

Just go to a regular place of employment. I've never seen any place with these kinds of deviant methods and process end up be a remotely successful company or an actual good employer.

> I've never seen any place with these kinds of deviant methods and process end up be a remotely successful company or an actual good employer.

What other employer do you know what does this?

LinkedIn does contract to hire.

>I wouldn’t never work for a company that does this.

Your double negative is genuinely confusing me. Is this intentional, or is it an error?

Yikes definitely an error, I’m on mobile.

Darn. I thought the double negative was hilarious.

Not no how, not no way!

At least they're transparent about it. Plenty of people end up working at companies with this attitude without ever knowing it. Especially in sales orgs.

Indeed; I've known a scientist and a developer who both had such experiences.

My job basically prefers the Contract-to-Hire pipeline. One is often hired on as a contractor, and if things work out by the time your contract is up, then you can stay. In a sense, we are doing something similar to AppSumo.

I take issue with these because they're really just doing an endrun around labor law:

- you're going to be treated like an employee, because that's the plan, and I'd wager many Contract-to-Hire setups would fail the government's "20 Factor Test"[1]: Level of instruction, degree of integration, demands for full-time work...

- I've yet to see a non-VP+ level contract with severability clauses that require contractual compensation, i.e. most contracts are "severable without notice", no different to "At Will"

Indeed, the practical side effect of this is "We're going to hire you and we get to avoid paying you benefits for an extended period of time (the contract duration)."

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/oda/shared/Documents/Publications/Nat...

There is the case where you are employed by a firm as a W-2, and you are a "contractor" in the eyes of the company you are doing the work for. And more often than not, after 6-18 months the company offers to buy out the contract to from your employer, converting you to full time.

They don't have to pay you benefits of course, but you can always market yourself at a rate that more than compensates for that. So it's not an automatic financial shafting for the contractor (unless they don't take this into account).

I suppose you are only looking for juniors, then?

There is not a chance I would leave a real job for a gig like that. I can't imagine many folks who have mortgages and families to support would consider it.

Actually, I was the last junior hired -- 8 years ago. Somehow, my org is able to find mid-level to senior people.

However, we do not really have such titles since it's a very small shop. So, perhaps I am not the best at judging whom is truly a mid-level vs. senior.

Transparent in retrospect is not, in fact, transparent.

It's a slightly more explicit version of a probationary/trial period, which is very common outside the US. (You don't need them in the US, because you can be fired at any time for any reason anyway.)

This. I've had to fire someone in their probation period, and their expectation (that they had finally landed a great job and could relax) clearly didn't match our expectation (we had a new employee on probation, let's see if they work out).

It would help people more if there was a clearer expression of "this is a trial. You might not pass it".

Agree. Unless there is a breakup clause that pays the employee (er, contractor) for severance, it puts all the risk explicitly on the employee, which is horseshit.

Edit: sorry, you got this question a bunch below. I didn't read ahead.

Are probation periods not a thing in the US? Maybe because of at-will termination?

In Australia most roles have a 3-6 month probation period in which either party can terminate the employment agreement at will. That's essentially a "paid trial period".

After that, employers have much stricter rules for what reasons they can fire you (in theory) and and both employers and employees must give 2 weeks notice or extra if agreed upon in contract.

There's no way to make a hiring process that makes everyone happy.

Though the length here was not specified, it could be e.g. 3 days that you can do while still employed.

Sure, but do those 3 days tell you so much more than a 30m interview?

You need to work with someone much longer than that to figure out their (non-obvious) flaws.

They do. You get signals on how well people can work independently on a non-trivial task. How well they can understand their is being communicated to them, whether they clarify what is important, etc. How well they can get themselves unstuck vs needing to ask about everything. How motivated they actually are to work, etc.

They're not perfect, and you really do need to make sure the task is targeted at what you actually want to see from the person when they join, but they definitely give more signal than 6 hours of leetcode.

> 3 days that you can do while still employed

That could easily put you in violation of your employment contract. And could result in your (ex-) employer coming after you, and/or your new employer.

I don't necessarily agree that it should, but it absolutely could.

You can make work trials that are obviously not competitive if you are really concerned, e.g. contributing a needed feature to an open source project. Realistically, companies are also just not going to sue.

If people are concerned about the risk of being paid, well, either you want to get paid or not, that's up to them, you can't have you cake and eat it too here.

Give me a take home exercise, doable in maximum 2-3 days and pay me the salary rate for that period.

I'd be happy and it would be fair.

Take home exercises seem so pointless in the AI age tbh. Pretty much anybody can write large amounts of code very quickly these days. It kind of feels pointless to even test this skill.

Plus, most people very lazily state the problem when they give the take home exercise to a point large parts of the problem are open to big interpretation. To the effect any deliverable you produce feels either overdoing or not doing anything at all.

Some people take a part of the problem they are trying to solve at work and just put it in a paragraph and ask you to solve it. Most the times the context is missing, they don't give data you need to complete your work and more importantly it feels they just want this requirement off their table and don't wish to be bothered. So when you go back to them for the data or context, they straight up reject you.

When you do get a company/team, that gives you a good problem to solve. They don't bother to read through your solution. When they do, they want you to go through a live code review in front of the whole team, or work through feature requests on the code you just wrote with dozens of people watching as you type. Then followed by that rounds of grilling you on esoteric trivia. Which in case most companies have a policy that if even one person gives a negative feed back they reject you.

In all, you end up doing lots of work for nothing.

Interesting take home assignment with lots of ways to solve it + technical conversation about the code + checking things like README + deployment steps and whether it even runs or not, I believe, would be very sufficient.

The idea anyway is to find someone capable for solving problems with a specific tech stack, be able to discuss ideas with other people amicably and write decent code.

To me removing the tools which can and are actually using during the job is like asking someone to write flawless code on paper: is that what you are trying to filter for?

As an employee, I've requested the same to early stage startups. No amount of interviews, will give you enough information to assess its potential.

"Trial periods" are actually a thing in many countries with strong employment laws, where firing people requires a cause. It helps to reduce the risk of hiring somebody, and so they are advantageous for both employers and employees.

In the US? Yeah, they don't make much sense.

As I mentioned in a reply above, I don't see the logic of them in the U.S. Fully onboarded or not, a company in most contexts outside of union-protected work can fire you at any time for nearly any reason or none at all. So why bother with a paid trial?

I don't think that reflects the practical reality. For both legal and social reasons, firing someone is way harder than not hiring them after a trial period. Bad hires are costly.

They can hire you as a contractor for a couple of weeks to avoid that mess, then give you a full-time offer / contract if things go well.

What mess, exactly? Like the parent said, contractor or FTE, you're almost certainly at the mercy of "the company may terminate the agreement with immediate effect for any or no disclosed reason".

More accurate: "They can hire you a contractor for 3-12 months and not have to pay you benefits for that period."

Yes, either way the relationship can be severed, by either party.

But if you're a FTE you will likely be able to get unemployment. As a contractor there is zero chance that can happen.

On the other hand, as a contractor you get to write off expenses, and if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule.

Each has + and -.

> On the other hand, as a contractor you get to write off expenses

There's probably not a lot of contractor-specific expenses you'd see in a C2H role. Hell, the two I did (admittedly a while back) gave me a company laptop. WFH tax concessions?

You're also not likely to get a C2H situation that looks like this:

FTE salary: $150,000, but for the duration of the "ramp" contract is paying you $150/hr.

You might have a small bump for tax discrepancies, but the last time I played that game you'd most likely find your contract rate to be $80-90/hr, i.e basically the same. They're not going to pay you effectively double for three months to hire you on at the base rate.

> if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule

I'd love to see the C2H that says "Hey, since you are a contractor, you can work your own hours and have your own availability". Or it might be said as lip service, but that's not how you're going to get the "hire" part.

You still in theory need your own laptop. You might have other office exexpenses. If you WFH then your internet. Cell phone.

As a contractor, you're a business. There's overhead to run that biz. Those are business expenses.

I'm not an expert, but there are some financial ramifications associated with laying off too many people in proportion the the company size, at least in California, since people who have been laid off can claim unemployment benefits.

There's also the risk of wrongful termination lawsuits if you're hiring someone full-time only to immediately lay them off for not impressing you enough.

It is much simpler to hire someone as a contractor. You may not even have to go through HR to do it.

I work in a white collar union position in the US with a rather long probationary period, but nobody here would describe it as a "trial period." The expectation is very much that you will pass through the trial period barring something very extreme. It's more to weed out the totally, entirely unqualified than a "trial" that you might or might not pass.

In a lot of countries, trial-periods are less of an interview and more of a "Firing you in the future will be incredibly hard, so we have a 3 month trial period where if you show up on time every day, you'll get converted to full time, and if don't show up, do zero work, and are an ass, maybe we won't convert you to fulltime".

In the US, when someone says "trial period", it usually means "extended interview" where there's a high chance of failure, while in other countries, the trial-period is a formality to make sure you're a functioning adult, but with no real chance of failure if you're not grossly incompetent.

For government/large corp roles, it's possibly a formality.

But for smaller orgs, the probation period where either side can terminate at will is very, very real. I have both fired someone during their probation, and walked away from a role during probation. It's not a formality, and just turning up on time and moistening a chair is not enough to pass it in many cases.

A probationary period (which is what we have in Europe) is very different to an extended paid interview as described by the trial period.

With a probationary period, your default state is “employed”. Typically what happens even if you fail the probationary period, is that probationary period is extended before any new hire dismissed.

Plus even in the UK, it’s actually not that hard to fire someone outside of their probationary period but inside of 2 years.

It’s also worth noting that generally employers still hold all the power even with the stronger employment laws. For example, unless you’ve got a very clear case for unfair dismissal, the cost of fighting a dispute isn’t generally worth the trouble - and in many cases the (ex)employee isnt even financially secure enough to hire a solicitor to begin with. So it’s easier to part ways and focus that energy on the opportunity.

I’d argue in the UK probation periods are effectively 2 years long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com