The current environment in tech is as follow: Someone goes through an interview process. Depending on the result, they get brought in or not. If they are brought in, they accept an offer. Usually it will contain some kind of language about blah blah trial period 3 months blah blah, sometimes in precise terminology, sometimes vaguely.
If someone is absolutely useless right off the bat, immediately everyone's like "but but we need to coach them, they just started, they'll get better". If after 3 months they're still useless, then it's "Blah blah it's the company's responsibility to keep them around and coach them because we hired them and we failed at interview".
That can only happen so many times (and can ruin teams or entire companies) before you start getting downright paranoid when interviewing. Maybe you have a lot of false positive and false negative, but if your interview process is Google-like enough, on average you'll turn out okay-ish (source: Google/Facebook/Netflix/whatever other company with such an interview process. They have some pretty strong teams in there). But since it's so hard to get rid of a bad apple, you can't take risks (Im being told Netflix is good at getting rid of people).
Change the game a bit: make it easy to get rid of bad apples early on. You know the interview process is bad anyway. Give people a chance. If they're actually competent, they have nothing to worry about. They'll get hired, prove their worth, and stick around. If they're bad, well, bye bye. Then we no longer have to rely on excruciatingly stupid interview processes.
A lot of people think this is inhumane/heartless. That big evil corporations MUST provide people with jobs and must keep them no matter how bad they are because they have bills to pay. I say its heartless to not give people a chance to prove themselves (or to fail while at least trying).
Do you have to give people a permanent contract right away in the US? In Netherland, people usually get a temporary contract at first, and then a permanent one. Too much uncertainty isn't good of course, but half a year to prove yourself is not unreasonable, I think.
(Though there are Dutch companies that abuse it by extending temporary contracts without ever giving a permanent contract, and sometimes even let good employees go because they don't want to give them a permanent contract.)
It already happens, it's called contracting. And the results are terrible because no one gives a fuck about quality at a job the might not have in 3 months.
Small caveat - I'd say contract-to-hire is what many places are implementing if they actually want the headcount instead of just a budget expenditure. The problem is that you end up with worse candidates because most people who are really good don't want the uncertainty and stigma of a contract position if they can get a full-time one elsewhere.
In the UK, specifically in London, you'll be a lot better off contracting and as a consequence when you look for senior engineers you'll have a tough time finding someone perm as most senior people who know their worth will be contracting/consulting.
Fair point, but in my experience the extra money is basically a wash when you factor in healthcare costs (I'm in the US), self-employment taxes, lack of employer-matched 401k, unpaid vacation, and the realistic utilization rate you can expect averaged out over several years. If you can keep your rate and utilization up you can definitely do better contracting, but a lot of people prefer the perm setup.
The pension contributions and paid vacation is nice but it doesn't make up for the difference in income. Also contracting means that you can essentially decide the holiday/income ratio yourself.
One of the main benefits for me is that I usually get bored/sick of working at particular companies after an extended duration (the work can get repetitive). Contracting means you can job hop, gain a wider variety of experience and take extended holidays without stigma.
I've found the extra money to be an illusion when you consider public holidays, sick days, holidays etc.
I've found it to be a net negative when you consider time between contracts. Contracting really needs to be about double your salary to make it worth it.
nah, that sucks. What I'm talking about is how Netflix does it (or at least, how Ive been told they do it).
You start working there for a premium salary and you're expected to deliver accordingly. If you don't, you get a generous severance package and politely ask to leave. And you know about that when you get hired.
the counter-argument is that when you fire someone, their co-workers, generally speaking, become at least a little uneasy (usually the level of unease is directly proportional to the level of agreement that the person getting fired wasn't good enough or otherwise had it coming, but there is still some unease even when it's obvious that it's the only way forward.)
Now, you can try to get around this by a real trial period (either contract-to-hire, or being super clear that the trial period is actually a trial period) - if you fire an employee of a obviously lower class, employees of the higher classes won't be as disturbed as if you fired one of their peers, but then you have the contract-to-hire problem, which is that people will usually choose a job perceived to be long-term with a low risk of being fired over any sort of 'trial period' - a large portion of your top applicants will turn the job down if they have to spend time as a lower-tier of employee first.
you're right, people get uneasy about it, but they get really uneasy when you keep bad people.
I've seen entire companies evaporate because a bad apple stuck around, people who had to work with them quit, then more quit, and eventually the whole company was just mediocre or bad people and they couldn't run with that anymore.
Kind of the broken window problem applied to people.
Sure, but my point is that there is a high cost to firing people. I agree that there is also a high cost to not firing someone when it needs to be done, but the two of those things combined explains why employers want so badly to get it right the first time.
The current environment in tech is as follow: Someone goes through an interview process. Depending on the result, they get brought in or not. If they are brought in, they accept an offer. Usually it will contain some kind of language about blah blah trial period 3 months blah blah, sometimes in precise terminology, sometimes vaguely.
If someone is absolutely useless right off the bat, immediately everyone's like "but but we need to coach them, they just started, they'll get better". If after 3 months they're still useless, then it's "Blah blah it's the company's responsibility to keep them around and coach them because we hired them and we failed at interview".
That can only happen so many times (and can ruin teams or entire companies) before you start getting downright paranoid when interviewing. Maybe you have a lot of false positive and false negative, but if your interview process is Google-like enough, on average you'll turn out okay-ish (source: Google/Facebook/Netflix/whatever other company with such an interview process. They have some pretty strong teams in there). But since it's so hard to get rid of a bad apple, you can't take risks (Im being told Netflix is good at getting rid of people).
Change the game a bit: make it easy to get rid of bad apples early on. You know the interview process is bad anyway. Give people a chance. If they're actually competent, they have nothing to worry about. They'll get hired, prove their worth, and stick around. If they're bad, well, bye bye. Then we no longer have to rely on excruciatingly stupid interview processes.
A lot of people think this is inhumane/heartless. That big evil corporations MUST provide people with jobs and must keep them no matter how bad they are because they have bills to pay. I say its heartless to not give people a chance to prove themselves (or to fail while at least trying).