6 ms·

Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do. Having an incompetent (or malic

by kaens 16y ago

Why don't companies just hire people after a quick discussion at 50% salary for the maximum of four months and see how they do. Having an incompetent (or malicious even) developer on your team for four months is likely to cost your company much more than 50% of their salary for four months.

nostrademons 16y ago
And working at 50%, for a competent developer, is also likely to chafe quite a bit. Though hopefully, if someone's really able to tell, you'll be able to tell in much less than 4 months.
yason 16y ago
My point was that this is what happens in the practice: you just won't know until you know, so why not make it that way upfront and not spend lots of effort trying to select the best candidate when you could, based on a much more loose criteria, select the best dozen and see who's really good. I wasn't envisioning a sweatshop: if the company tried to extract everything out of cheap hires for four months, the company itself would lose. And there are these leeching companies anyway, working within conventional hiring practices as well. I had a good company in mind, one that really needs good programmers and not cheap minions. An incompetent or malicious developer wouldn't really last four months, not probably four days. The projected four months was the final threshold after which most programmers can tell whether the candidate is really worth hiring. Having new semi-hires around might certainly add up to the team overhead but on the other hand, that's what happens with conventional hires, too. Lots of teaching, tutoring, and support and things might still get crossed in the first few months. Plus the whole process of interviewing and that some hires quit or get fired within months. So, to reply to your comment: having a batch of new hires, some incompetent and some possibly stellar, and few weeks to sort out the final candidates and few months to seal the deal, might not cost as much as you're afraid. Even a single new hire (carefully selected by HR, phone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and all) can eat up surprisingly lot of the team's time. Further, like hires in general, you don't want to be doing this all the time, just once a year or when you really, really need more programmers.
- kaens 16y ago
  Phrased like that, it's a much more appealing idea. A lot of companies strike a bit of a middle ground by doing contract-to-hire types of things.
- starkfist 16y ago
  The issue with this approach is that it doesn't weed out the mediocre. This is why big companies fire people by re-organization. You run into legal problems if you are firing people who are competent, but not excellent. So you round them up into another business unit and then drop the whole unit. I assume you would run into the same legal issues with the proposed 4 month trial period. If the person does a solid, but not great job and you let them go, you are opening yourself up to being sued.

by kaens 16y ago

nostrademons 16y ago

And working at 50%, for a competent developer, is also likely to chafe quite a bit. Though hopefully, if someone's really able to tell, you'll be able to tell in much less than 4 months.

yason 16y ago

My point was that this is what happens in the practice: you just won't know until you know, so why not make it that way upfront and not spend lots of effort trying to select the best candidate when you could, based on a much more loose criteria, select the best dozen and see who's really good. I wasn't envisioning a sweatshop: if the company tried to extract everything out of cheap hires for four months, the company itself would lose. And there are these leeching companies anyway, working within conventional hiring practices as well. I had a good company in mind, one that really needs good programmers and not cheap minions. An incompetent or malicious developer wouldn't really last four months, not probably four days. The projected four months was the final threshold after which most programmers can tell whether the candidate is really worth hiring. Having new semi-hires around might certainly add up to the team overhead but on the other hand, that's what happens with conventional hires, too. Lots of teaching, tutoring, and support and things might still get crossed in the first few months. Plus the whole process of interviewing and that some hires quit or get fired within months. So, to reply to your comment: having a batch of new hires, some incompetent and some possibly stellar, and few weeks to sort out the final candidates and few months to seal the deal, might not cost as much as you're afraid. Even a single new hire (carefully selected by HR, phone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and all) can eat up surprisingly lot of the team's time. Further, like hires in general, you don't want to be doing this all the time, just once a year or when you really, really need more programmers.

kaens 16y ago
Phrased like that, it's a much more appealing idea. A lot of companies strike a bit of a middle ground by doing contract-to-hire types of things.
starkfist 16y ago
The issue with this approach is that it doesn't weed out the mediocre. This is why big companies fire people by re-organization. You run into legal problems if you are firing people who are competent, but not excellent. So you round them up into another business unit and then drop the whole unit. I assume you would run into the same legal issues with the proposed 4 month trial period. If the person does a solid, but not great job and you let them go, you are opening yourself up to being sued.