Normally people are hired with a "provanställning" for the first three/six months, basically an at-will contract where you can fire the person for basically any

Normally people are hired with a "provanställning" for the first three/six months, basically an at-will contract where you can fire the person for basically any reason (it's very pro-employer). In my experience you can tell if the person is going to be fired because of low performance in that time span. So "companies don't hire because it's hard to fire" doesn't really ring true for Sweden. People (in tech) don't hang around the same company for too long either, even when someone who doesn't know anything gets a cozy job some company is going pay them better for another cozy job.