The 6 months is only for performance issues. I'll say that showing up to work without pants generally falls in the "extremely wrong" things to do, like punching

The 6 months is only for performance issues. I'll say that showing up to work without pants generally falls in the "extremely wrong" things to do, like punching a coworker, setting your cubicle on fire, sending a nude image to an email-distribution. All fair-game for instant termination. It doesn't have to be 6 months if something "extremely wrong" happens during those 6 months. Maybe 6 months is only appropriate for at&t. I'm just saying they need a "reasonable chance" to give you enough data to measure performance change. That's different for different industries/companies. For a start-up with lots of coding, maybe only 1 month is needed to measure any change in performance. But some of the blame goes to the employer as well. In theory an employer should almost never have to deal with an unfixable bad employee. If a company really keeps having repeated problems with bad employees, the interview-process probably needs some fixing.