[chihuahua]

The "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire?

Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment.

You haven't replaced anything, you've just added another level of hassle for everyone.

[shoopadoop]

It's an obstacle when hiring people who are currently enjoying stable employment. Probably fine for juniors, but not for experienced people with families and whatnot.

[jb1991]

That is directly addressed in the article.

[blizarre]

Not exactly, if I am thinking of leaving my job and I have responsibilities, I will not even entertain taking a leap of faith, resigning from my current position and grinding for 3 month in a super-competitive environment for 1/10 of a chance of getting a better job.

I'll talk to recruiters and interview at other companies on my spare time, as before.

[jb1991]

My point was that this perspective is not lost on the author of that article, as he directly addresses it.

[blizarre]

What am I missing then, he talks about multi-days "campfires" contract work as a replacement for the interview process. Maybe I can get a week of holiday on a short notice but nobody will be able to do that 5 times in a month if they are actively looking.

[saghm]

And even if someone could get time off drive times a month to work "provisionally" at a different job, I can't imagine they'd typically be as productive hopping back and forth at either of them compared to devoting all their time to one. Sure, maybe the prospective employer would be circumspect enough to judge someone based on the correct signals of stuff like whether they're asking the right questions, showing capacity to learn and grow into the role in the long run, etc. rather than strictly judging their output, but being smarter about what you're measuring instead of blindly checking off boxes is also an option in traditional interviews, and plenty of companies still don't do that, so why would the expectation that the lazy approach of only measuring results wouldn't end to happening with this as well?

[garretraziel]

He addressed it as “job market is in such a bad shape, so perhaps even seniors won’t have any other option”, which might be true, but is sad nonetheless.

[pixelatedindex]

It’s awfully convenient for old heads who enjoyed the insane run up of the last decade and a half that are in plush situation to then say “oh it might suck for you now, too bad!”

Good for you to make all the hay when the sun shone? Fuck the future generation, let’s make it even harder for them with these insane interview ideas.

[michaelt]

Yes, it says "hope your competitors randomly decide to fire their best engineers for some reason" (worded as 'ends up between gigs')

[libraryofbabel]

Where? Please point it out! All he says is there will be more desperate people on the market in future and because they're desperate they'll have to accept trial work. But that's not answering the objection that people who do still have stable jobs in that world won't want to interview at your company if you require them to do a stint of trial work first. And those people include a lot of desirable candidates.

[1123581321]

I’ve run a program like this. My answers to your objections are:

You don’t run it for everyone, just people who seem good enough and are willing to do it. A resume filter and a 30-minute conversation are usually enough.

You stop as soon as you’ve got your hire. If you’re bad at picking people for the screen, you learn the signals quickly because of your level of investment.

It does replace a longer traditional interview loop. You hardly talk to them up front. You tell the candidate you will extend an offer right after the work phase.

Another objection is not everyone can afford to spend that time with you. That’s true. We would pay them, and still got some refusals. You have to accept that every interview style works better for some candidates than others. You’ll also find candidates who love it.

[tcdent]

This is my preferred proposal to new contacts as well (I set it up as a contract so there's a little less red tape, but even people that pursue me for traditional employment afterword usually land on an extended contract).

Two things it solves: You get to evaluate me, my ability to deliver, and how I interact with your team and I either bring real value within two weeks, or I don't. I can tell you verbally I am an indispensable asset or I can show you; other people have ruined the verbal trust layer which is why this whole debacle exists in the first place btw.

And more importantly, but less communicated, I get to evaluate you. How your team works, the level of talent present, management's ability to keep direction, and wether I genuinely enjoy what you have for me to work on.

[sjducb]

My experience with this is that contract is usually better paid than perm, so when it comes time to convert to perm I am not willing to take the pay cut so I go contract somewhere else, or remain with them as a repeat contractor.

HR usually stops my clients from hiring me perm at 2X the rate they pay their full time employees, despite the strong demonstration of competence that I’ve shown over the last few months.

My clients are usually unable to make permanent employment with them more appealing than repeat contracting with them.

[1123581321]

Yes, that last bit is important. A good employer should welcome being evaluated as much or more as they’re evaluating.

[WorldMaker]

You could scale "provisional employment" by making use of "past employment" as a weighting mechanic. Let other companies do the "is employable" and "works on a team" checks. I believe that is called "a resume" and "references". "Let's add stamps and maybe a star system for these references" sounds like just reinventing LinkedIn with a slightly more Uber-like UX. LinkedIn already exists? Resumes already exist?

It seems to me like a lot these problems start and end at "we don't trust resumes and past employment history" and "we highly prize 'cultural fit' but think there needs to be a technical component to 'cultural fit' interviews rather than just doing proper 'soft skills' interviews". Maybe we all should just straight up stop pretending like we are looking for anything more than soft skills and vibes?

[sgillen]

I think you've just lowered the risk of a bad hire for the company, which might allow them to "take a chance" on candidates they might otherwise pass on.

[202508042147]

In a different life, I went through multiple interview stages at a FAANG company. In between the sessions, we got to talk to some of the (future) managers. One of them told me that this whole interview process is broken, we should all just be hired temporarily and see how that goes (akin to what Yegge is proposing). The batch had maybe 30 people. Probably not easy to place all of them, but certainly doable.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

It seems the benefit would be one sided - that initial 100 -> 10 (ATS/interview/coin-flip) filtering processes would as usual have a large percentage of both false positive and false negatives.

The false negatives suck for both candidate and hiring company who have accidentally rejected someone they would have like to have hired.

The benefit of the "provisional employment" process would be that even if it doesn't help avoid the false negatives, it would weed out the false positives so that the company at least ends up hiring people who are qualified and a good fit (even though due to the false negatives they may have rejected even better candidates).

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Instead of having “provisional employment”, could we instead just have 30/60/90 day plans and evaluate the performance of the engineer and fire them if they don’t meet that criteria at the 90 day mark?

[HarHarVeryFunny]

The only candidates who would be willing to sign up for that would be ones who were currently unemployed, and with the financial reserves to be able to risk being back out of work in 30/60/90 days.

Given how arbitrary in terms of talent mass layoffs are, there are of course tons of highly qualified out-of-work candidates (and due to age discrimination, maybe some of the best/most-experienced ones!), so this certainly might work to draw from that pool of candidates.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I was being facetious, sorry if that wasn’t clear. That’s just how Regular Employment works. You don’t even need to tell the employee the implications of being on the 90 day plan. You tell them up front what the expectations are for the role, and if they don’t meet them in 90 days, you fire them. Does not need to be more complicated than that.

30/60/90 is pretty standard stuff. It’s literally the documentation and justification you need to fire the employee at the 90 day mark if you need to. Like a preemptive PIP if you will.

I don’t want to hire anyone who doesn’t want to be held accountable to what they say they can do anyway.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> You tell them up front what the expectations are for the role, and if they don’t meet them in 90 days, you fire them.

In the US at least, firing people for cause is difficult to do. More likely you just wait for next RIF and include your low-performers on the list.

So, yes, this is business as usual to some extent, but it's not a very cost effective or efficient way of hiring. If you really have work that needs doing, then you want to hire someone able to do it, not have a haphazard hiring process where it's a crapshoot and "if they don't work out we'll just fire them in our annual RIF, and try again".

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Limited sample size but I've not worked anywhere in the US that didn't have a 90 day carve out for terminating people from date of hire, MegaCorp or SMB.

Of course it's not cost effective, or efficient, but as the article points out, nothing really is, and this method is at least preferable to the weird quasi-employment situation the article proposes

[musicale]

> You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire?

Sample size of 100 seems like overkill for finding a 6-month contract employee.

How about starting with a sample size of 1:

Sort the applicants (ether randomly or by criteria of your choice, pre-filtering as desired) and hire the first one who meets the minimum qualifications, based on a streamlined interview process of your choice.

You could experiment with a larger sample size if desired (perhaps large enough that you expect to find at least one qualified candidate.)

[tcdent]

Losing two weeks while you try out a candidates fit has way less cost than bringing the wrong person on formally and spending the next year debating wether they were the right choice or not with all of the associated "soft" overhead.

[musicale]

I think so. 6-month contract with 2-week (or however long) vetting period seems like it might work.

[ryukoposting]

And that's besides the money problem.

You provisionally hire 10 candidates for 3 jobs, keeping each of them for 6 months:

Do you spend 5 years' salary over the course of those 6 months just to hire people? How do you financially justify ballooning your payroll for a bunch of people you're going to get rid of before you get any ROI out of them? You've (maybe) gotten better talent in the end, but have you actually improved the company's bottom line?

[skybrian]

You could be less selective with a high-turnover pool of temporary workers, something like an internship program. But that doesn’t mean anyone gets to be an intern.

[izacus]

To be honest, a lot of ideas are like that - coming from folks who want to be employed but haven't actually ran an employment process.