this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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Im reading the article and im baffled. In a way which comes back to your 'HOW IS THE USA A REAL PLACE' thing.
I'm at the 'try out an engineer for four weeks' part, and am I missing something? Isn't this normal with jobs? That there is a month of tryout period? Are they just bragging about it being unpaid? How is that impressive? (It isn't like it is free for the hiring company anyway even if they don't have to pay the first month, programming famously being a non-stacking process where training and managing people into a new team is quite costly, vs hiring more people to lay bricks, a process where you can just hire more people if you want it to go faster).
I have never found this to be normal with jobs, no. But in the US, most employment is at-will, so you can be fired without cause at any time.
(I've encountered probation windows where benefits don't kick in for 3-6 months, and that's hideous in a country without single payer health care, but never a tryout period.)
Yeah I can't find the proper dutch word for it in my mind (and even then I would need to find a translation) but the concept of 'you can be let go/quit in the first month without any notice' seems to me to be a normal thing (which at-will fits into, but also probation periods etc), like I doubt it is a thing at higher end jobs, and it is more of a hire a McDonalds tillworker (which is not to say this is unskilled work btw, there certainly is a difference in quality of somebody doing that work for a month vs years).
So for me the only real benefit of this offer seemed to me the price. Which is just such a weird thing to compete on with tech workers. (And I would think that the businesses interested in this offer would also be of lesser quality). To me the whole action just signals 'our students are mostly of low quality, here is a sieve to filter out the good ones'. Which is why I was baffled.