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.
If, after four months, the people turn out to be "smart and get things done" and the company wants to keep them, they'd get the missing 50% from the first four months as a one-time bonus and 100% salary afterwards.
It costs something but it also costs a lot of time and money for both parties to engage into this mutual guesswork game called job interviewing. It might even cost everyone less as I bet many candidatepeople would have to be fired after only a few weeks or days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could not afford to work for four months at half of my salary, and I don't have a family - so I can only imagine that people supporting a family would really not be able to do this.
> 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.
Because best developers already have jobs and aren't knocking on your door desperate to take a risk like this.
That's the problem with the "probation period" ideas, in addition to creating churn and other unpleasant hygenic effects, why would somebody with a great job willing subject themselves to limbo? It will likely end up being a filter for people who have no other options available to them.
Some places do that, and they're generally not places you'd like to work for.
Places that cold-call will do bulk hirings with the expectation that most people will leave. A lot of the time these arrangements allow employers to force a lot of work out of their employees with questionable tactics.
If, after four months, the people turn out to be "smart and get things done" and the company wants to keep them, they'd get the missing 50% from the first four months as a one-time bonus and 100% salary afterwards.
It costs something but it also costs a lot of time and money for both parties to engage into this mutual guesswork game called job interviewing. It might even cost everyone less as I bet many candidatepeople would have to be fired after only a few weeks or days.