While at-will employment does mean you can be fired at any time, the default assumption is that your job will continue, barring something happening (like poor performance, or the company being unprofitable, or your boss being in a bad mood that day).
The phrasing here makes it sound like the default is that it's time-limited and an extended interview. Sure, technically at-will and "a tech interview" both have the same amount of job-security (exactly zero), but there's social expectations around employing and firing people, and overhead for the company, which lead to full-time employment having more security in practice.
Not sure about other at-will states but in Utah one can apply for unemployment after losing their W2 gig. If this trial period doesn’t involve W2 paperwork then I wouldn’t think it’s comparable.
However, AppSumo is apparently promising the opposite - they are setting the expectation that it is quite likely new hires will not work out and you should be fully prepared for termination.
Now that's an assurance I'd take seriously.
The fact that they explicitly call out this practice is probably a sign that they lay off a larger percentage of new hires compared to the average company. Otherwise, why mention it?
Just go to a regular place of employment. I've never seen any place with these kinds of deviant methods and process end up be a remotely successful company or an actual good employer.
What other employer do you know what does this?
There is not a chance in hell I would leave a real job for a gig like that. I can't imagine many folks who have mortgages and families to support would consider it.
However, we do not really have such titles since it's a very small shop. So, perhaps I am not the best at judging whom is truly a mid-level vs. senior.
- you're going to be treated like an employee, because that's the plan, and I'd wager many Contract-to-Hire setups would fail the government's "20 Factor Test"[1]: Level of instruction, degree of integration, demands for full-time work...
- I've yet to see a non-VP+ level contract with severability clauses that require contractual compensation, i.e. most contracts are "severable without notice", no different to "At Will"
Indeed, the practical side effect of this is "We're going to hire you and we get to avoid paying you benefits for an extended period of time (the contract duration)."
[1] https://www.oregon.gov/oda/shared/Documents/Publications/Nat...
It would help people more if there was a clearer expression of "this is a trial. You might not pass it".
Your double negative is genuinely confusing me. Is this intentional, or is it an error?
Though the length here was not specified, it could be e.g. 3 days that you can do while still employed.
That could easily put you in violation of your employment contract. And could result in your (ex-) employer coming after you, and/or your new employer.
I don't necessarily agree that it should, but it absolutely could.
If people are concerned about the risk of being paid, well, either you want to get paid or not, that's up to them, you can't have you cake and eat it too here.
You need to work with someone much longer than that to figure out their (non-obvious) flaws.
They're not perfect, and you really do need to make sure the task is targeted at what you actually want to see from the person when they join, but they definitely give more signal than 6 hours of leetcode.
I'd be happy and it would be fair.
Plus, most people very lazily state the problem when they give the take home exercise to a point large parts of the problem are open to big interpretation. To the effect any deliverable you produce feels either overdoing or not doing anything at all.
Some people take a part of the problem they are trying to solve at work and just put it in a paragraph and ask you to solve it. Most the times the context is missing, they don't give data you need to complete your work and more importantly it feels they just want this requirement off their table and don't wish to be bothered. So when you go back to them for the data or context, they straight up reject you.
When you do get a company/team, that gives you a good problem to solve. They don't bother to read through your solution. When they do, they want you to go through a live code review in front of the whole team, or work through feature requests on the code you just wrote with dozens of people watching as you type. Then followed by that rounds of grilling you on esoteric trivia. Which in case most companies have a policy that if even one person gives a negative feed back they reject you.
In all, you end up doing lots of work for nothing.
The idea anyway is to find someone capable for solving problems with a specific tech stack, be able to discuss ideas with other people amicably and write decent code.
To me removing the tools which can and are actually using during the job is like asking someone to write flawless code on paper: is that what you are trying to filter for?
In the US? Yeah, they don't make much sense.
In the US, when someone says "trial period", it usually means "extended interview" where there's a high chance of failure, while in other countries, the trial-period is a formality to make sure you're a functioning adult, but with no real chance of failure if you're not grossly incompetent.
But for smaller orgs, the probation period where either side can terminate at will is very, very real. I have both fired someone during their probation, and walked away from a role during probation. It's not a formality, and just turning up on time and moistening a chair is not enough to pass it in many cases.
With a probationary period, your default state is “employed”. Typically what happens even if you fail the probationary period, is that probationary period is extended before any new hire dismissed.
Plus even in the UK, it’s actually not that hard to fire someone outside of their probationary period but inside of 2 years.
It’s also worth noting that generally employers still hold all the power even with the stronger employment laws. For example, unless you’ve got a very clear case for unfair dismissal, the cost of fighting a dispute isn’t generally worth the trouble - and in many cases the (ex)employee isnt even financially secure enough to hire a solicitor to begin with. So it’s easier to part ways and focus that energy on the opportunity.
More accurate: "They can hire you a contractor for 3-12 months and not have to pay you benefits for that period."
But if you're a FTE you will likely be able to get unemployment. As a contractor there is zero chance that can happen.
On the other hand, as a contractor you get to write off expenses, and if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule.
Each has + and -.
There's probably not a lot of contractor-specific expenses you'd see in a C2H role. Hell, the two I did (admittedly a while back) gave me a company laptop. WFH tax concessions?
You're also not likely to get a C2H situation that looks like this:
FTE salary: $150,000, but for the duration of the "ramp" contract is paying you $150/hr.
You might have a small bump for tax discrepancies, but the last time I played that game you'd most likely find your contract rate to be $80-90/hr, i.e basically the same. They're not going to pay you effectively double for three months to hire you on at the base rate.
> if the client is following the law as a contractor you get a far more flexible schedule
I'd love to see the C2H that says "Hey, since you are a contractor, you can work your own hours and have your own availability". Or it might be said as lip service, but that's not how you're going to get the "hire" part.
As a contractor, you're a business. There's overhead to run that biz. Those are business expenses.
There's also the risk of wrongful termination lawsuits if you're hiring someone full-time only to immediately lay them off for not impressing you enough.
It is much simpler to hire someone as a contractor. You may not even have to go through HR to do it.
Are probation periods not a thing in the US? Maybe because of at-will termination?
In Australia most roles have a 3-6 month probation period in which either party can terminate the employment agreement at will. That's essentially a "paid trial period".
After that, employers have much stricter rules for what reasons they can fire you (in theory) and and both employers and employees must give 2 weeks notice or extra if agreed upon in contract.
Not sure that is something I would personally enjoy. While I understand you must fit in, having this process highlights that leaving your current company is even riskier as you might not make the cut and end up with nothing. The trial is one-sided, with all the risks for the new employee, not AppSumo. I understand that any change of job is similar where you may stay forever, however, saying that way make it worse somehow.