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0 pointshogFeast6y ago0 comments

Just speculation but I think a big part of this is that it is often quite difficult to lay off staff.

The issue isn't that you assess employees poorly...it is very hard to be right based on knowing someone for a couple of hours...but that it is so hard to get rid of someone if you are wrong. Would you marry someone after meeting for as long as the interview? That is the decision for a lot of companies.

I think that is why you see places like Denmark and Sweden, that make it easy to fire employees, do well and places like Japan and France do relatively poorly (the latter is particularly odd, they had a big lead in engineering...tech is miles behind)...ofc, it is hard to fire people in California...so not every example fits.

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jonex6y ago

It's not easy to fire people in Sweden. You are not allowed to fire just because of lack in skill. Typically they would have to be severely negligent (like basically intentionally sabotaging) or there has to be a lack of work for that role. (In the latter case, they would have precedence for the job if you try to hire a replacement)

But for people just out of university it's common to hire people with a probationary period of a few month, during which you are allowed to terminate the employment without any specific reason. This probably helps some people, who don't have the right experience, to get a job.

I'd say that it's not very common that the opportunity for termination is actually used though, so I wouldn't credit it for any perceived success of Swedish tech.

wojciii6y ago

To fire people in DK is possible but I would not call it easy. It takes money - for example if the person worked at the same company for 3 years, it takes 4 months salary if the person was hired using a standard contract which follows a law called "funktionærloven" written to create rules between company and employees.

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