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Comment by n_ary | Hacker News Reader

> The downside is that it is extremely hard for new grads with no experience to get their first job in … and Europe compares to USA.

Not sure about Japan or rest of EU, but in Germany, landing a SWE with no prior experience beyond basics(watched some videos on YouTube and wrote some HTML/CSS in notepad) in larger corps is easy. Firing is also simple(2 weeks notice) during first 6 months probation period.

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The counter to that counter is that I have been told that software jobs in Germany start out as very low paying. My friend who moved to Germany to work as a programmer ended up only getting about $30k a year to start, which at the time was less than half of what our peers were making in the US.

That said, I think probationary periods are one of the best ideas the US needs to adopt.

>>probationary periods are one of the best ideas the US needs to adopt

May I ask why? Both Canada and USA allow employers to fire with 2 weeks (or a month .. I forget )notice.

In the US you can be fired with 0 notice or severance, regardless of tenure in most states.

Even though you are entitled to fire people in the US, there are a lot of differing state and city rules. You are also open to (potential) lawsuits at all times. There are also now a lot of very obtuse rules about things like healthcare coverage for full time employees.

There's an extra layer of simplicity when it comes to probationary periods.

A junior/graduate dev in Germany makes €50K a year. $28K is the minimum wage for a full time employee.

>Not sure about Japan or rest of EU, but in Germany, landing a SWE with no prior experience beyond basics(watched some videos on YouTube and wrote some HTML/CSS in notepad) in larger corps is easy.

I don't think this is true at all, but even if SWE pays pretty badly in Germany, at least compared to the US.

SWE pays bad everywhere compared to the US.

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