# The try before you buy has been a thing for many, many years.
Date: 2026-06-25

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The try before you buy has been a thing for many, many years. Corporations would hire people as contractors, sometimes even from contracting firms, and then hire them in if they do well.

Other corporations have a rule that if you are not promoted you are laid off.

Even the campfire method you describe is quite old - it's called open source. There are places that won't hire you if you don't have enough open source cred.

However the real failure point for all the above is that they still measure the wrong signal. Measuring whether a person fits in well with a team or can produce good looking code is not going to identify real star performers.

Star performers are more likely to reject the log from your mountain of work. They try very hard to be doing things that are actually productive and not kind of sort of productive. They take initiative that these forms of evaluation will not be granting them.