In France there&#x27;s a 4 month probation period extensible to up to 7 months. It&#x27;s too long, 7 months makes very little sense, and some companies abuse it. Basically you can pretty much fire at will during this probation period, but after it&#x27;s _really_ hard to fire under French employment laws. If you&#x27;re in a field where it&#x27;s hard to land a job, it&#x27;s 7 months of butt clenching.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in a company where I&#x27;ve been let go after 2 months in the probation period, but it was clear I wasn&#x27;t a good fit with the company culture. This is what the probation period is for, we didn&#x27;t need 7 months to figure that out. On the other hand, I worked for a consulting company that automatically extended all the probation periods, and laid off people that were on probation if they didn&#x27;t have enough consulting contracts to feed everybody on the payroll (and then reshuffle contracts among people post-probation that were unfireable).