We don't do this, but we do have people work for us on a contract basis for a period of time while they still have another job. We have a lot of people who are looking for extra cash or maybe they like to just do a bunch of contract projects. But one thing can lead to another and then you decide you both want to work full time with each other.

I agree with your general stance on CTH - but this seems a little sketch. If you're already a contractor and are used to trying to keep multiple projects going, or have some idle time, then by all means. From the candidate side its nice to sign up with eyes open to the bad as well as the good.

But if you're working someplace salaried, it seems fairly dishonest to spin up a short contract. especially when most of the attention is consumed in the process of getting started (environment, implicit policies, platform, etc).

plus on your side, you don't really know how much of that person you're getting. if the work is great, thats fine, but if it seems slow or misguided, is that a fundamental reflection of ability, or because they tried to cram it in between 8pm and 11pm every night?

Which is flat out gross misconduct for 99.9 % of all full time employees in the engineering field.

Is that true? I’ve never had a contract that forbade me to work on side projects for cash.

There's often a clause in the Employee Handbook you're asked to agree to periodically.

And with Anglo Saxon law it's probably an implied term as there is so much precedent after all we are supposed to be good servants to our masters :-)

The clause is unenforceable in most (perhaps all) US states.

Oh you mean working in the black economy I am sure the IRA will be interested.

No one here has a contract that forbids working for other companies in your own time. I haven't seen that in the DC area.

Maybe that's a Silicon Valley thing?

People might have clauses to prevent people from working on similar work for competitors, sure, but I haven't seen anything that bars working on other kinds of projects outside of work.

Standard in professional jobs - the US in particular tends to have laws that vastly favor the employers. SV is actually one of the liberal states.

Though as you say your a journalist they tend to be exceptions.

It should be one of many options. CTH is how I got my foot in the door as a junior guy long ago, but now that my career is established, I would not even consider it unless the alternative was unemployment.

It's typically a 3 month contract, not a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks isn't enough.

I left my previous employer for a 6 month contract at ~50% increase in salary for the contracted period. If it was a 3 month contract, I would have declined.