Hm, it’s hard to say without knowing the full picture, but I can see where your friend is coming from with this. Trying to think in those employers’ shoes, hiring you from part-time to full-time long-term would be a massive risk for them (particularly in France where we all know that breaking a C.D.I. if you start messing up would be insanely difficult). So, they’re limiting it in time to mitigate that new risk. But I can see how, in their mind, it’s a move forward in their trust for you, and it would be unreasonable in their mind not to mitigate the risk towards that extra trust.

My gut feel is: if you’re not planning to start messing up, then yeah there is additional risk for you for in a year, but it feels like a rather small risk for the reward opportunity if it works out. Also, the opportunity cost seems to be low, maybe even negative: if you stay in your current situation, then I’m guessing the next move forward to look forward to is… well, not much, right? If the alternative plan is to stay forever in this current situation, it doesn’t seem like much of a growth path forward.

I hope I’m not giving you bad advice with this, considering I don’t have the full picture.

One thing that worked out fantastically for me with uncomfortable risk over time is working on fallbacks. So, if I put a lot into plan A working, you can bet that there is a plan B I’m working on with equal fervor. And then nothing feel better than destroying all the work done towards plan B, if plan A ends up working out! But if it doesn’t… then at least you’re not out on your butt about it. So, if it fails in a year, what would you do? You may want to start making steps towards that, while staying hyper optimistic about plan A.

(Also, sometimes both plans work, and plan B ends up being surprisingly better than plan A once they both materialize. It’s rare so don’t count on it, but my point is plan B is never wasted work, and sometimes even less than it appears.)