Who is Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley can't stop hiring?

I'm probably in the minority here: when I was a manager, I was always totally fine with my employees moonlighting. Even if they didn't tell me and I found out later (as I did in one case). The only thing I've really cared about is whether they did good work.

I believe the main reason employers have an issue with moonlighters is that they view it as lack of loyalty. There may be other reasons, such as concerns regarding whether the employee can perform at 100% at two or more jobs, but I really do think that loyalty is the primary concern by a large margin.

I wouldn't call it loyalty. I would say that it's more about assymetrical dependency, even if it's a subconscious thing. A lot of managers/bosses want the employees to be dependents of the job.

In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract, meaning it’s breach of contract to do paid work for another company at the same time. The typical agreement being made by an employer is salary in return for the employee’s full time attention, where full time means ~40 hours of work per week, or sometimes more. As a manager I do care if my employees work significantly less than full time and devote that time to other paying jobs, especially if they do good work. That’s opportunity cost; if they could be producing more in the ~40 hrs/week agreement we have, they’re cheating the company and violating the agreement they made. I don’t care if they do hobby work or open source projects in their spare time, if they’re fulfilling their agreed upon obligations.

I think you were not a very good software manager. Let me explain why.

You need to treat the performance of your programmers as opaque, you shouldn't trust your ability to gauge their performance.

Suppose you buy a novel, and you buy it thinking that it was written by an 80year old Author that traveled the world and learned a lot of experiences and was actually a genius and a seductor of women and was a philantropist that rubbed shoulders with politicians.

If you then learn that the novel was actually written by a ghostwriter in china, or by ChatGPT, then would the value of the Novel be the same? No, it would be almost worthless, the content of the novel is the same, if you inspect the product you would not be able to tell the difference. Sometimes the value, or indicators of the value, are in the process.

Stepping back out of the metaphor, the product will show its true value 2, 5 10 years down the line, will it crash when the marketing team figures it out, or you have a viral moment and 100K concurrent users?

You cannot rely solely on the inspection of the deliverables, you must assume that there are invisible or hard to inspect properties that are almost impossible to divine from inspecting the deliverable, but easier to understand by inspecting the talent and process that builds it.

> In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract

In 25 years of professional work in tech over several employers, I’ve never seen such a clause.

Ok, but if I have L7 vision and skills, but get hired as a L4, and can complete my work in 10h/week, what right does the company have to demand more than that? It sounds like a mismatch between level/salary and skills. If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn't that what the company hired them for? We aren't talking about officer-level positions here.

> If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn’t that what the company hired them for?

Generally speaking, no. Full time jobs are supposed to be full time, and the expectation, and explicit agreement the employee signed up for, is that employees will apply their skills for 40h/week regardless of level, vision, or skills.

Have you read your employment contract and/or employee handbook? You probably have one or both of those even if you don’t know it, but if you don’t have one of those, have you asked your employer what they think about this, whether they agree to let you work 10h/week and keep your full salary if you can “complete” your work? It sounds funny to me to even say it that way. At no time in my life has there been a specific set of tasks and work per week after which I could say my work was complete, software engineering doesn’t work like that.

Again, the right the company has to demand your full time attention is that was the agreement you signed up for: salary in return for 40h/week of your best effort.

I guess you’re lucky, TYL. Just checking since most people don’t read their employment contracts carefully - have you actually checked for exclusivity clauses? Are you talking about full time engineering work, or something else? Exclusivity clauses are less common for part time work, contract work, and labor jobs. I’ve seen both exclusivity clauses and non-compete clauses for multiple jobs, both at large established companies (e.g. Disney) and for smaller startups.

Microsoft, Apple, Google, and a bunch of others famously got busted colluding to avoid hiring from each other, and the employment contracts at the time also had exclusivity clauses. I know because mine did, and I received a payout from the settlement of that lawsuit.

I don’t think L7 can do 40 hours of L4 work in 10 hours. In my experience L7 can do things L4 cannot do in principle, no matter how much time they have. This makes their time more valuable.