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44 points nradov | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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enraged_camel ◴[] No.44468831[source]
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.

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1. TZubiri ◴[] No.44469296[source]
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.