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Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure.

Perhaps for people that want to grow their roles in organisations, it's important. As a freelancer, I am happy to live without this ritual. In the past, before I became freelancer, I dreaded these reviews, as I suspected often these performance reviews could be politically charged and not necessarily deal with my performance (for example a manager might tell me I need to improve some aspects for a raise - I might have to suck up to some manager to get more chance for a big raise, when a limited budget is available for a group of employees).

As a freelancer I am free to decide on the aspects I want to improve on and as such I don't need a manager to help me with this. This makes me much happier.

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Having both freelanced and currently working full time, I feel that feedback is a significant benefit of working full time. As joshyeager says in this thread, "Yes, feedback is essential for growth. Without it, you can't grow any farther or faster than your own ability to evaluate yourself and decide how to improve.", and I agree with this.

This is something that is just missing when you are working by yourself as a freelancer. I could be a good coder, but crappy co-worker and I'd never know that if I just work by-my-self. Personally, I'm an OK programmer. But I used to be crap at teaching people. I freelanced for almost 7 years before I joined my first programming gig, and this is one of the first things I learned. Without feedback from my colleagues, I would never even have found out about it, unless I had gone out of my way to get myself involved in teaching.

And the way I look at it, feedback from your co-workers doesn't just improve you as an employee, it usually helps you grow as a person as well, and fix some error of your personality or character. For me, improving the way I try to teach things to my peers made me a better programmer, and [plug]helped me a lot while I was writing my book (https://www.amazon.com/Django-Project-Blueprints-Jibran-Ahme....

As a freelancer, its totally different. For them, i think recommendations and reviews are definitely way more important from clients which allows you to build a profile.

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