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Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

Dude, you're hiring contractors for temporary work. Of course they have their own businesses!

Put someone on your payroll full-time with benefits, paid vacation and sick leave and then encourage them to start a business on their own time while you pay them full wages. Then you'll have something to crow about.

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The only information that should come into play when making decisions about the firing of full-time employees should be their actions between the time they start work and end work every day. Your preconceived notions about how an employee's outside activities affect their job will not apply to everyone, and are irrelevant to the question of continuing their employment.

Find me five examples of where it has worked. Can't be hard if it's true.

How mature does their business have to be? Markus Frind (of plentyoffish.com) doesn't have an outside full-time job, but from what I hear he easily could. But the issue is not whether there are examples. The issue is that you shouldn't need to know whether an employee his a business or not. You look at their performance and nothing else. If you're right, their performance will suffer and you have reason to let them go. If you're wrong, you'll never even realize they have a business on the side. However, the converses of these two statements don't hold.

Markus Frind had a day job for most of the time he was developing PlentyOfFish - when he's described his development process, he said "Basically every waking moment outside my day job was devoted to improving the site, trying out ideas, and making it better for my users."

BTW, between your post and mine up-thread, that's 5 examples. Microsoft, Apple, E-bay, Del.icio.us, and PlentyOfFish.

Steve Wozniak, Joshua Schachter, Craig Newmark, Brewster Kahle, Markus Frind

> The only information that should come into play when making decisions about the firing of full-time employees should be their actions between the time they start work and end work every day

This just simply isn't true. Imagine if your CFO gets caught with hookers and blow by the cops on a Saturday night. It may not affect his work during work hours but it most definitely negatively affects your company from a PR perspective.

So you just can't make a blanket statement like that.

I assumed that serious issues such as illegal behavior were obviously excluded from my statement. Your case also applies to the defense industry where disclosure of classified information can land you in jail. I'm talking about clearly legitimate out-of-work activities here.

> assumed that serious issues such as illegal behavior were obviously excluded from my statement.

It wasn't obvious but it sounds like we agree so no harm done:)

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