Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, sure. And if you followed the letter of the law I’m sure you deleted it all from your laptop promptly and is unavailable to you no matter what.

But if you didn’t, for whatever reason, and you happen to have an illegal copy of some production CRUD app hanging around so I can look at how you organize your thoughts, nobody I’ve interviewed has ever gotten even a whiff of heat for letting me look over their shoulder and see how they wrote their schema. I don’t want a digital copy and I could give a shit about your illegally retained IP (and there’s a whole lot of it floating around). I want to know what you name your variables.

The best way forward is absolutely some open source code, folks clean up better in public and you don’t have to make apologies for things that weren’t your fault.

But this smells like folks just wanting me to take their word, and it ain’t gonna happen. I’m flexible, but when in doubt I choose ‘no’. If the next guy can prove it and you can’t, hey, plenty of fish in the sea.

A candidate showing me code they wrote for their previous employer would be pretty much an automatic black flag for me.

It's a matter of "if you want to know how they'll treat you, look at how they're treating their ex".

exactly. I work damn hard when I leave a place to make sure I have absolutely zero IP. its likely none of it would be useful to anyone anyway. But thats what I agreed to explicitly, thats what my former employer wanted, and as unlikely as it is that anything would happen I wouldn't want to taint a new company with code that can't be clearly attributed to them (which is what they paid for).

thats insane

I was kind of with you up until this point. That's a line that is foolish to cross.

Any candidate who plays fast and loose with their previous employers' code is going to play fast and loose with _your_ code. Or your corporate secrets. Or lifting GPL code. Or pretty anything else they think they can make off with. Such employees are a lawsuit waiting to happen and are best avoided, as are employers who tolerate such employees.

You start off relationships with potential new subordinates by asking them to break the law in order to demonstrate their value to you? Wtf man.

I don’t know their arrangment with their old employer and I don’t ask. Very often folks will have an ongoing maintenance consulting relationship and retain some IP just in case. More often folks will just have some stuff lying around, and they’re already breaching their contract by having it.

Believe it or not, there’s next to nothing I’ve ever seen that was the remotest bit interesting on an industrial espionage level. Just regular old business logic that was either cleanly done, or not.

I honestly could not recall any of the crap from the interviews I’ve done beyond a sense of how people thought.

Anyways, you wanna do some interviews your way, be my guest. I will happily send the guys who don’t want to do show and tell to you. I’m not trying to be all things to all people. No open source, no closed source, no side projects? We can play API bingo or code a b-tree, but prob not a culture fit.

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