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Comment by andyidsinga | Hacker News Reader

My response - and even how I got jobs early in my career as a developer was this:

"let me know show you some of the software I've developed on my own - I'd me happy to tell you how it works, the tech involved and the patterns used ..yada yada"

Corollary : if you apply for a job or walk into a tech interview and can't talk about these things, its a red flag for the interviewer.

PS. Now well on in my career, and having started my own software business after leaving a bigco. I'm back to a very similar thing: if I go to a meetup / conference / sales call I better have some code I'm will to show and discuss ..and highlight what I consider my talents. (fwiw : it feels great to be back in this mode)

edit: also : asking an candidate to do the kind of homework/coding is total BS. I wouldn't do it. But I would give them the line above :)

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Someone who has spent 10 years, doing good work in a large company likely never built a single piece of software that they can show on their own.

They may have built software on their own, but it would all be internal, proprietary stuff that they can't demo, and you have no way of verifying.

Hmmm.. Agree they can't show it, but they can most def. talk about parts of it, their role and show contrived examples, discuss language skills, architectural elements, improvements they wished they could have made, how they worked with others on the larger team, presentations they made... the list goes on.

This is especially possible given that a lot of work includes open source code, publicly available APIs, SDK services etc. In interviews I've conducted, when a candidate mentions these its an opportunity to dive into more detail on their expertise ..and again discuss contrived examples.

In addition, probationary periods are a way to guard against complete mismatches.

I have been developing software for 12 years. I can't show you anything that I've worked on because it has all been internal tools. I can talk about what I've built, but I can't show it to you or show you any code.

yep -- see my response below on same subject. Key is to walk through the "what" and discuss contrived examples ..as an interviewer I might ask you to show me pseudo code ..but really the more you can describe a contrived system and detail how you would implement, the less my BS detectors will be going off.

Unfortunately that puts you at a disadvantage and is a small downside of your previous job. Many professions these days require a portfolio to show, and programming is quickly becoming one of them (and it's better for your career if you can accumulate it while working). I guess your options are either making a portfolio weekend project or submitting to interview homework or other coding test.

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