Re^2: Code Samples and Previous Employers

All this talk about "ooh, it's proprietary!" and companies wanting to steal from another company's codebase by taking it from you is frankly totally out of proportion.

Certainly there's one monk here who found out the hard way that an agreement with one's employer can have a real impact on how you're supposed to behave.

From a technology point of view, I agree with you -- seeing someone else's script that does input validation then puts data into a database, or takes stuff out and displays it, is all pretty boring.

From a legal or ethical point of view, things change. That's the part that carries more weight in this situation -- is it ethical for me to show off some of my current employer's code if I'm under an NDA? I'm pretty certain the answer is, "No, I'm not allowed to do that".

One solution is to write some code that you own alone, maybe even samples that have been posted on this site. My local example is something I really did write myself and shows that at one time I was able to wrap my brain around writing some Object Oriented Perl -- albeit just a single module. I am currently working on something that's a bit more complicated, but it's not done yet.

I certainly don't consider it a character flaw if a programmer wants to show me some random chunk of code from a previous employer.

Perhaps with the previous employer's blessing that would be OK -- or possibly for some code that's way out of date -- like some C code I ~~write~~ wrote 15 years ago. Otherwise, I disagree -- proprietary code is proprietary code.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

Update: Fixed typo.

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Re^3: Code Samples and Previous Employers
by perrin (Chancellor) on Mar 21, 2005 at 09:34 UTC

It should be obvious that I'm not talking about work involving security clearances or explicit NDAs. I'm talking about the kind of work that most of us spend our time on -- data munging, HTML parsing, server monitoring, e-mail manipulation -- all that good stuff. Also, code samples are supposed to be short chunks of code that demonstrate your knowledge of programming concepts like encapsulation and good variable names. There's no need to bring in a complete program, or even complete file.

If someone walked into an interview with a bunch of code that handles money transfers for a major bank, I'd consider that pretty disturbing, but bringing in a snippet of code that calculates the right justification on a column in a PDF for some daily report is reasonable and does no real harm to anyone.

If it worries you, then don't do it, but you'd better find another way to create some code samples then. Hiring a programmer without a code sample is like hiring a writer without reading any of her work.

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