During the interview process I often get asked to share my GitHub account. Of course, then I get chided for not having much in it. In particular, I get questions about why I don’t have work from prior jobs in it.
Um, hello? Has anyone heard of a little thing called Intellectual Property these days? Seriously folks. Every job I’ve held has been a corporate job, and every job I’ve held I’ve had to sign something stating that all of my work is the property of my employer. This is one of the main reasons they pay me; to produce code which does things for them that their competitors are not able to do. If I were to go saving this on GitHub, or any other publicly accessible location, I could be liable for exposing industry secrets (OK, a lot of what I’ve done is commerce related, and a shopping cart is a shopping cart for the most part, but that’s not the point). If those little code secrets were really good (like proprietary algorithms, or better still passwords and hashes) I could find myself in a lawsuit. On top of that, I’ve just potentially exposed their security, making that particular site easier to hack or spoof.
Once I explain this I’ve still had some come back and ask me to share work in another manner. Wow. What part of Intellectual Property do you not comprehend? Even if I did have copies of my prior work (which would technically be illegal, even though we all know almost every developer has some snippets of code in their arsenal) why would I share that with you, once more potentially giving out competitive secrets? All I’m doing is showing you that I don’t care about the IP of any job I work at, including yours.
This is why I don’t share much on GitHub. I’ve worked hard and I’m not going to just hand out someone else’s IP, even if I wrote it, just to prove to you that I can code. I’ve been at this for 20 years. Please don’t insult my ability or integrity.
Curious about just how much I do or don’t share? You can see my GitHub account here: https://github.com/ercubed
(The only real thing shared, is the work I’ve done with teaching, so that all the students would have examples of the work once we were done with it.)
As for you hiring managers out there reading this: Do you really want to hire someone who has copies of, and is willing to share, other employers intellectual property? If they’ve done it with others, chances are they’ll do it with yours as well.