We do the same thing and I find it’s a reasonable approach. For the candidate, it puts them at ease; they’re talking about something they’re familiar with (we go a step further and ask them to make changes to it).

Art, architecture, writing, music, I mean pretty much every creative industry.

Hence why I said engineering industry. Would you ask a chemical engineer to bring a recipe for a proprietary drug synthesis? The creative industry doesn’t exactly aim to obfuscate its methods.

Even better, would you ask a chemical engineer for their spare time projects? How would that even come about?

I graduated and worked for a few years as an electrical engineer. I had/have a portfolio of sorts and would gladly bring one to a job interview, including previous projects.

> Would you ask a chemical engineer to bring a recipe for a proprietary drug synthesis

Nobody is asking for anyone to bring complete codebases, either. Not to mention that, in chemical engineering, if something is proprietary enough, there are patents. Those come with credits.

I get the feeling that programming is the only industry paranoid enough to treat the most utterly mundane work as if it was bomb codes, averse to recognition enough to not credit people and disorganised/rushed enough so that 99% of companies are unable to let workers share their findings with others in the field.

Very few of those jobs have output that is obfuscated from public view.