Re:Ask HN: View Company's source code in a job interview?
by kat on Friday March 07, 2014 @05:46PM
(#7363242)
"A glance" is a good way to express it. I don't really care what I see, I would just like a quick gauge of how well-kept their code is. I think looking at the small things like frequency of comments, variable naming, parameter checking, etc would be a good basic indication of their style.
Re:Ask HN: View Company's source code in a job interview?
by hga on Friday March 07, 2014 @06:58PM
(#7363549)
"I don't really care what I see"
And while I don't have a good way to express it yet, if they demur you can point out the above, and that quite to the contrary of whatever they're worrying about, they'll have to pay you good money to seriously examine their code (and then work on it) ^_^.
Even then I'm not sure it would have saved me from the worse code base I ever worked with, the only one I flat out decided had to be replaced (after spending a month fixing some bugs and learning it took days to determine how to safely fix one, the code was so tangled).
In reference to the NDA comments, if a company is too paranoid about that sort of thing without clearly having "special sauce" worth protecting---unfortunately, future products or product directions can also both be worth protecting and necessary to disclose to you---that's a strong sign to avoid them.