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"Can you see my code before I hire you? No." I'm curious, but why? Pros to letting him see the code base - You just made an offer to this candidate, you obvi

"Can you see my code before I hire you? No." I'm curious, but why? Pros to letting him see the code base - You just made an offer to this candidate, you obviously like him and think he is a good. Good candidates are expensive and time consuming to find. Recruiters will charge 40k to give you a candidate you have a 50%(this is being super generous) of hiring. Letting him see the code base probably saves you 5k-30k depending on how selective you are with candidates. Cons ?He figures out your secret sauce based on looking at your code base for 10 minutes and builds your company from scratch and runs you out of business???

partisan 10y ago
Honestly, if I get the sense a candidate is chasing the perfect code base, he or she probably would not get an offer. People like that leave unexpectedly once their itch is scratched (or not scratched). Assuming that the candidate was extended an offer and asked to look at the codebase, I would require an NDA. I work in a niche market so you can't get the secret sauce in a sit down, but there are methods that can give you an advantage. For example, I worked at a place that did something they weren't supposed to be doing to gain a competitive advantage. To this day, 8 years later, despite working at several of their competitors, I still haven't seen anyone else do this thing. I haven't revealed this to anyone and I won't. We aren't doing anything like that, but we do have methods that I haven't seen till now.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Trying to think of a better way to get this info without code. I like talking about how testing works. How code review works. How deployment works. I think those all tell me more than I would learn looking at the code. Could they lie about test questions? Sure. But I am sure they could show you cherry picked code that lies also.

partisan 10y ago

Honestly, if I get the sense a candidate is chasing the perfect code base, he or she probably would not get an offer. People like that leave unexpectedly once their itch is scratched (or not scratched). Assuming that the candidate was extended an offer and asked to look at the codebase, I would require an NDA. I work in a niche market so you can't get the secret sauce in a sit down, but there are methods that can give you an advantage. For example, I worked at a place that did something they weren't supposed to be doing to gain a competitive advantage. To this day, 8 years later, despite working at several of their competitors, I still haven't seen anyone else do this thing. I haven't revealed this to anyone and I won't. We aren't doing anything like that, but we do have methods that I haven't seen till now.

brianwawok 10y ago
Trying to think of a better way to get this info without code. I like talking about how testing works. How code review works. How deployment works. I think those all tell me more than I would learn looking at the code. Could they lie about test questions? Sure. But I am sure they could show you cherry picked code that lies also.