That's great for front-end guys, but it's frustrating to me as a back-end developer to have expectations that I can show live examples of my past work to potent

That's great for front-end guys, but it's frustrating to me as a back-end developer to have expectations that I can show live examples of my past work to potential employers when I've spent years designing and building enterprise internal systems which have no visible result outside of the code itself, which is under strict NDA. I get it, development is a craft, it's easy to judge the quality or experience level of a coworker after having to deal with their PRs for a month or two. However, it's not like any toy project I could throw on github is going to have real relation to the actual work I do, and trying to replicate e.g. some of the third party integrations I've written internally as public stand-alone packages is going to get me fired and sued by an overprotective employer. This isn't a hypothetical fear either, multiple times I've gone through phone interviews to a "lets review some of your past work" stage, and my "I can't legally show you any of these things, but here's general descriptions of some of the major internal projects I've led or handled solo" has resulted in failing to make the next interview round.