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"This 'irritating problem' of people claiming that they know _____ when they actually don't, is best solved with... drum roll... Source code. Don't tell me you

by nxn 16y ago

"This 'irritating problem' of people claiming that they know _____ when they actually don't, is best solved with... drum roll... Source code. Don't tell me you know _____, show me what you did with _____. Today that problem can be solved with Github, Sourceforge, Google Code or whatever." That isn't really a complete solution to the problem, take my situation as an example: I've been working as a C# dev for some years now, but since the company I worked for ended up owning all the code, and since almost all the applications I helped create for them are internal, I have nothing to really show for it. Why don't I have any side projects I've done with C#? It's just simply not my first choice of language for personal projects due to the fact I have to use it so much on a daily basis; instead, I tend to go with lesser known languages that I'm certainly not as familiar with just because it makes writing some of the code a little more exciting. In essence, I'm claiming to know the language, but the only proof I can give is saying "Well, I used it daily for X amount of time".

raganwald 16y ago
This came up a while back, and I feel your pain. That Java job I told you about? All the Java and C++ code now belongs to Quest, who bought my employer. And I did some good work on ING Direct (USA), but I can't show that to you, either. My wife once bought a bunch of postcards from a printer to promote her business as a photographer. Right on their price list was a charge for a credit waiver. basically, every postcard had to have a small "Printed by FooCorp 1-800-888-8888" on it. If you didn't want that, you paid extra. I have reached the point where I feel the same way about the code I write. Naturally, nobody can see trade secrets. But if there's a portion of the code that is not a trade secret, perhaps a Rails or jQuery plugin that gets developed along the way, I want that open sourced. If the answer is "No, we want to own everything 100%," I need to make extra money to make up for the fact that I am going to go dark, just as that printer needs to charge extra money to make up for the lost advertising opportunity.
- bergie 16y ago
  Our employment contracts actually require us to open source everything our hackers build (except some client-specific configurations or templates of course)

by nxn 16y ago

raganwald 16y ago

This came up a while back, and I feel your pain. That Java job I told you about? All the Java and C++ code now belongs to Quest, who bought my employer. And I did some good work on ING Direct (USA), but I can't show that to you, either. My wife once bought a bunch of postcards from a printer to promote her business as a photographer. Right on their price list was a charge for a credit waiver. basically, every postcard had to have a small "Printed by FooCorp 1-800-888-8888" on it. If you didn't want that, you paid extra. I have reached the point where I feel the same way about the code I write. Naturally, nobody can see trade secrets. But if there's a portion of the code that is not a trade secret, perhaps a Rails or jQuery plugin that gets developed along the way, I want that open sourced. If the answer is "No, we want to own everything 100%," I need to make extra money to make up for the fact that I am going to go dark, just as that printer needs to charge extra money to make up for the lost advertising opportunity.

bergie 16y ago
Our employment contracts actually require us to open source everything our hackers build (except some client-specific configurations or templates of course)