> On top of that there's a secret in the industry though: there's a lot of maybe not entirely legal code copying going on. Hiring someone who's made a similar g

> On top of that there's a secret in the industry though: there's a lot of maybe not entirely legal code copying going on. Hiring someone who's made a similar game in the past can mean that they come with source code that could be copied to shortcut the time to write code for the new game. It would be pretty hard to drag code from other engineers with you, without outright bringing the source code along. If that happened, it would very much be illegal. What's more likely to happen (and something I, and most other engineers, have done) is use their own solutions from previous work experience to develop new features. This has been tested (at least in Federal and California courts) and been found to be completely fine, as long as it's not in the end goal of infringing on protected property (e.g. developing an h264 codec/hardware blob to avoid the license).