Item — HN Reader

"Bring the source code—we’ll ask to take a look at it."

Seriously?? What actual company do you know that would allow its IP to walk out the door? And possibly to a competitor?

Additionally, projects are usually the work of a team, and are heavily iterated upon. "your contribution" is usually hundreds of little changes building upon other changes, not "this is the application I wrote".

2 comments

This is a good point, and one I forgot to address.

We would never ask to see proprietary source code. Hopefully, a candidate would have a side project or open source work they're willing to share. If not, we'd definitely work around this. For team projects, we'd ask them to describe their contribution. So far, this hasn't been a big problem, but we're still iterating and making the process better!

The article is definitely not clear about this. In fact it says "bonus points if it's open source" implying that you expect to see proprietary work. It was a bit of a red flag for me while reading.

I interpreted that as "bonus points if it's contributions to a big official Open Source project, as opposed to your personal pet project with no exposure or users".

I think it's assuming you've done something substantial on your own time, or worked on open source. I don't know exactly how common either of those is, but I'd guess pretty common.