Ask HN: How to advocate for prospective employers to show us their codebases?
by palimpsests on Hacker News.
It’s common for prospective employers to ask for some examples that prove our ability to code, whether through a sample assignment, an online programming test, whiteboarding, etc. Sometimes a new job or contract will come with the discovery that the codebases on which we are asked to work are not what we were expecting, to put it lightly. Such as, * saturated with anti-patterns to the point that it’s a massively negative impact on productivity * excessively long compile / build times due to lack of maintenance and/or things just not being built well * severely outdated tooling and versioning etc. While this can be a workable situation sometimes, an opportunity to contribute in a meaningful, positive way, in others it can be a tedious slog. A developer can ask questions during the interview process about these things, which can sometimes illuminate these issues. If an organization’s developers are active in open source contributions, that can be a helpful signal as to the quality of a codebase. And, it occurred to me that there’s a big double standard in hiring around this. It seems like the software development process, generally speaking, is built on what is essentially a lack of trust in engineers – we can come in with over 10 years of verifiable experience, talk eloquently about that and our abilities, and still be met with these ridiculous and demeaning puzzles. Why should we not be able to look at the code at a place we are thinking about working at? It’s a CORE part of the job. To be blind to that doesn’t feel right to me. If/when I decide to look for a different position, I’m considering to ask employers if they would be willing to let me sign an NDA so that I can examine the code on which I’ll be working. I’m curious how this idea lands for people reading this post. I can envision a world where this is standard practice in hiring. I’m curious to also hear reasons as to why this couldn’t work in practice. EDIT: changed non-intentional ultimatum-esque language