Ask HN: Do you keep a copy of your source code when you quit your job?

2 points·paolgiacometti··6 comments

Maybe it sounds unethical but once you leave your job for another one, do you keep a copy of the code you were working on?

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In all of the positions I have been in this is considered Corporate Theft. The code I was paid to write is fully owned by my employers.

I have heard of some less restrictive contracts, but I have never seen one myself that grants me the right to take the source code with me, even if it is only the code I wrote.

This answer explains it very well: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1541...

I guess it depends, if you are keeping it to reuse in while it may be an issue. To use as a reference for future work isn't terrible as long as you aren't directly lifting code someone else wrote and putting it into your new employees codebase (thats what stackoverflow is for). My employer has us out everything on a public GitHub repo so access isn't really an issue but with corporate sensitive code it is a more difficult issue.

I agree, and even if one does not keep a copy of the code, the techniques one develop for coding or optimizing the code cannot be erased from the mind of who created them

I have kept copies of code and email from every job since the 1980s. Some of it is now hopelessly unusable since codepoints have drifted (I mean, the raw data is still there but the characters are garbage in ASCII, are probably badly transcoded EBCDIC).

No - I don't like the taste of prison food.

no, because that's theft; would anyone hire you if they knew you had a history of stealing IP?

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