| >Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious. -- Fred Brooks. >I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. -- Linus Torvalds So really, why ask for just the code? Why not ask for a copy of their database as well? That's even more important. It has all the relations and structure, the customer data, the data points they use to judge success, etc. I think you can imagine plenty of reasons why they'd say no to that. And the reasons regarding proprietary code, while not as strong, are not all that different. Of course, it would be nice if they had something to show. A lot of companies do some work on open source modules that they use, so they should at least be able to show that. But that's not necessarily indicative of their entire legacy codebase, nevermind their data structures. And many companies have some nice new code that they're working on, but still have to support lots of old legacy code as well. So you really need to be able to deal with that anyway. |