[ionised]

Wouldn't a back end engineer most likely have been working on proprietary source code for their time with the previous company?

Or are you talking about code they've written out of work hours? If so, that's never going to be indicative of the kind of code they can and normally do write is it?

* To clarify, I'm asking because I'm nearing the end of my third year at my first dev job at an engineering consultancy as an enterprise Java/Spring/Hibernate/Gradle developer and am planning to leave in the next few months but the question of how to demonstrate code to a potential employer is one that worries me.

I cannot show anything I have been working on here as it is wholly proprietary and my development outside of work is not at all comparative.

[stickfigure]

While likelihood is something for debate, it is true that there are plenty of people who have no public code, or no public code worth looking at. Those people have made a grave career mistake.

This really isn't any different from hiring an artist. What would you say to someone who walked in your door and says: "I'm a great painter; look at all these people I have painted for" but can't/won't show you any examples of their work? Hiring this way is basically a random chance that you'll like the work product.

[ionised]

What I meant was, I have personal coding projects but I don't have access to the kind of high-performance hardware and expensive 3rd party software that we use and that I have most of my experience with at work.

So while I have experience writing some fun little Android apps and contributing in a small way to some projects here and there outside of my 9-5 working hours, that code is not going to ever be close to what I am actually capable of or am used to writing.

[MCRed]

The analogy to artists is exactly right-- there's a lot of coders who are jackson pollacks out there who are not getting hired because the people looking at their github are not capable of recognizing what they see.