Hello community!

Disclaimer: This is not primarily about game-developer-jobs.

Lately, I wanted to update my CV and came across a small problem:

I created quite some products, but they are not available to the public. Nearly all of them are commercial products. To most, I own the right to share code excerpts.

Now, the question is, how can I still present these to potential employers? I would be fine by sharing excerpts of my code, but definitely not the entire code-base/project. In the end, I'm creating software for what makes me happy, while I totally understand that employers want to see/judge the quality of my code.

How devastating is this?

What kind of code would you, as an employer like to see? I assume, this is heavily job related? Where is the difference between expectations of code by juniors and seniors? I doubt seeing another implementation of a generic algorithm or data-structure would not be really interesting to see code-examples of.

I considered to break a few things from my commercial products into libraries and publish the code for everyone too. Is that of any worth or would one rather see completed projects as a whole?

Finally, what would you recommend me? Should I just keep going and work on closed source projects (my current ones are too) or actually force myself to publish something that I can show to an employer as well?

I'm just a bit anxious about "not having that kind of code up, that employers are looking for". Thanks for your time, would be really glad if you could advise me : )

If you can list the projects on your resume/CV and corroborate your work experience, you're fine.

Code samples are typically only really important if you're looking for entry-level work or otherwise have nothing concrete to show.

Any decent employer knows that you can't always share your code. If your job history looks good, there's nothing to worry about.


As to what you should do... that depends on what you want to accomplish :-)