Hello everyone.

I am conducting a research for an article that will be published on my Gamasutra.com blog.

If you are not a programmer please, ignore this topic!

Here is the question.

Imagine that an awesome opportunity to get a job in a game development company presented itself. The salary is high, the projects are interesting, the work conditions are good, and overall it is better and you want it.

All you need to do is to show the sample of your best code.

You are presented with 2 options:

• Private option: send the sample of your best work by email so that ONLY THEY could see it.
• Public option: showcase your work on their public forum, where EVERYONE could see it.

Please choose the statement which correlates with your thoughts better. Take a minute to think about the statements. All of them have upsides and downsides.

1. I am comfortable with both private and public options. I have no problem showing my best work anywhere.
2. I am comfortable with private option, but not with the public one. I have no problems with sending my best work by email to my potential employer.
3. I am comfortable with public option, but not with the private one. I have no problems with showcasing my best work on public forums.
4. I am uncomfortable with both options. However I have no problems with showcasing my other, slightly less impressive works.
5. I am uncomfortable with both options. There is no way in hell I shall share any of my work with potential employer neither privately nor in public.

I will update this thread (or post) when the article goes live and provide you with a link, so stay tuned.

If you have any comments, thoughts or criticism, please leave a reply.

PS

I have posted this poll in several subforums in order to ensure that the people taking it did not mix up (for example coders with artists). I hope the fact that this poll does not technically lie within the scope of this subforum will not be an issue, for it seemed like the most appropriate place. Thank you.

Pretty easy one for me.

My second job is acting on Japanese TV and movies so being in a public spotlight is nothing. That goes for my code as well, snippets of which I already often post in public.

L. Spiro

The two posts above are, I think, very reasonable. I interpreted the question differently though, not as an issue of public spotlight or sincerity of feedback but as an issue of intellectual property. If we assume my best code is a valuable trade secret (it's not, at least in real life, but let's pretend), I'd be uncomfortable giving it to someone in private if they could make use of it and then not give me anything in return (the job, in this case). If I post it publicly, though, at least they won't gain an unfair advantage.

I'd also probably pick the public option over the "send slightly less impressive works" one both because sharing is good and I'm probably too vain to show off anything that might not make me look as good as it could.

I also strongly doubt that anything I'm saying in this post has much to do with how I'd actually react in real life were I confronted with this situation.