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Hatem Said
Hatem Said

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how to describe my previous work without breaking confidentiality

how to talk about my previous work and impress interviewers without being too detailed, and regarding web development, what is considered confidential and what is not?

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jake profile image
Jake Casto

Define confidentiality, are you restricted from describing work? Are you restricted from speaking about clients? In my experience, I could never share my work (the code) or say who I was working for but NDA's never restricted me from saying something like "I'm building RESTful Services for the largest crypto-crowdfunding platform in the EU". I couldn't say "I built a PHP based RESTful API for [X], we use MySQL & Redis databases with no encryption". If its front-end work there should be no issue showing it off if it's back-end work describe it. What did you do? Any notable achievements?

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Jake Casto • Edited

I always describe parts of the work ex) "While building RESTful Web Services I wrote a server-sided cache system that reduced dynamic database queries by 67% and improved the services response time by 46%". Mention notable things, don't pile on information to interviewers.

I've conducted interviews and there are things that mean nothing to me: how many lines of code you've written (you may write one billion lines of code that do absolutely nothing, I really don't care), how many projects you've completed (project is a very vague word, you may have been hired to write a shell script that echos 'foo'; is that a real project? no one knows).

What I do care about are your achievements, work you're proud of.

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hatem20 profile image
Hatem Said

thanks, Jake
I have no restrictions in my work it's just a matter of ethics, and actually, I was asking if it is ok to talk about the code architecture, infrastructure.

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jake profile image
Jake Casto

If you don't have any written restrictions then technically you can talk about anything. Ethically it's entirely up to you, ask yourself: "If I had hired this person what wouldn't I want them talking about in regards to this job?". Architecture & Infrastructure are great topics to bring up in interviews.

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catrina

use your code to create a similar "side project". but - sanitize names, etc. basically your code and comment it ALOT. large readme's about what this particular code is doing. replace/find, replace/find.

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hatem20 profile image
Hatem Said

I think this would be too complicated, and I don't need to show the code
just describe it.