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Discussion on: how to describe my previous work without breaking confidentiality

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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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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 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.