Jill Jubinski is a well known and respected community leader in OpenStack. When she says something, especially about recruiting, it is worth listening to her, and evaluating what she says. When she tweeted:

While I find the ‘show some code ur proud of’ stance, its like, what if someone doesnt want to code outside of work? That has to be ok too.

my response came off as a contradicting her. It was:

nothing to show would be suspect. If you hate to code, no paycheck would be high enough to make you do it well.

Which goes to show that terseness is a demanding constraint; I did not adequately state what I was trying to state in my attempt to limit it to a single tweet. And of course, that meant it became a discussion back and forth.

Let me try to be a little more nuanced and fair here. What Jill says is spot on: it should be 100% OK for a programmer, and a good one, to not have anything that they are capable of showing prior to an interview. I, myself, would have fallen into that category earlier in my career.

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