Ask HN: Do you reveal all of your code to contractors?

12 points by whatdoyouthink2 8 years ago | 5 comments

Hey SAAS founders and CTOs, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether you trust the people you hire enough to share all of your codebase with them?

I believe for employees that is no problem so my question is more related to contractors. Contractors in the US vs. East Europe? Do you sign agreements with them? Have you had issues happen?

Interested in hearing your opinion and experiences.

aprdm 8 years ago |

We do share the part that is relevant for the work to be done. We try to isolate it as much as possible and only share that.

We require some paperwork to be signed beforehand and we obviously do not share any production secrets or database information.

We usually have some database stub with fake data that they can work on / spin locally.

muzani 8 years ago | |

We tried doing that but it ended up being more effort isolating the part that they would work on.

Sevii 8 years ago |

Just don’t give them access to all your git repos. It’s pretty easy with github/bitbucket

akulbe 8 years ago |

I get access to code, but I have to sign an NDA beforehand, in most cases.

Reputation is everything to me, so I'm not about to do something that'd abuse that trust. It's just not worth the risk.

visox 8 years ago |

Hi i am working in Accenture in Europe as a contractor, i have pretty much access to code on the project as anyone else on the team.