A lot of people wonder about the strange events in the life of Mark Whitacre. As I was reading through the Fortune article, I immediately noticed the fingerprints of the life of a Christian. So I looked it up and it seems that Christianity played a huge role in the story of Mark Whitacre. Obviously, you can't put that in modern films, but he covers it in other sources and talks freely about it in numerous interviews. You can Google and find plenty of references. I thought I'd mention it, not just because I'm a Christian, but because it answers a lot of questions: his claim that his wife was his "moral compass", why she didn't leave him, and his contrite apology at the end of the interview. I suspect it also has much to do with the CEO who was involved in "prison ministry" that later hired him up at Cypress.

See? We're not all anti-evolutionist, racist, hate-mongers.* :-)

* Some of us are just ex-conartist/embezzlers :-)

My manager once went down to a local university to tell the students something about the real world with regards to the job market (and to plant some recruitment seeds while he was at it). This same question came up: what do you show?

Some people have mentioned that contributions to open source are a great solution, but interview time is not the time to start joining projects. Fortunately, there's an obvious answer...

The important thing is to demonstrate ability, so the only thing that matters is that the code works and shows you know what you're doing. My manager said the best piece of sample code ever submitted was by a guy who wrote some code specifically for the purpose of interviewing. You'll know what they want to see if you're interviewing and you have plenty of experience with that proprietary stuff you can't show off. Make it work.

The code doesn't have to simple, but let's not make the code request any more complicated than it has to be.