Should have kept a copy of my best code off of my work computer. That way it wouldn't have been confiscated along with the computer during the layoffs. [sniff] I had some beautiful Stored Procedures I can't satisfactorily remember how to reproduce. 😅

yes but no ;p

It would've been a breach of your contract if you keep some of the code.

But well, noone checks personal devices usually.

@NoToJavaScript how is that a breach ?
Here in Belgium, you 'can' have code and stuff that you make on your personal computer.
What is against the contract is to use that code or anything that resembles the original code in future projects not related to that company.
I can however wait 12 years. After 12 years, I am allowed to re-use the code.

When a dev quits, his new job cannot be in the same field of operations. It must be different and can be sued... (probably to valid the points above about code and stuff)

I'm not talking about cloning the company's bread and butter software and selling it or whatever else upper management might be shitting their pants over. It's just that there's a lot of research and effort that goes into writing code, so a dev should be able to create a doggy bag of handy code they created and take it with them. When I left my last company, my immediate supervisor, a developer himself, said that I SHOULD take my code with me. But then a few days went by and the excuses started coming out of the woodwork and it turned into a NO.

I'm not asking these days. If I write an algorithm or something that I think will help me down the road, I'm sticking it in a DLL and/or a repo and that's that, lol. Am I the only one that thinks this way?

@catch-exception absolutely agree! I have a whole repository dedicated to all the little tricks I pick up along the way.