Hiring Engineers Let me ask you a question: How much value do you think your source code has? To answer this question, let me take you a few years back, when I worked with a small high tech startup. We were working on a pretty complex augmented reality system spanning all layers from low-level computer vision components to cross-platform mobile and web apps. Especially for the lower-level components, a good amount of research had been involved. We worked closely with an academic institute that specialized in computer vision. In short, this project wasn’t something that anybody could just easily recreate. So one of the assumptions we had implicitly made was that our source code was one of the company’s major assets.