I do experience-based interviewing, and i have never encountered this problem. The great majority of the time, people are able to talk about anything. Sometimes, there are sensitive parts of prior work, but a candidate can just talk around those bits and focus on the rest. Even if someone had been working somewhere super-secret, if they aren't a junior, they have other experience to talk about.
If all your career experience so far has been at the NSA, yeah, you might want to do a side project before looking for work.
As someone who's done classified work, the general guidance we got is that we can speak in generalities.
So I can't say what the code specifically does or who it's for, but I can talk about how I worked on a c++ engine wrapped in a Java server that was responsible for coordinating a large group of non-homogeneous assets, as well as various architectural details (what libraries did we use, database, messaging setup, etc). So it's not like I have nothing to talk about in an interview, plus the fact that I can't get too specific adds mystique. It's kinda fun, because in my experience there's an assumption most engineers/engineering managers make about what I've worked on from that first statement, particularly if they know where I work, and it's actually not that. :)
You can’t remove the identifying details and talk about the technical challenge and usage in a generic sense? Your system or software is that specific? Can you give a now public example?
I can, and that’s usually what I do, but there are identifying details about the very specific domain which AWS only has a single product in.
So I can talk about architecting a system, about customer feedback and redesigns, but I can’t talk about work I did that will span another three years.
I think at FAANG it’s usually fine — most people have good enough examples even without their full repertoire. But at mid enterprise or F500 companies I could see this being a bit impactful.
> I can, and that’s usually what I do, but there are identifying details about the very specific domain which AWS only has a single product in.
Sorry, to be clear, I mean can you give an example of something you couldn't use as an example, but is now public.
I've worked at GAMMA, and agree, it's very doable to turn my work generic and talk about it in-depth, compare it to alternatives, etc. so that was the main driver in asking for an example.
If all your career experience so far has been at the NSA, yeah, you might want to do a side project before looking for work.