Requesting samples of your work is more common in the creative fields, but it does happen on occasion that a tech company will ask for a code sample. In most cases you won’t be able to provide them with actual code from a previous employer because of legal reasons. So for this purpose you should dabble on some side projects in your spare time, and create a website or a program that you can show off to the employer.
Another way to deal with this situation is to ask the hiring company for a problem statement – basically an exercise, so that you can code up a solution from scratch. This avoids the legal issues by providing a fresh code sample.
Of course, there is the possibility that someone other than you could have written the solution to the exercise, but that is a problem with any code sample: you can’t really tell who wrote it. For this reason I never ask for code samples; rather, I ask candidates to write code on the whiteboard during the in-person interview.
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