Is there a more diplomatic way of preventing your staffs from stealing your code other than locking them up and restricting them to wireless communication and storage devices.

This is what a facebook engineer (Don Pinkus) said @[url]http://www.quora.com/How-do-Google-and-Facebook-keep-their-source-codes-secure-when-hundreds-of-staff-members-have-access-to-it[/url]:

Used to be an engineer at Facebook.

Pretty much nothing physically stops you from copying and pasting the code, and sending it to yourself.

The legal & career repercussions for doing this would be severe.

Also, most of the code isn't really that cool on its own. It's not like you can just copy paste FB's code and have Facebook. You need all of the data that the algorithms use, infrastructure, and much more.

And as others said, some of the security measures are more locked down, and a lot of the employees (including many engineers) never need to interact with them (i.e. encryption)

Also, you only code on FB's codebase on your work computer. Theres pretty much no reason for the code to ever leave your work computer - so code doesn't really just "leak" over time.

Edit: if you searched hard, you probably could find snippets of FB code on Stackoverflow when employees ask questions. But after the first few weeks on the job, any engineer would realize they should anonymize the code.

I think I might have pasted 1 or 2 raw snippets of PHP on the first few days I was learning code at FB, and actually got some people to reply on StackOverflow saying "what the hell kind of PHP is that"... turns out I was pasting snippets of "Hack", our at the time very secret language.