I agree. Doing this would be stupid as hell, since it just opens you up to a lawsuit over stealing company secrets. Having knowledge in your head is one thing. Having actual code is another entirely.

I'm not sure I'd even take most corporate code if it was offered to me. It'd potentially drag me into any future breaches or noncompete violations, and have no upside I can think of. I'm honestly struggling to imagine why devs would bother taking most code when they leave a job.

I have seen people bring in Portable Hard disks and copy the code. Lets say you have developed a utility messenger bot which alerts you every time SLA of your support ticket is about to be crossed. A developer would like to keep this 'completed+working' code with them to reuse in next projects.

One of my employees left the company and he took all the Unity assets (assetstore.unity3d.com) I had purchased. I realized this when I saw those assets being used in "his" newly released game on Appstore.

> I had purchased

These strike me as the likely cases, yeah. Taking company-specific software seems like it's either useless (why would I even want some random inventory management system?) or spectacularly illegal, like taking a stock trading algorithm.

But I can imagine someone wanting random quality-of-life tools, though honestly just asking for those would probably suffice. And people certainly take expensive proprietary assets and programs that employers buy, though I'm not sure that really fits with the top-level fear of "our programmers stealing our data".

That's not employer code.

Most companies I've worked at recently have some sort of mechanism in place to prevent this. Portable drives disabled, email attachments monitored, etc.

I've known enough people that have done this, as to believe it to be pretty common