You can see it all the time: In the hope of landing a job, new developers put in hour after hour creating their portfolio website. They have a grea...
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I think this is good advice, but I'd be skeptical of responses saying "I'd look at it, but it wouldn't influence my decision at all". That's like when people say "advertising doesn't influence me at all".
Yeah true, there's probably an influence at least inconspicuously. Similarly to hire you get biased because of a name, a photo, or other information. Maybe your point is also what Louis in his quote is pointing at:
"Websites are cool and look nice but they open the door for more interpretation and criticism because they’d naturally form an opinion."
I actually haven't been to a single job interview where my portfolio page wasn't mentioned as something that helped convince the employer that they wanted me for an interview. I must have done it all wrong! 😂
I love this article... partially because it echoes what I've found from my surveys and career coaching.
The thing is that people form their first impression of you from your resume/cv. They form that impression in 60-90 seconds. After that they'll look at whatever else you've sent.
So while github and portfolio do have an impact on how people view you, the problem is does it change their mind TO YOUR BENEFIT. That is where those materials are like threading a needle a bit and huge time commitments.
Whats worse is you don't have any idea what they're judging you on when they look.
So the order of importance I teach where I can get 100% interview rates is this:
You can get to 100% after number 2, but people won't stop obsessing about 3, so I address it with them. Even after they start getting interviews every time they insist they have to have those extra things.
Hopefully this doesn't turn into some sort of thing about cover letters being a thing of the past.
Thanks a lot for the feedback and sharing your insights. Really fascinating.
I'm curious now. Is this advice also valid for developers without professional experience? And if you don't provide any proof of your technical skills how can you convince a hiring manager of giving you a shot?
So there are two things that it comes down to for me.
First, the interview is where your skills are measured. The resume and all those things provide a strong indication that you'd be a good fit. No amount of portfolio or github replaces that, so thats why they're still secondary materials.
Second, for folks starting off with no previous dev experience, unless they've never worked anywhere they actually DO have experience, just not paid development experience. So their resumes and everything emphasize how they still can deliver results regardless of their environment, and their technical skills is yet another way they can do that.
Its that last sentence that makes the difference. If we reduce ourselves to a collection of technical skills we actually don't have value for companies and teams. The magic is connecting our effort to results.
Focus on your GitHub portfolio
Write blog posts
Write detailed READMEs for your projects
Optimize your resume
those points are, I completely agree. BTW Thanks man for good content.
I agree totally - you really don't need a portfolio site. I've never had one, and all the best devs I've hired didn't have one either.
It's also true that having one can backfire. I've rejected potential candidates due to their portfolio sites before - overengineered, using inappropriate technology for such a simple site, poor code etc.
Thanks for the feedback and sharing your perspective
I have a "portfolio React website" which I use to interview on, as it's a P2P (WebRTC-based) chat / audio / screen-sharing program.
It's neither brilliantly designed, nor even brilliantly coded, but it's a passion project, and cool to some individuals, and that's all that matters to me at this point.
speaker.app / github.com/zenOSmosis/speaker.app
I create my portfolio because it's fun to build & I enjoy doing it, not because If someone will hire me after seeing it, but I would say it increases the chance to land the interview.
Of course if someone wants to create his portfolio just because everyone is creating just to get a job & under pressure it's better not to waste time in such case.
Great sharing, thanks for all those valuable insights.
Inspiring post.
It covers a lot of the stuff that juniors are looking to know.
Thank you for your insight.
I especially appreciated the bashing of portfolio websites and the uplifting of blogs, open-source project building!
Thanks a lot for the feedback. Means a lot that you found it helpful
Thanks for sharing, good advice, I'll keep it in mind.
speaking of project what kind of project do i build?
You can find a pretty detailed article about how to build portfolio projects in a professional way including a few ideas here
I know, here's mine sinisakusic.com
Haha, that's a good one. Shows character :)
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