GREAT ARTICLE. Funny enough, 10 minutes before I read this, I was answering a LinkedIn survey they sent me, and something I told them was that I didn't use stuff like portfolios because "portfolios from most developers are nothing but copy/paste of sample code" and I didn't trust bootcamps because "they just rip off people desperate for a better job opportunity".

That said, a lot of the criticism here has some truth, it just misses the mark.

Portfolios are good. Portfolios made up of cookie cutter stuff where someone just built a bunch of code by copy/pasting or regurgitating some video, where they produced thousands of lines of code and can't explain any of it and learned nothing from it, doesn't help *anyone*. They didn't learn anything useful, and they aren't proving anything to me.

A portfolio where someone said "here's a project I want to build" and honestly tried their best - even if the application came out terrible, but they can talk to the lessons learned - is gold. But it is SO HARD to differentiate between the two without that conversation!

When I hire, I have 3 clutch interview questions:

* What's the hardest challenge you have solved with code and how did you solve it?

* What do you like the most about [technology X]?

* What do you like the least about [technology X]?

These questions quickly get you to the heart of just how much introspection and learning someone has done. While I don't expect a junior to be breaking out some real epiphanies or anything, I can tell if their learning on a topic is shallow or not with these questions... and if they have a portfolio, asking them about what they learned while building it is great too.

J.Ja