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Comment by rty32 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't spend any time on a portfolio. No manager spends their time looking at that. You are not a UX designer and portfolio means nothing. Your best bet would be polishing your resume and LinkedIn profile -- that's where recruiters and hiring managers look for highlights.

If you want to do a portfolio regardless, especially for non job hunting purposes, do it however you'd like and spend however much time you want, ONLY IF you enjoy creating such a website. Otherwise anything that is not ugly is ok, and my personal preference would be to give the website a somewhat "modern" look, although not fancy.

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As a hiring manager -- I very much disagree. If there is a link to a personal site, github, or anything else on the resume I will visit it and try to get as much information about the candidate as I can through it.

I'll ask them questions about it and see if they can talk passionately about it. Sometimes a nice personal site or github with some portfolio projects on there is the difference between a yes or a no.

As a manager who has hired hundreds of developers I always ask for a portfolio, with links to live sites.

Right-click, view source!

Can reveal a lot about a developers habits and practices.

I also expect a GitHub repo. Fyi, personal sites and projects are just as important as the ones you get paid to build.

IMHO LinkedIn is a waste of time. People struggle to keep it up to date and most don't have the time to put enough detail into their profile that it says very little about the candidate.

You have to ask them to richly narrate their portfolio or you won't know if it's fake. You could be judging someone else's code quality. It's not wrong to do so but it's a different kind of interview.

In my experience you can quickly tell if the quality of somebody’s resume material lines up with the person across the table. I suppose at more attractive workplaces there are folks spending serious effort to game the system, but I haven’t seen it.

If anything I am most accustomed to seeing a light GitHub profile and an out-of-date personal site, and the candidate clearly has the skills to do way better today, they’re just not touching open source or spending time on their site.

> Fyi, personal sites and projects are just as important as the ones you get paid to build.

You're missing out on great developers who have children and family lives that don't lend themselves to having the time for building a portfolio that nobody is going to look at except once every few years.

Not to mention that if a portfolio is going to be a selling point to a hiring manager, you need to rewrite it every time you change jobs to stay up to date with the latest trends lest you be pegged as someone who is out of touch.

Vanity projects are fine as vanity projects, but a hiring decision based on one is a red flag about the person doing the hiring and I'm happy to be passed over for it.

What do you expect to see in the source? You're either going to see minfied code, or like 5 lines of HTML and then a js import.

GitHub repo and personal portfolio are unreasonable expectations. I have both but keep neither up to date because 99% of my work is commercial/private.

I trust that when you were hired as a manager you were required to provide a sample of the recreational gantt charts you have done for historical engineering projects.

> IMHO LinkedIn is a waste of time.

I couldn't agree more! I don't know why this site is still relevant these days. It should be a sign of an entry-level or mediocre employee/job by now. I haven't updated mine in about four years or so.

Depends entirely on how you intend to get a job

If you post cool projects on HN or Twitter, people will absolutely look at your personal site and send you job offers if you look promising

I've gotten 10x more serious job offers from posting projects on HN and Twitter than via resumes and LinkedIn

All that said, the content of the projects is an order of magnitude more important than the design of the personal site, unless you want frontend roles

Agree, if your personal site is basic looking but links to a cool react library you made that would be more impressive to me than a fancy portfolio.

If you want to learn React then nothing you do is a bad idea because it is all going to teach you something. If you want to look impressive spend your time building something impressive that you think is cool. Even something overdone like a Select component or a Table component if it works well will demonstrate way more competence.

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