I feel these days everything you contribute towards public forums becomes part of your portfolio, from blogs, linkedin post, github etc. Personally, github i tend to use for learning, training and code snippets / tools i’ve found useful.
I tend to think of portfolios in terms of coding portfolios but i guess there could be other types. Portfolio of Bug reports, test reports, test notes, strategy etc. Someone like Gleb i’d say has an amazing portfolio of coding solutions and libraries but a lot of devs do i guess. Link. So maybe a portfolio of contributions is far more powerful than side projects? What is a good portfolio for testers?
Also i think coding portfolios only really showcase technical ability, and are useful if you can showcase bodies of work you’ve done or your creativity, difficult with testing. A nice body of work could be a framework of tests that run, generates a nice report, is integrated with a pipeline, sends message to slack etc and tests something interesting, that would be nice but i’m not sure without them demoing this if you’d get the full picture.
Even with the above it’s still only a small picture of the candidate. Also not sure what a HR, Hiring manager, CTO etc view of a portfolio would be. They’d likely just check the CV , so maybe mainly engineers or engineering manages might checkout such portfolios.
With myself I haven’t had someone use an online project i’ve done during an interview before but have been asked about an article I wrote or my photography during interviews. They’ve added interesting discussions to interviews.
I do like the challenge of coding tests, especially when you pair with someone. You both get the feeling of how it would be to work together. I always talk through my thinking so whether i complete them or not they still get an insight into how i tackle problems, question things and how i take notes i feel.
From a hiring point of view, I do check out peoples repos/portfolios when they share the links in their CV. Usually they seem empty, which makes me wonder why they even shared it in the first place. But i do check them and have suggested that people either show their portfolio or do a test during hiring and majority seem to pick the test. I guess because majority don’t have great portfolios maybe.
Going back to the question of Portfolio vs Coding interview. I’ve tried both with candidates. Portfolios i tend to see more as part of someones cv, talking point. I’ve also made wrong assumptions about peoples coding level because the code they had on their github wasn’t great, but they did fine on the actual assessment, when asked to improve it.
To date, i prefer coding interviews /Task based interviews. These have been better as you get an insight into :
- how the candidate tackles challenges,
- their thinking behind actions and decisions.
- How they handle confusion,
- You get to talk to them through doing an actual task
etc
Also if the role is for like a Head of / Test lead / People co-ordination type role, not sure if a portfolio would be valuable. So maybe its mainly useful for hands-on technical roles. I also get the feeling not many engineers have portfolio yet, so until more people do it, not sure if its a thing yet. So might be a bonus if its good. I don’t think hiring decision would be based on having a portfolio though. Its more extra points to be considered
