TL;DR:

I keep seeing new devs share their portfolio websites here or in other places. It seems like everyone thinks that it's mandatory to have one if you want to find a job. But from my experience that's not true. Many of my co-workers never had one, me neither. But that's of course only my experience in the country/city where I live.

So I was curious what other more experienced developers and people involved in the hiring process think. In the last months I reached out to a lot of people. LinkedIn even temporarily blocked me.

Anyway, around 60 hiring managers (mostly React team leads and recruiters) were so nice and shared their opinion. I wrote this pretty lengthy blog post including the results and also some advice from some of the hiring managers and myself. You can find the link at the bottom.

Here is a short summary:

I asked if the hiring managers would look at a candidate's website and if another candidate without website would have lower chances. Most hiring managers said they'd look at a candidate's website. At the same time a candidate without a website wouldn't have lower chances of getting the job.

Some hiring managers said that a website could even hurt your chances of getting a job if it doesn't look good or is in some way broken or outdated. The other problem is my own experience: building a website from scratch can be a huge timesink. Design, styling, writing the content, making it responsive... That takes time.

So the question is why would build a portfolio website if a) the people who can give you a job don't care and b) it takes a long time to build one from scratch.

Good news, there are some great alternatives that have a much higher impact:

Projects on GitHub: The advantage is that the hiring managers can see the source code. In comparison to a portfolio website a typical project on GitHub is rather a full-blown app with state management, API requests and so on. So it's much closer to a real-world application and can prove your production skills much better

Create blog posts (or other content): Some hiring managers explicitly said that this would be a huge advantage. Here a quote: "Blog posts are extremely valuable. I would prefer a non-experienced person with a bunch of articles over a person with less than 1 year of experience" The advantage of blog posts is that you show your thought process and communication skills. That's very important to hiring managers. You don't even need a blog but can just start writing on dev.to or so.

Write detailed READMEs for your portfolio projects on GitHub. That's actually somewhat similar to blog posts but very easy to do. So write READMEs in any case. You can add details about your technical decisions, the code structure. You can add screenshots and links to the most impressive code. Mention anything that makes you look more professional.

Optimizing your resume is the last tip. That's important because the resume is the first thing a hiring manager sees. If it isn't good they won't even look at your website. So first invest some time into your resume before focusing too much on a portfolio website.

If you have any thoughts, feedback, or a different opinion I'd be happy to hear about it. Just drop a comment below