I have this problem. All my code belongs to freelance customers or projects I intend to monetise at some point (and aren't even vaguely ready to share with the world).
Also, there's nothing stopping someone from copy/pasting entire projects into their portfolio.
I would totally ignore someone's portfolio when interviewing them.
I do find the "portfolio" thing interesting, because it clearly puts us in the same category as artists.
Accountants don't have "portfolios", interviewers don't ask to see their spreadsheets. Managers don't have saved video recordings of 1:1 employee meetings for interviewers to look over. Engineers don't have a sample set of bridges they've built [0].
Artists (and by extension, designers) are the only other profession where you're expected to have a portfolio of your work for a prospective interviewer to look at.
I guess what I'm trying to say with "I'd ignore the portfolio" is that if we're going to emulate another profession, let's copy the engineers, not the artists. Artists are typically underpaid and undervalued. Engineers are highly respected professionals.
[0] well, they might have photographs of the actual bridges, but not a sample selection of actual bridges. For some reason I can't point an interviewer at a previous employer's app and say "I built that" like an engineer can.
Funny, I was going to say that artists more closely resemble our profession than engineers.
Engineers are mostly standardized, and the salary range reflects that. There are some very well compensated engineers, but the bulk do okay, doing normal work.
And critically, a board certified engineer stamp is an engineering stamp. Regardless of who it comes from.
On the other hand, artist compensation is directly correlated to ability to market yourself, current trends, and overall skill.
You have artists who are struggling to make it a job (in our world: entry level web design, analysts), artists who are doing okay with careers (enterprise software dev), entrepreneurual artists (startups), and superstars.
And critically... their degrees tell you almost nothing about which category they're going to be in.
That's interesting. I guess it depends on perspective - yes you could be a "rockstar" dev who talks at conferences and makes gajillions writing scalable MVP's for SV-funded startups. In which case, yes, your value is directly linked to your ability to market yourself.
But most aren't. Most devs clock in, write some code, clock out, go home, do something completely different. It's a job. They operate inside the salary bands of their organisation, and they do okay, doing normal work.
So artists and designers aren't? There might be a few folks around these parts that might take issue with that. I was once an artist, and that training has been of significant value, in my engineering.
I list Adobe Illustrator as one of the 4 applications that I use every day (along with Xcode, BBEdit, and SourceTree). It's what I use to generate graphic assets for my development work.
Anyway, we could dance this jig all day, and I don't think it would solve any pressing world issues. Not a big deal. We don't need to prove anything to each other.
I'm not saying for a second that artists shouldn't be respected professionals. I'm saying they tend not to be: my mother was a professional artist until she got fed up of trying to make ends meet and got a nice boring conventional government job and did her art as a hobby.
Yes, agreed. It's not worth getting too bothered by it ;)
Also, there's nothing stopping someone from copy/pasting entire projects into their portfolio.
I would totally ignore someone's portfolio when interviewing them.