1. Your resume sucks
  2. You don’t have a portfolio
  3. You’re not getting a referral
  4. You don’t know how to tell a story
  5. Your technical skills aren’t up to par

This post will likely be the shortest. The question is… do you need a portfolio? The answer (unsurprisingly): It depends.

I often see conflicting advice on this topic so I think it’s best to break this into two buckets:

  1. Cases when you do need a portfolio
  2. Cases where you don’t

Cases when you need portfolio (or one may be beneficial)

  • If you’re a brand new developer switching careers… you have literally no reason for anyone to believe you’re competent unless you can show them projects and code you worked on (and a lot of them)
  • If you have SOME (1-2) years work experience, but little to no academic experience to help bolster your resume
  • If your type of work is highly visual (ie Front End Engineer or hybrid Design / Engineering type role)

Cases where you don’t need a portfolio

  • If you’ve had a lengthy-ish career (3-4+ years), your developer war stories should take precedence at this stage
  • You have a strong academic CS background and are just looking at new roles (a portfolio might help, but hopefully you’ve already had some internships along the way)

That’s it… seriously. To recap, if you are just starting out a portfolio is REALLY CRUCIAL. I can’t count the amount of posts of despair I’ve seen that read something like this:

“I can’t get a dev job anywhere! I keep sending my resumes and they get rejected. Here’s my resume:” ** Proceeds to show resume with 0 relevant work experience except for that one webpage they built for Joe Schmo’s crab shack, and purported knowledge of Javascript** “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong!”

The reason no one is contacting you is because they have no reason to trust you. You need large meaty projects you’ve built on your own time to fill in your lack of work and academic experience.