A decade ago when I was teaching computer programming full time at the community college, I told my students that their online portfolio would be the most impor

A decade ago when I was teaching computer programming full time at the community college, I told my students that their online portfolio would be the most important thing to differentiate them from their classmates. I'm actually slightly less sure of this today... It's probably true for startups/"tech" companies; but many, many programmers work LOB in non-tech companies and I haven't heard/seen much that the hiring process has changed. If anything, we've come closer to the consensus that a small "work sample" is the best possible kind of interview - show up, here's a laptop and a small CR or project, implement. This has the advantage of being do-able remotely too, of course. Pull requests back to languages and frameworks works if you're at the skill level and motivation to work at the framework level (e.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft; the companies making the mainstream frameworks). But it's a dis-service to ignore many, many programmers working successfully at a lower level. It seems like the portfolio-as-key to being hired is still not very true for that category.