>> As a hiring manager, I disagree. Nothing beats actual work experience delivering code in a real production environment to real customers from within a real t

>> As a hiring manager, I disagree. Nothing beats actual work experience delivering code in a real production environment to real customers from within a real team environment. I fully agree with this, except it is difficult to gauge who did what from the outside when interviewing. This is especially true for major projects where multiple individuals work on the same tier. I've see linked-in profiles of former colleagues who wholly took credit for things other people did. When interviewing, I usually ask a lot of questions on challenges and lessons learned from these projects, but even then, if you have worked alongside a group for a while you can learn enough to claim you did work. I found it difficult to determine in many cases whether someone actually did the work or just managed it or just did the easy portions alongside the hard portion.