Definitely true in many cases, but with no job experience it _can_ tip the scales. The job that first hired me didn't really scrutinize my projects either (and

Definitely true in many cases, but with no job experience it _can_ tip the scales. The job that first hired me didn't really scrutinize my projects either (and nobody cares after the first job), but I still think it's the right thing to do. Going through the entire process of getting a portfolio online is a huge signifier. If you build the site, manage it with git, get it up on GitHub and somehow actually deploy it somewhere, that means you've at least interacted with a lot of the basic tools developers use. It's a thing that you've done, when there may not be many others, and doing it more than once means it's less things we'll have to teach you when onboarding. With a nice classless frontend framework like Sakura, it takes like 30 minutes tops to put together a small HTML page and you can drag-and-drop deploy with Netlify, so honestly the bar is quite low. But I actually brought up GitHub from the standpoint of: I have no idea what kind of job he's actually trying to get and how his experience might relate to that. All we know is 5 years, can't get hired.