> At the time, one could have probably gotten away most of the time with merely claiming to have published open-source code or showing off how you got some GitH

> At the time, one could have probably gotten away most of the time with merely claiming to have published open-source code or showing off how you got some GitHub stars. In retrospect, I can't say much of my honest portfolio work did for me other than act as learning experiences. Cranking out a bunch of garbage code would have sufficed for showing that I had some "skill" for landing my first job. That's one of the reasons we stopped considering bootcamp candidates. > That ANSI code thing is funny as hell, though! I loathe what it represents, but admire how it proves a point by gaming the system. Also demonstrates my point that so much of what defines success in this field has been the mere appearance of even a shred of clout. I don't know. You look at software like Quake and DOOM and it's quite obvious they were successful because these were well engineered. Same thing with the iPhone; One of the reasons it's so good is iOS and it's heritage from OSX, itself a descendant of NeXTSTEP, probably one of the most influent OS of the 90's. Having 12'000 "hello world" projects using these joke dependencies isn't a badge of success, rather a differentiation between amateurs and real engineers. The former doesn't see anything wrong with pulling in 30+ packages just to have colored output in the terminal, the later definitely does.