I have issues with both #2 and #5, having just gone through the getting hired process myself. I think a portfolio is good, but I can't stand this "let's look a

I have issues with both #2 and #5, having just gone through the getting hired process myself. I think a portfolio is good, but I can't stand this "let's look at Github and Stack Overflow" attitude. To my interviews I brought four projects that I plan to sell one day and one project that I worked on but wasn't mine, so these projects are not open source and I don't like this trend of employers expecting all this open source code. I have real working programs in my portfolio, that should be good enough, if I show you the code you would just nitpick on it anyways. Give them an audition project: Just no. The suggestions in the article definitely help, but audition projects as I've seen them are horrible, and even with the suggestions, you still need tons of time that you probably don't have unless you are unemployed. Maybe if it's an hour test-like thing, I had a good test project with a company that was an hour long, it tested me on a programming language I had never used, I guess it was more similar to a hello world programming example than anything else. However my other experience with audition projects was the week type. It was two questions, given BEFORE the first interview as a pre-screen. The first was a 2 page single spaced paper on an economic question. This was about 10% the length of the major research paper I had to do around the same time, all I could think of was how much better my time would be spent doing that. The coding question was far worse, something about triangulating a trapped miner using his cell phone records. There were so many things not explained that I would need, like the API of the cell phone records or how the data was stored that I felt like either I would have to ask the guy for more information than he would give or that it would be totally fake. Oh, and on top of all that, they gave me a deadline of the work week, not even a weekend. I was in school at that time and only had a few hours on weekday nights. From my personal experience (which very well may be colored by the one example above), I would have to say that projects as part of a hiring process are for desperate candidates. It will screen out the dumb or lazy ones, but it will also screen out the skilled ones because they will figure it's not worth their time trying to do tons of work for a company that very well may not give them a job, and that the time would be better spent doing something REAL (and not unpaid work for the company either), maybe even a project to put in a portfolio and show off to all companies they are interviewing for.