Hiring managers are looking for proof that you are as good as you say you are. Inexperienced / young programmers often vastly overestimate their own abilities a

Hiring managers are looking for proof that you are as good as you say you are. Inexperienced / young programmers often vastly overestimate their own abilities and experienced managers know this. Having hired a couple of gung-ho self proclaimed supermen only to see them not deliver, the hiring manager now wants to see proof. If you are new in the industry, you don't have people to vouch for you. That's why you get requests to see your actual work, rather than own cherry-picked code examples. "I could do it easily if I just got the chance" won't fly if you are in a location where there are more developers than jobs. You'll have to make yourself stand out. The easiest way to do that is to build stuff. Doesn't have to be groundbreaking stuff, but it should work and be within your "specialty" language(s). Then next time someone asks you for a non-trivial example, you can just send them a couple of your projects, rather than a couple of clever code snippets.