From my past life as a hiring manager: having a portfolio (or better yet a demo that you can show during your interview) helps junior hires a lot. It helps in 2 major ways:
1. I can see that the junior hire actually _did_ something worthwhile in addition to their mandatory coursework
2. It creates a topic for discussion that is: a). more comfortable for the candidate and b). more revealing about their work-related traits.
It's a win-win. For senior candidates I just look at the track record. If they have a relevant project on e.g. GitHub, I might take a look, but it's not going to sway anything in a major way unless it happens to be exactly the domain expertise we're looking for, which happened only once.
That's a small company though. A large company will not even look at your portfolio or GitHub unless you're a GitHub superstar of some sort, and maybe not even then. There are several well publicized stories when people who drive huge projects on GH failed to get an offer from FANGs of the world.
The best dev we hired though, had nothing on github and did not have a portfolio. He just wrote code three times faster than anybody I've ever seen and without any bugs.
1. I can see that the junior hire actually _did_ something worthwhile in addition to their mandatory coursework
2. It creates a topic for discussion that is: a). more comfortable for the candidate and b). more revealing about their work-related traits.
It's a win-win. For senior candidates I just look at the track record. If they have a relevant project on e.g. GitHub, I might take a look, but it's not going to sway anything in a major way unless it happens to be exactly the domain expertise we're looking for, which happened only once.
That's a small company though. A large company will not even look at your portfolio or GitHub unless you're a GitHub superstar of some sort, and maybe not even then. There are several well publicized stories when people who drive huge projects on GH failed to get an offer from FANGs of the world.
The best dev we hired though, had nothing on github and did not have a portfolio. He just wrote code three times faster than anybody I've ever seen and without any bugs.