Too bad. you look like an interesting chap to know.

Accountants don't have "portfolios", interviewers don't ask to see their spreadsheets. Managers don't have saved video recordings of 1:1 employee meetings for interviewers to look over. Engineers don't have a sample set of bridges they've built [0].

Artists (and by extension, designers) are the only other profession where you're expected to have a portfolio of your work for a prospective interviewer to look at.

I guess what I'm trying to say with "I'd ignore the portfolio" is that if we're going to emulate another profession, let's copy the engineers, not the artists. Artists are typically underpaid and undervalued. Engineers are highly respected professionals.

[0] well, they might have photographs of the actual bridges, but not a sample selection of actual bridges. For some reason I can't point an interviewer at a previous employer's app and say "I built that" like an engineer can.

Engineers are mostly standardized, and the salary range reflects that. There are some very well compensated engineers, but the bulk do okay, doing normal work.

And critically, a board certified engineer stamp is an engineering stamp. Regardless of who it comes from.

On the other hand, artist compensation is directly correlated to ability to market yourself, current trends, and overall skill.

You have artists who are struggling to make it a job (in our world: entry level web design, analysts), artists who are doing okay with careers (enterprise software dev), entrepreneurual artists (startups), and superstars.

And critically... their degrees tell you almost nothing about which category they're going to be in.

But most aren't. Most devs clock in, write some code, clock out, go home, do something completely different. It's a job. They operate inside the salary bands of their organisation, and they do okay, doing normal work.

And specifically, when there are no signals that can be normalized across candidates for comparison.

I feel like that's pretty descriptive of most general software development.

So artists and designers aren't? There might be a few folks around these parts that might take issue with that. I was once an artist, and that training has been of significant value, in my engineering.

I list Adobe Illustrator as one of the 4 applications that I use every day (along with Xcode, BBEdit, and SourceTree). It's what I use to generate graphic assets for my development work.

Anyway, we could dance this jig all day, and I don't think it would solve any pressing world issues. Not a big deal. We don't need to prove anything to each other.

Yes, agreed. It's not worth getting too bothered by it ;)