[ericfrazier]

In my experience so far on the job market, employers do not look at anything in your portfolio, github or otherwise. I've got github portfolio and a huge active site and app portfolio with excellent analytics. I can see who visits my online properties and out of over fifty jobs applied for, not a single hit from an employer on any of my portfolio even when I'd be getting to the 2nd and 3rd and 4th interview with five companies so far this year.

[schwartzworld]

Definitely true in many cases, but with no job experience it _can_ tip the scales. The job that first hired me didn't really scrutinize my projects either (and nobody cares after the first job), but I still think it's the right thing to do.

Going through the entire process of getting a portfolio online is a huge signifier. If you build the site, manage it with git, get it up on GitHub and somehow actually deploy it somewhere, that means you've at least interacted with a lot of the basic tools developers use. It's a thing that you've done, when there may not be many others, and doing it more than once means it's less things we'll have to teach you when onboarding. With a nice classless frontend framework like Sakura, it takes like 30 minutes tops to put together a small HTML page and you can drag-and-drop deploy with Netlify, so honestly the bar is quite low.

But I actually brought up GitHub from the standpoint of: I have no idea what kind of job he's actually trying to get and how his experience might relate to that. All we know is 5 years, can't get hired.