[sheepmullet]

"4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an improvement compared to the previous system. Portfolio based systems are almost always better than credential based systems."

Are they really though? On what basis?

99% of my best work can't form part of my portfolio. I spend 2 hours of my own time on L&D each week day. Maybe 30 minutes of it is on projects I could present. In a year that's ~120 hours max. I'm not going to be doing anything really impressive from a portfolio POV with less than a month of full time work put into it.

Even worse is the trend I'm seeing where people drop the Learning from L&D altogether so they can invest more time into presentable projects. It is stunting their growth as developers... even as it improves their hireablility.

[nordsieck]

To be clear, the previous systems is getting a BS in computer science from some university, or a bunch of certs from companies like Microsoft.

There are certainly problems with the portfolio model, but I've never heard anyone seriously argue that it's worse than credentials.

[sheepmullet]

Credentials vs portfolios isn't an either or argument. And "worse" is a loaded term.

If you have the credential of an undergrad degree at MIT with a good GPA, combined with a credential of working for Google for 5 years, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

On the other hand if you have made serious contributions to the Linux kernel, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

But most developers don't go to MIT and work at Google. And they also don't make serious contributions to large open source projects. For most developers credentials and portfolios are not effective methods of hiring.