I think the arguments is there is no way to validate it was you that did the work. There's been too many instances of groups that do interviews for others or the work for take homes to help get people placed. There was a big deal about some H1Bs a while back where the people that showed up didn't look anything like the people that interviewed. So I understand both sides.
It's frustrating though when you've done a lot of work, as you've listed. I think in a good interview maybe going over that code and getting the chance to explain things you did, why you did, or issues you had, could also go a long way.
Bit annoying is that when companies ask for a portfolio, they often mean GitHub. Lot of non-technical hiring people I discussed this with were confused by the fact that there are other ways to contribute, like mailing lists.
This is what I do not get. I just do not understand the technical interview process these days.
I have 20 years of experience in software development, I have hundreds of LinkedIn contacts you can check on, a dozen recommendations on LinkedIn and a dozen projects on Github, not to mention a blog and let's say a other indicators (e.g. Stackoverflow creds).
Now what exactly are people checking on? My picture is on LinkedIn and Github. Clearly I can code and have done dozens of projects. What is the point of asking me - "Do you know Kafka?", "Have you used AWS S3 and how?", "How would you build / scale a Node.js project" - these are the real questions I was asked. Yes, had you cared to look at my Github / blogs you would have seen I have done this multiple times, what are we verifying now?
I tried my best but at one point stopped caring about interviews.
I don't really think this is true? This might be true for developers that only work for companies and never in their own time maybe.
My portfolio site is just one of the sites on my personal website that also hosts many of my projects. It wasn't much work to setup, and it provides organization and sharing capability so there's motivation to make it anyways.
>This might be true for developers that only work for companies and never in their own time maybe.
I'd argue that that is indeed the majority. Maybe they have some work from school days, but very few devs are making portfolio pieces years into the industry once they can flesh out their "Employment" sectiion.
IME you only need a portfolio as a non-junior if you are making a lateral move.
- adapted Java's Regex engine to work on streams of characters
- wrote a basic parametric geometry engine
- wrote a debugger for an async framework
- did innovative work with respect to whole-codebase transformation using macros
Among other things.
As for ChatGPT in the context of an interview, I'd only use it if I were asked to do changes on a codebase I don't know in limited time.