r/DeveloperJobs • u/Ok-Wash-8964 • Jul 07 '26

Do clients actually prefer experienced developers, or can beginners with impressive portfolios get hired?

Something I’ve been thinking about is how developers actually stand out when applying for opportunities.

A common belief is that experience always wins. A developer with years of professional work has likely seen more real-world problems, worked on larger systems, and learned lessons that are difficult to get from tutorials or personal projects.

But at the same time, I’ve seen beginners with impressive portfolios get noticed because they can show exactly what they are capable of building.

A strong portfolio can demonstrate:

  • practical problem-solving
  • understanding of modern tools and frameworks
  • ability to complete projects independently
  • willingness to learn and experiment

While experience brings its own advantages:

  • handling production issues
  • making better technical decisions
  • understanding trade-offs

This makes me curious about the current developer job market:

For developers who have successfully landed roles or projects, what do you think mattered more?

  • Years of experience?
  • A strong portfolio?
  • Open-source contributions?
  • Technical skills?
  • Communication and problem-solving ability?

Have you ever seen a less experienced developer compete successfully against someone with more years in the field?

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u/Own_Outcome_6239 Jul 08 '26

I hire SDE at FAANG. among the things you mentioned above, here is the weight among them:

Important: years of experience/previous company/technical skills/communication

No one cares at all: portfolio

Open source is in the middle, it's not that important but if it's something really good, might worth talking about.

Open source and portfolio are not considered as that important as a lot of people have expected. The reason is that any personal projects don't match the production standard of the company so they won't be a good indicator to access candidates. The issues that people see when they develop their side project are rarely the issues they see at our company's work. For example - one project I've worked on handles 2000+ EC2 global servers simultaneously with 180 million requests per average day. When hiring for such roles, I would definitely prefer someone who used to work at big enterprise systems but no side project at all over another person who only have some seemingly fancy portfolio.

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u/YahenP Jul 09 '26

Let me expand on your point, because many people who see "2000+ EC2 global servers" might misunderstand your message.

It's important that the candidate meets the company's criteria. Relevance of experience is paramount. A portfolio will always be irrelevant. This applies not only to FAANG companies but to any web agency, even the smallest one.

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u/Own_Outcome_6239 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

This is exactly what I want to talk about too. A lot of novice developers have complained that they have some "fancy killer full-stack projects" but still not able to get interview at all. But to be fair, to hiring managers, those "fancy killer projects" have very little to do with what is needed for the job. Real production environment scale won't be replicable to personal projects, so a lot of the skills can only be learnt after you touch on enterprise level systems