Lately, I’ve been noticing a steady increase of forum users posting low-quality portfolios with no work samples. These posts usually attract few offers and clutter the forums. After a bit of searching within the category guidelines, I found that portfolios are meant
My proposed solution is that a new rule is added to the category guidelines that prohibits these. However, that rule may harm small developers who are offering free work that they can use to build a portfolio.
What do you think - should these topics be allowed?
In my opinion they shouldn’t be allowed. Even if you’re not putting them in temporarily because you don’t have an immediate access to your stuff (which seems to be impossible unless you really haven’t shared your work anywhere prior). In many cases people just forget to put those too so I don’t feel like there should be repercussions for not having examples.
Do keep in mind sometimes people may not know how to properly setup a portfolio. Yes, you can learn how but sometimes people don’t know where to start. Also keep in mind that some of the developers on this forum are young and may not have job experience like many of us older developers so that need for a portfolio may not be necessarily seen.
However, yes, I do agree with the removal of such portfolios because they clutter.
I do not think they should be allowed, nobody is really looking for someone with no experience to work for them. If someone is going to make a portfolio looking to get hired, they should definitely have some work to show to see if they would provide for a great (Scripter, builder, etc.).
Now that doesn’t mean these people should not look for work, as that’s how you grow your portfolio, but there is, as stated before, no reason to create one if you have no work experience.
These cause unnecessary clutter to the DevForum, like you stated. Glad someone brought this up.
I’d like to counter your claim here. There is a reason to make a portfolio without work experience. That would be “to showcase your skills” by creating your own project(s) and showing them off. Take many builders on this forum for example: they usually show off places called “showcases” versus specific assets from games they’ve worked on.
Now that doesn’t entirely rule out work experience but it shouldn’t mean the complete removal of a portfolio due to lack of work experience.
Honestly poorly written Portfolios are such a waste of time and I got sick of it so I wrote this 2 weeks ago to address the issue
perhaps the title should be more aggressive like “How to write a better portfolio?”
(Please feel free to provide any improvements I can make towards the Guide)
Here are things that I believe are mandatory:
Showcase
Time spent
Cost
Availability
Better titles
That’s no excuse to write a poorly written portfolio and wasting people’s time
There is an official template, this isn’t a matter of intelligence but rather a lack of effort
Now, I have a counterclaim to this, instead of trying to make a portfolio with no prior work experience, they could simply go to #collaboration:recruitment and make a post with the tags of hiring, scripter, builder, etc.
And as a builder, my portfolio not only includes my games (which in a way are showcased) but also a few of my specific assets. Creating your own projects is perfectly fine for showing past experience, but it does not mean people will always think it is good, so it is (in my opinion) to have proper experience with other developers as well.
I do believe if a portfolio does not have the nessacary things showing experience, what your main skills are, and how you work, it is pointless to create a portfolio that simply says “I’m an upcoming…” or "I am starting to work in [blank], but have no experience yet.
Also as @RuizuKun_Dev stated, these are major things to have in a portfolio as it shows how professional you are and helps find people who can have you work, when and how you need to, along with how hard you work, etc.
I can definitely see both sides of this idea because some people may not have have anything to showcase, therefore they cannot display anything, but on the other hand, they could create a few examples before creating their portfolio, for example, I am creating a portfolio but I am not planning on creating the actual thread until I am comfortable with the amount and the quality of the examples I have.
But another reason for it being allowed is, as I mentioned above, some people may not have examples, but they may have the skills, I’ve seen many people on the forum do free work to get some examples. They may not be able to think of something to create so they might rely on the person that is commissioning them to tell them what they’re supposed to do and they may be able to create something.
My opinion is that they should not be allowed. It takes a few more seconds to upload an image or gif. Don’t have any examples? Take a few minutes to make something. Its simple. If someone is too lazy to put at least one image, then who knows? Maybe they’ll never finish a commission you assign them because of laziness. You should have at least one example to make it a portfolio.