Tips on Assembling a Portfolio

There are at least two situations when you should approach a job interview with a portfolio in hand:

You are just graduating from school; or

You want a career shift, for example you want to get into the audio industry after years of doing telephone work.

Artists and art students have a big advantage over engineers and engineering students in such a situation. The artist is used to creating a portfolio to show to other people. So if you're a graphic artist and you're trying to get hired at an ad agency, you show up at the interview with the portfolio under your arm, and you flip through your drawings with the interviewer.

Some of my job candidates have had success by creating something like a portfolio. To given an example, consider this direct quote from a hiring manager about one of my candidates: "We appreciated that he brought one of his boards along." Here I'll discuss my advice for software candidates; hardware candidates can extrapolate.

You should assemble a few examples of your code from the last few years. Of course take nothing confidential, such as something from your previous employer. If you're writing in C or assembler, a routine that spans a page is perfectly adequate. If you're in C++, you might have a page for the class header file, and another page or so for the implementation of the class. You can have two or three different routines, each a page or two.

Edit the text in an ascii editor with an equal-spaced font so that the code is neatly arranged; everything is indented like in textbooks. Write a textbook-style header for the function, telling what it does. For each argument to the function, add a comment explaining the argument. Sprinkle judicious comments throughout the code.

Xerox a set, and put it into an envelope, not folded, I mean an 8.5x11" envelope. Take that envelope with you when you go to an interview. When the interviewer asks you "what code have you written in language X," or "what code have you written that relates to X," then you say "I brought an example for you to see," you pull it out of the envelope, and pass it over the desk. You do your best to leave the code example with the interviewer.

If you're just graduating, then prepare some code examples from your undergraduate coding classes; or an excerpt from the code you wrote for your master's thesis; or an excerpt from the code for your doctoral dissertation.

If you want to change industries or industry branches, then spend some time nights and weekends writing some code that relates to your target industry. Suppose you have a big sonar background but because you've played guitar all your life, you want to get into the audio industry. Then write up some filters, or a simple reverberator, or a pitch-shifting algorithm on your own time. You can list that somewhere on your resume as something you do in the spare time; you can post it to your web site and put a URL into your resume; and you can take your code with you to the interview.

I've put together some other recommendations for job candidates. There is also a list of currently available job descriptions.