IDK, I'd take a junior with a portfolio over one without any day.

The bigger problem is that most junior portfolios cover 15 programming languages at a high school level of competency, without README files, code comments, or live app deployments.

I do in fact have about 5 minutes to spend during the resume review process looking at an engineer's GitHub portfolio to see if they have specialty knowledge of a single stack. If the portfolio were professional enough, I'd let them skip a take-home assignment entirely.

Of course, that's wishful thinking compared to the reality. Many junior devs on LinkedIn are thrilled to be learning a little introductory Java and PHP. Umm...