[geppeto]

An engineer with all those things will get the same salary as a new grad or someone else with a few years of experience (or even a coding school grad), in the bay area.

Many people do those things simply to get a phone call or email back, and have no leverage at all in the actual technical interview process. And there is no shortage of technical interviews in programming, very common for a job seeker to do 12 - 15 interviews at different companies during their interview cycle.

So again, standing out to recruiters is not really worthwhile. Although recruiters that do look for those things will swear by finding candidates with public github contributions, but thats how they avoid living in tents, but its not an objective reality.