[octorian]

> Key takeaway is “hobby-based”

That's actually not a bad thing in my book. When I was at the beginning of my career, the fact that most companies completely disregard any non-work-related experience was extremely frustrating to me. I'd been tinkering with computers my whole life, working on stuff far above and beyond your average "just learned it in class" folks, and it was all irrelevant unless qualified by work experience.

Of course today its commonplace to show off your "hobby-based experience" to employers via a Github page and F/OSS contributions, but back then it wasn't.