[misschresser]

I switched into software with a non-STEM background, been an engineer for about a year now and have heard / seen a lot of hiring conversations both during my process and since then at my company. Projects that you can point to and explain are valuable if and only if you can even get on someone's radar. The amount of "projects" that people are doing in their own time is becoming dizzying, and for employers to actually spend time to parse through what is a good project vs. what is a boilerplate tutorial project is not realistic.

In my case, my employer happened to hire people from my particular bootcamp, and had good experiences with those hires. Coming from that bootcamp is what got me in the door, no amount of "projects" would have done the trick. It's very hard to say "I'm legitimate, see all these projects I've done", because unless you can have a very clear timeline of "I did this project two years ago, and I've been diligently learning ever since as noted by this, this, and this project", it's just another person with another github with another project. Absolutely zero reason to bring that person in when you have other applicants with actual backgrounds + a project or two.

All this is to say, I don't think this advice applies nearly as much as people believe it does anymore.