[lentil_soup]

I have hired a bunch of people in game-dev, personally it doesn't matter how long it took. If you show me a demo game/project you've built then we can talk about it, problems you faced, decisions you made about the architecture, your pipeline, where you cut corners, etc.

I don't care how long it took (specially if it's a hobby after work kind of thing) as long as I can see you have a solid understanding and experience of what the work really is.

Not having time after hours it's a hard problem to solve. Gamedev problems are quite different to other software industries so previous experience might not immediately translate, this is specially true for gameplay programmers or things like tools and engine where you need to have experience with working with artists/designers and within the constraints typical of games (memory, performance, platforms, etc). But other fields like, backend, devops, data analysis I've seen often hire from outside the industry