[lmarcos]

Agree. Interviews taken into account side projects are biased towards:

- people who have free time to work on side projects (usually young people have more free time than people with families)

- people who don't mind sharing their code with others

- people who work on interesting side projects. If your side project is boring, that will probably bore your interviewers -> no offer

- people who work on side projects on regular basis. If I get to work on one side project every year, well, chances are I may have forgotten the hell I did on that project (depending when the interview takes place). If I work on side projects constantly, I have no trouble picking up a fresh one to talk about

[fnimick]

> people who have free time to work on side projects (usually young people have more free time than people with families)

That's the whole point. Companies would always prefer someone with no responsibility who can be guilted and pressured into doing overtime over someone who can point to actual needs outside of work that they need to attend to. It's a great way of filtering out people who will have boundaries.

[JohnFen]

> people who work on interesting side projects. If your side project is boring, that will probably bore your interviewers -> no offer

This hasn't been my experience at all. The interviewer doesn't care how "interesting" the side project is. What they want to see is what your actual working code is like, that you demonstrate a good grasp of programming concepts, etc.

[lolinder]

I wouldn't be worried about boring my interviewer and getting rejected because they consciously recognized that they were bored, I'd be worried about there not being a level playing field between projects when the hiring committee is discussing it later. The guy who built the fun video game will probably be remembered more fondly than the guy who built the CLI tool for tracking the weather.