[diggan]

> Companies should only care about what I get done at work. What I do at home is my business.

I mean to some extent you're right, but obviously there are limits here. And, it can be used as a signal to see how interested a person is in something.

As one example, I don't have any college education or beyond that, and when I wanted to start working as a programmer it was kind of hard to get any response from companies and with a tiny local startup ecosystem (this was in Spain back in 2012), I managed to only find one company that was interested in hiring me as an intern in the beginning, to at least give this person without any professional experience a chance.

Since I always done programming as a hobby just for fun, it was way easier for them to evaluate if it was an outlandish bet or a somewhat safe bet, as I already had some projects on GitHub that I had done in my free-time they could look at and displayed some eagerness to program professionally.

I don't mean to say that you have to program in your free time just to be "hireable", but I'm 100% certain individuals who do that (and publish results at least sometimes) have a way higher chance of getting hired, especially if they're just starting their career.

[brokencode]

Oh yeah, I was talking from my perspective as somebody more established in the industry.

I definitely think that if you’re just getting started, especially if you don’t have the typical college degree and internships, side projects are a great way to demonstrate your skills.