[austin-cheney]

When interviewing for past jobs this is all over the place.

* Some places are incredibly interested in my side projects. They want to know about the motivation, the solution, and more. These places are really interested in what interests the candidate, their initiative, and their capacity for independently solving real problems.

* Some places are mild concerned about side projects, because they want to determine the real level of actual experience and capabilities, but are otherwise interested in anything about the side projects.

* Most of the time they only want to know about work history. In these cases I really feel like they are looking for mindless automatons on conveyor belt to supplement their pool of low confidence beginners.

This experience from interviewing for JavaScript related jobs. I stopped doing that line of work more than a year ago. Now, in the real world, places are more interested in my prior leadership experiences. This mostly means all the overseas adventures I have gone on in the military and only mild interest in my side programming projects just enough to know that I am a self-starter.

[andyish]

This aligns with my own experience, though it seems to be one extreme or the other. Either the interviewer is fascinated and wants to know how it was done (rather than anything to do with implementation), or they don't care.

I don't have any overseas adventures though (: