I have no side code projects to show you
My open source projects have gotten me all but 1 of my last 4 jobs.  Hands down.<p>Yes, I still had to pass the interview, but when you can claim that your NPM package ballooned to a million monthly downloads suddenly the conversation changes from writing code to architecture, product management, and leadership.<p>Essentially you are telling the guy on the other side of the desk that I can solve problems nobody else in the world is capable of solving (or willing to try) and here is my proof.  The clear response from that guy on the other side of the desk is to refocus on the things involved with that level of effort&#x2F;output.<p>I have never had to worry about competition from other candidates.  It has nothing to do with what I think of myself (ego or arrogance) and everything to do with how they perceive the potential I could deliver back to the company.<p>Second and third order consequences of this, that nobody but the interviewer sees, is that you won&#x27;t need your hands held like a child.  You don&#x27;t need all the popular abstractions, frameworks, and mountains of tooling that other candidates cannot live without.  The reason for this bias, and it took me a while to see it, is that you are spending all that extra time outside the office solving many of the same problems as people at the office except that you are doing it without a financial incentive, greater time constraints, fewer resources, and often in a more portable way.<p>---<p>Now let&#x27;s look at the candidate who only works at the office and has no open source projects to demonstrate and they are competing against somebody like me who would rather be working on open source for free than doing the job they are (well) paid to perform.  What does the interview have to ask that guy to assess their skills?<p>It isn&#x27;t about the code that is on Github.  Nobody has time to scrutinize that.  It is about the product, product quality, market penetration, the kinds of problems you have solved.  It is about how you achieve popularity where other people did not and with a budget of 0 (maybe spending on a web server).  But since you don&#x27;t write open source and don&#x27;t do work outside the office this conversation never arrises.  The interviewer is limited to asking you about how to write code like you are a newb.