In a nutshell, where a "sensible" person (engineering manager, engineer, founder..) is involved in front line recruiting (i.e they search, they look at applicat

In a nutshell, where a "sensible" person (engineering manager, engineer, founder..) is involved in front line recruiting (i.e they search, they look at applications), your projects are valuable. I found that in a lot of cases such people have a bias against resumes and will only consider candidates with side projects and a github profile. Mostly these would be early stage startups and some growth stage and large companies that believe in side projects. Where "recruiters" and "recruiting systems" do front line recruiting, projects don't matter. They're pattern matching resumes and looking for specific things they're told to look for. These would be growth stage startups and large companies, generally companies that hire in volumes and don't have the time or patience to holistically look at candidates. In short: don't work on projects just to showcase your skills and get hired - hiring is a crap shoot. Work on them because you love working on them, and believe that the world could benefit from them no matter how small.