You have to look at side projects as helping to build you up in ways that are not explicitly paid for. This isn’t limited to software. Consider physical labor

You have to look at side projects as helping to build you up in ways that are not explicitly paid for. This isn’t limited to software. Consider physical labor; if it’s someone’s job to do lots of work that requires massive strength and endurance, is there ANY employer that will pay you extra for the time you’d be spending at the gym to meet the required strength? No; they’ll simply ignore the person demanding that investment, and hire the person that already fits their needs. School is another example of something you work hard on without really being paid. On the flipside, I do hope that employers are good at actually understanding open-source project pages. For instance, GitHub is terrible about letting people create profiles with prominently-displayed forks of dozens of projects as if they’re contributing when those people may actually have done nothing on any of the projects they’ve displayed. Similarly, having a single project should not be an indication that you’re worse than someone with 10 projects; there are some legitimately huge problems and “one project” might be a full-time job in itself.