You can absolutely be good without side projects. And there are a lot of ways to be useful as a software engineer. But all other things being equal, when looki

You can absolutely be good without side projects. And there are a lot of ways to be useful as a software engineer. But all other things being equal, when looking at code, it literally comes down to practice. The more code you've written, the more things you've had to research and the more mistakes you've already made, the faster you'll be able to produce good code in the future. Side projects help that aspect. Because there's only so much you can do and learn during your day job. You can always make up for it with other skills, experience, or just the difficulty level of the projects you've been on and nail the job anyway. Side projects help people who DON'T have all of that nail jobs. They can go "Look, I may not have worked for Google, or I may be only a few years out of school (if I ever went to school), but I made up for it with these projects". And of course, you can always have both :)