Agreed. What separates own-projects from previous job experience is the ownership. Anyone can be a "valued member of a team", go to meetings, collaborate, ope

Agreed. What separates own-projects from previous job experience is the ownership. Anyone can be a "valued member of a team", go to meetings, collaborate, open and close lots of Jira tickets, be super helpful, check in code which "should fix the problem", etc. But it's not the same as if you have your own project, which fails or succeeds based on how much effort and debugging you put in.