I think the biggest advantage of side projects is for when an interviewer asks you an open-ended "tell me about a project you enjoyed working on". As an applic

I think the biggest advantage of side projects is for when an interviewer asks you an open-ended "tell me about a project you enjoyed working on". As an applicant, I can speak in great detail about any of my side projects, discuss any design decisions, trade-offs and compromises I made. Personally this usually involves some interesting trade-offs made on personal projects to optimize for AWS bill, vs decisions I'd have made at any company where a $100 /mo bill wouldn't even register as a line item on a budget. It also is a great way to differentiate yourself if you're trying to make a move from eg an Enterprise Java B2B company to a consumer-facing SaaS startup using $NEW_TECH. As a hiring manager, I can see the candidate isn't being challenged enough by their current job, or they had a curiosity they wanted to satisfy outside their regular hours. Either way it shows initiative and a hunger to learn, both of which are good signals. Usually when people are talking about these projects, they are passion projects and you get a good feeling if somebody actually likes programming, as well as hints towards what specifically they find interesting. Did they spend 10 minutes talking about progressive enhancement techniques and bundle sizes? Did they talk about user feedback? Or maybe they focused on CI/CD, auto-scaling, or API design choices? This to me is far more useful than "Worked on team X and performed assigned tasks Y, Z".