Side projects remind me a lot of extracurriculars in college admissions. To the extent that they show that you have really accomplished something difficult the

Side projects remind me a lot of extracurriculars in college admissions. To the extent that they show that you have really accomplished something difficult they can be very impressive and differentiate you from other candidates. E.g. in terms of high school extracurriculars, if, say, you've reached the title of chess grandmaster that's impressive, if you went to chess club practice a couple times a week and were just decent at it that's not going to help. As a software engineer, if you've built a site with millions of page views or written an open source library that many engineers have heard of, that definitely opens doors. (Though even then, maybe not in the way you're expecting. Any given recruiter still might not care or might not be able to remove the red tape for you just because of that. But you'll likely have certain unique opportunities become available). If you've thrown together a few sites in your free time and then moved on to other things, it's not that impressive.