In fairness it isn’t a great filter. As someone that had a similar story - I got a very well paying job out of high school based in part on some home grown apps

In fairness it isn’t a great filter. As someone that had a similar story - I got a very well paying job out of high school based in part on some home grown apps 20ish years ago - the field of people doing small scale stuff was small and any basic CRUD app, let alone embedded hardware hacking made you instantly look like a wizard - since getting started then was much harder - any output was proof of a certain level of skill in acquiring knowledge that was above average even if the overall scope wasn’t huge. In this day of Arduinos/RPi and git pull boilerplate, a small app or hardware project doesn’t prove much of anything. The scale of side project to really differentiate is beyond what most people reasonably have time for if they wish to have a life. I think compensated take home assignments still have some merit though.