I think that when it comes to projects on github the key is in distinguishing between the "I want to be hired" projects and the "I'm doing this because it's interesting and fun" projects. The latter tend to be much higher quality than the former and they're also more fun to work on (because you don't have the pressure of what a recuiter might think about it). Although, as you said, it's not always easy to tell which is which at a first glance.

This kind of frightens me. It likely leads towards some kind of ageism, as students and teenagers are comparatively time-rich and can more easily find the time to build up impressive GitHub profiles. As you get older, projects like building a house, raising children etc start taking up your free time and after many years as a software engineer, you do relate differently to your profession, compared to when you first started out. (You're less naive. Less capable of just having faith in some weird karma whereby hard/good work will be recognized and rewarded if you just do it).

I guess other professions have similar things going: Lawyers might take on high-profile cases on a pro-bono basis to build a name for themseves, or contribute to academic publishing even when they are not on payroll in any academic capacity, etc. But they have a different culture to go with that. As a lawyer, I guess your X-hours work week will stay an X-hours work week and your non-billable hours Y are simply subtracted from X.

But most jobs in the software engineering profession come with the expectation that you have an X-hours work week, and your employer usually does not allow you to use any of that time for personal professional status-building through open source or publishing etc. ...your only chance is to do it on weekends, which eats into your work-life balance.

It's true that the culture is different, but it's not my experience that employers are categorically against status-building, especially if it indirectly reflects well on the company.

We recently got a paper accepted at a conference cooperating with our local university and my employer was more than happy to pay for that time.

What's the real problem IMO is that studying, training, etc. is pushed to your time off. When you account for all of that, my 40-hour week is more like 50 hours.

My previous employer (the one I have been with the longest, at 3,5 years) categorically rejected paying for conference participation etc. The company would frequently get requests from organizers of conferences, networking events and the like for the company to have a presence. The CEO would then post the speaking opportunities in the company-wide group chat laying down the rule that anyone could attend in the company's name if they wished, but he personally considered it a waste of time and we'd have to do it in our own time.

I think people very seldomly took him up on the offer and if they did, I would guess there was a certain probability that he would read it as a negative signal along the lines of: This person is really going out of their way to do networking, so they're probably working on finding their next gig so they can leave the company.

In one other company I worked at, the company was keen on conference participation, but the way it would work there, if you were the person doing the legwork it would be your boss presenting at the conference. So you couldn't really use it as an opportunity to make a name for yourself. You'd just make a name for your boss.

I've also done extensive freelancing. If you run a low-risk freelancing strategy, clients pretty much expect you to work for them fulltime. It's already a tough sale to get them to give you a day off every quarter to do your own bookkeeping. And the hourly rates aren't high enough to allow you to spend several weeks or months in between freelancing gigs to work on status-building. ...now if you're using your status-building to get the most choice consulting opportunities where you have the bargaining power to do few hours at high rates that's a different story, but that's a different kind of freelancing altogether. (The "high-risk" kind which I'd distinguish from the low-risk kind that my personal experience is limited to).

To be honest, I don't think there's anything wrong with employers preferring enthusiastic candidates over jaded ones. If you want to keep earning tech salaries, you need to keep learning.

If you lose interest, there's nothing wrong with pursuing a different career -- I know a couple of people who started over because they just couldn't bear how boring tech jobs get after 20 years.

A Github profile doesn't have to be filled with side projects, it might as well be filled with main projects.

Same goes for "for free", although here the job market doesn't offer too many opportunities yet.

Right but having contributions in either open source or your current company's github ones will look better than you writing same amount of code for the company's internal repositories

Nothing I wrote is about private repostories.