That's the same Catch-22 situation I'm in. I'm trying to find work and eveyrwhere I look it's "We want to look at your Github profile and open source contribution!" Fuck. I don't have any of those because I mostly code at work and if I do stuff at home it's very unprofessional and only for personal use. I don't have time to contribute to open source and frankly I don't even want to but that doesn't make me less of a good programmer. I love my job but when I'm at home, I have other hobbies and interests.

I ask applicants for a Github link, but it's not nearly as big a deal as you might think. Some people have interesting work on github. Others don't, but have something else to show instead. I'll look at whatever a candidate sends over (within reason).

And open source contributions are a lot easier to make than you might expect, when you consider non-code contributions. Opening an issue on github for an open-source library is a great signal. A well-written bug ticket tells me:

1 - You write enough unique software to encounter bugs in other developers' work (i.e., you're not just duplicating the same CRUD work everyone else is)

2 - You understand how to identify common tasks in your application that should be delegated to a library (and don't try to just re-write everything yourself)

3 - The details in the bug ticket show that you understand what information is relevant to solving a problem and can communicate with other developers.

Those sorts of contributions should be possible in most work environments, as part of your normal job responsibilities.

Submitting an issue is often much more appreciated as a project maintainer than a big code dump pull request.

The reality is most of your competition does have side projects. It's an unfortunate reality of this industry. I've been on both sides of the equation and it's definitely true that having an active github and StackOverflow profile is very helpful :-/

Agreed - I can't show my full time job stuff and my at home stuff is for a little side money to pay my bills and not open source. I don't want to just throw random stuff up there.

I saw a job posting about "you can show us your resume if you want, but we really want to see your GitHub." The company doesn't have its own Github page. Should I tell them mine is just as populated as theirs?

(I do have Githubs, but they are because I like coding for fun, and I don't like coding for fun to find jobs.)

Is there a way you could convince your work to let you talk about the project in general terms? Don't have to be specific, like "developed a hack to take my data back from NSA", but you could describe the technologies and the processes?

Some people can, some people can't. I have lots of apps on the App Store, so I can.