> But if he was being considered for a mid level generalist role, yeah, none of this would’ve mattered. And why should it?
As someone who has been on the hiring manager side, I'll state the obvious: because it demonstrates insanely good problem-solving skills that would transfer to nearly any challenge.
Unfortunately I feel like recruiters at larger companies are squinting at CVs and think like: "Open source? Entrepreneur? Eh, oh. Smell of despair and discarded pizza boxes.".
Of course unless your passion project is very successful one, but majority of them are not.
While I agree with the sentiment you are delivering, I think successful is probably the wrong word here.
I worked on a repo for several years with many tens of thousands of lines of code and attempted to promote it heavily with little success. At some point I chopped out about 2,500 lines of code from that repo and packaged just one feature as a standalone product.
Years later the child repo has thousands of users and the parent has barely any. While I consider both projects to be successful by definition, if I'm going to briefly showcase one over the other I'll showcase the smaller project that received more engagement. Because the engagement metrics do indeed matter. It lends credence and legitimacy to a project.
