I have no side code projects to show you

Yes, I still had to pass the interview, but when you can claim that your NPM package ballooned to a million monthly downloads suddenly the conversation changes from writing code to architecture, product management, and leadership.

Essentially you are telling the guy on the other side of the desk that I can solve problems nobody else in the world is capable of solving (or willing to try) and here is my proof. The clear response from that guy on the other side of the desk is to refocus on the things involved with that level of effort/output.

I have never had to worry about competition from other candidates. It has nothing to do with what I think of myself (ego or arrogance) and everything to do with how they perceive the potential I could deliver back to the company.

Second and third order consequences of this, that nobody but the interviewer sees, is that you won't need your hands held like a child. You don't need all the popular abstractions, frameworks, and mountains of tooling that other candidates cannot live without. The reason for this bias, and it took me a while to see it, is that you are spending all that extra time outside the office solving many of the same problems as people at the office except that you are doing it without a financial incentive, greater time constraints, fewer resources, and often in a more portable way.

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Now let's look at the candidate who only works at the office and has no open source projects to demonstrate and they are competing against somebody like me who would rather be working on open source for free than doing the job they are (well) paid to perform. What does the interview have to ask that guy to assess their skills?

It isn't about the code that is on Github. Nobody has time to scrutinize that. It is about the product, product quality, market penetration, the kinds of problems you have solved. It is about how you achieve popularity where other people did not and with a budget of 0 (maybe spending on a web server). But since you don't write open source and don't do work outside the office this conversation never arrises. The interviewer is limited to asking you about how to write code like you are a newb.

Believe it or not, there’s next to nothing I’ve ever seen that was the remotest bit interesting on an industrial espionage level. Just regular old business logic that was either cleanly done, or not.

I honestly could not recall any of the crap from the interviews I’ve done beyond a sense of how people thought.

Anyways, you wanna do some interviews your way, be my guest. I will happily send the guys who don’t want to do show and tell to you. I’m not trying to be all things to all people. No open source, no closed source, no side projects? We can play API bingo or code a b-tree, but prob not a culture fit.

Ha, but seriously, I hate take home assignments.

Yes, very good for you. But let me tell you, I have many very impressive (and large) side projects, and I also do art in the evenings for hours. I've also created entire albums of music. I've written novels.

It's not a matter of "doing other things", or "having a life", but it really is a reflection of how passionate you are about a field, and probably your time management skills. Instead of making excuses for having an empty Github, how about you discipline yourself, if you want to be competent in software development.