Comment by popularonion

Games industry is a special case, more adjacent to the design industry.

I worked at a few Fortune 500 companies and interviewed a lot of candidates for both simple CRUD and harder systems programming work. Side projects, GitHub stuff, or even an independent bootstrapped business almost NEVER helped the candidate and more often seemed to hurt.

The only thing that would definitely help was getting your patches into major, major projects like the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, OpenJDK, etc.