All skills to take time to develop, well said. I am confident that looking at how a candidate interviews will no doubt show the fruits of that time spent without weighting too much the time spent, regardless of whether that time spent comes from contributing to open source, from their full time job, or just studying and honing their skills efficiently under harsher time constraints. We don't want people to target the metric of "time spend coding on OSS projects" do we? I don't.
Besides, having a diverse experience base and pipeline (parents, non traditional developers, non traditional paths to SWE, and even single people with a ton of time and fortune to be able to do things like robust side projects) has served us particularly well in having a team with a wide breadth and depth of experience and viewpoints. Specifically weighting side projects in lieu of technical/EQ interview performance would ruin that in favor of the latter group.
Besides, having a diverse experience base and pipeline (parents, non traditional developers, non traditional paths to SWE, and even single people with a ton of time and fortune to be able to do things like robust side projects) has served us particularly well in having a team with a wide breadth and depth of experience and viewpoints. Specifically weighting side projects in lieu of technical/EQ interview performance would ruin that in favor of the latter group.