Different people review resumes differently. Here's my take:<p>Important questions for me include: Can they build things? Do they have enough experience dealing with real-world deployments to avoid common pitfalls? Do they care about the domain? How long will they stick around?<p>You're correct that they're going to be of the most help early on, because they demonstrate real-world experience with production software. It's a great sign you'll be able to take a vaguely-specified user need and get something valuable done in production. But even more senior resumes sometimes still leave me wondering if they've worked at sufficiently big/bureaucratic places.<p>Assuming your resume demonstrates competence without the projects, then yes, they could just as easily count against you as for you.<p>If the project is one that's related to the domain and/or the tech stack, that's a positive sign that you're interested in what we're actually doing, and so joining us would give you something you could be very engaged in.<p>Otherwise, I'm going to be concerned that we're going to have to compete for your time and attention with your side project. That this is a day job you're just doing until the side project takes off. I might hire somebody like that, but one of the things I think about when hiring is ROI on my time, so if I can get somebody as good who is likely to focus better and stay longer, I'll hire them instead.<p>The particular side projects you list are of the kind that would be most concerning to me. They look like attempts to build actual businesses. And you have two of them going at once, which is a bad sign: if you can't focus on one of your commercial projects long enough to make is successful, maybe you won't focus on your actual job either. And there's something cold and unappealing about both of them to me. They are trying to compete with full commercial sites and prominently say they're the best, but when I try them out it doesn't seem that way.<p>In contrast, the kind of side project that I'd react positively to in more senior engineers is one that demonstrates competence without looking like it will be competitive, and bonus points if it's related to the domain somehow. Modest open-source projects, for example. Twitter bots. Niche Twilio apps. Small, fun services like mcbroken.com or typelit.io.<p>To me things like that indicate enjoyment of the work, a desire to create things, and an interest in serving users, all positive traits. But they do so without giving me questions about whether they employee will be able to focus on what they're getting paid for.