> However, I don't and won't spend every waking hour I have doing one thing
Why does everyone think that it requires every spare second you have to write a couple programs and post them on GitHub? Can you spare 1 hour per week? Why would it require every waking hour you have to write a couple scripts and throw them in GitHub?
Some "programmers" are just not good at programming. Actually, that is a vast majority of them. This is why they think it's so hard to have a side project, and it's the same reason companies that actually care about who they hire have to do 20 interviews to find 1 viable candidate.
There are plenty of new people entering the workforce, too. I can't remember the last time I took an Uber/Lyft where the driver wasn't in a coding bootcamp. It scares me just to think about having to be the engineer "training" the new hire at a company that didn't make its interviews hard enough.
(As a corollary, this means that if the engineering interview at a company is objectively easy, that's a RED FLAG, and you should not work there.)
Why does everyone think that it requires every spare second you have to write a couple programs and post them on GitHub? Can you spare 1 hour per week? Why would it require every waking hour you have to write a couple scripts and throw them in GitHub?