> If you want to get hired as a dev, you need to at least show off some projects that pass scrutiny.

I have several hobby projects. Is that really all it takes to get hired?

By "project" do you mean "product"?

The job descriptions still say: "experience building according to best practices and working with a team". The meaning of that never changed.

What changed is tolerance of failing to meet that standard. That's how layoffs after overhiring happened. The bar was not raised, but moved back to where it was prior to the mid-2010s.

Anyway, it also depends on who is doing the interviews. If your "hobby" projects are built similar enough to what they have at that workplace, then the interview should feel like you're already working there for both you and them. Having absolutely no professional experience is going to automatically put you at a disadvantage. If you know of any startups, even if they're awful places to work, I'd much rather have a couple years of that on my resume than any internship.

What I was really saying is that someone who has been a teacher for a while and then learned to code with AI is now far more likely to get hired at an education software company than someone fresh out of college with a degree in CS. That's the way it should be! That's genuine progress. They may not end up in a coding role, but they'd absolutely crush it as a project manager.