When I was interviewing after I graduated college last December, all we ever talked about was my projects. We would skip over school (every other candidate they interviewed had a comp-sci degree, not a differentiator) very quickly.

I even had an interview where one my interviewers pulled up my GitHub during the interview and asked me questions about design and tooling decisions on certain projects.

From each company where I received an interview, I was told that it was because they were interested by my side projects.

Of course- it may depend on what your side projects are! Mine were of interest for the cloud based roles I was looking for- RESTful APIs, Kubernetes, AWS, Linux SysAdmin stuff, etc.

Then you applied at the wrong companies. For people with a real GitHub repo with a project or contributions, I always skip all programming tests and jump on the real code. It's a real pleasure to have an excited candidate explaining reasons for architecture or choice of tools etc. compared to fizz buzz. I can only encourage everyone to bring a small side project, it will make your interviews easier.

How big is your sample size? What phase of the interview are you thinking of? Context changes the approach.

If I'm doing phone screens (i.e. top of the funnel and looking at large numbers of people) I glance over github projects and links quickly - about a minute per resume to look over everything (this is is why formatting, styling, and ease of reading matter on resumes). If I'm doing in person interviews (i.e. bottom of the funnel, talking to small numbers of people) I look at almost every personal project, website, and link the candidate puts on their resume with the intent of asking the candidate about them.

I've definitely had people look at my personal projects. As an example, I applied to a company doing computer vision and they sniffed out my CV projects. They definitely came up in the interview.

It's possible that they were missed because so many people list their GitHub where it contains absolutely zero work written by them (or even nothing at all).

Ironically I've found the same thing. I linked to live demos of projects on my personal web server and never found traffic referred from Github.

Depends on the place. When I was hiring at a startup, trawling a provided GitHub account was the second thing I did after scanning over the resume.