I've been looking on Indeed, HN: Who is Hiring, and angel.co but have had zero luck this past year. I get that companies don't want to take on the risk of a potential bad hire but c'mon. I can't even get an interview.
To be frank, "too inexperienced to get a job? time to contribute to open source!" is almost always a glib and unhelpful retort. If someone can't get recruiters to reach out, they probably don't have the expertise to build open source, and vice versa. Open source is not a dumping ground for inexperienced newcomers.
In general, getting something done counts for a lot. And many floss projects will welcome contributions. There will generally be feedback, need adjustments for testing etc. But there's room to do productive things.
That is certainly one way to treat someone willing to do free labor in service of something the maintainers love, but I don’t think it’s a positive way. If open source is to continue and grow, it will always need a fresh set of people to work on it, and bringing those people along is part of the work of shepherding an open source project, in my opinion.
What is your advice to the person saying they can’t get an interview?
You still haven’t given your advice. If you’re going to be critical of mine you could add something positive in counter.
After you do some contracts and get some good experience under your belt, register as an LLC and give yourself a title - software engineer at your company.
It should be enough to get your foot in the door for an interview and from there as long as you are a good talker you will get the job.
There's a lot of jobs where coding is part of it but it's not called coding.