Open source involvement is overrated. Yes, companies say they value it, but you can't listen to what they say; instead, you must look at what they actually do.
Are candidates with copious open source contributions getting hired primarily because of those contributions, or at the very least being spared the indignity of the white board and trivia questions during interviews? In my experience, no. Interviewers generally don't care, or perhaps their process is too rigid to admit the deviation that caring would require. In fact, when pressed, many will even admit outright that they don't care, claiming (as I've seen here on HN) that they have no way of knowing for certain that you're the true author of your purported contributions or that your contributions alone can't really demonstrate how you write code (like a white board presumably can).
The only reason they value open source contributions is that it amounts to free labor, and it demonstrates "passion"--a quality that they associate with susceptibility to exploitation.
>there is a huge demand and most programmers I know receive several offers a month
You mean recruiter spam? That's not a job offer. At best it's a liberally-dispensed invitation to submit yourself to some company's drawn-out, degrading, and ultimately capricious interview process.
The "huge demand" is for 20-somethings who graduated from top schools who are "passionate" and can be over-worked and under-paid.
Expect this to get much worse as the profession is stripped of its remaining threads of prestige by the explosion of bootcamps and the supplanting of the terms "software developer/enginer/programmer" with "coder," one that equally well describes medical data entry clerks (no doubt the way many managers and spiteful journalists actually view us), if Google search results are an accurate representation.
Why expect professionalism from people who aren't treated like professionals and shown the respect that would normally be their due?
Are candidates with copious open source contributions getting hired primarily because of those contributions, or at the very least being spared the indignity of the white board and trivia questions during interviews? In my experience, no. Interviewers generally don't care, or perhaps their process is too rigid to admit the deviation that caring would require. In fact, when pressed, many will even admit outright that they don't care, claiming (as I've seen here on HN) that they have no way of knowing for certain that you're the true author of your purported contributions or that your contributions alone can't really demonstrate how you write code (like a white board presumably can).
The only reason they value open source contributions is that it amounts to free labor, and it demonstrates "passion"--a quality that they associate with susceptibility to exploitation.