> I'm also fairly new to the game (just over 1.5 years)

I've never been asked to show a side project (or even sample code). By the time those practices became common, I had more than 5 years of experience at real companies, where I'd done real things.

If you can get along enough in your career, people will stop needing to use technical validation. For better or worse, they'll use social validation instead.

"Surely someone couldn't have been a Senior Developer at [whatever company] for 2 years if he sucks at coding," they'll think. They'll be wrong some of the time, but that's beside the point.

> having a relationship, family, and a social life, etc

Unfortunately, some companies still think the best workers are the ones that are absolutely obsessed with work and are compelled to be on the clock all the time.

There truly are companies that value work-life balance, though. Be honest with your interviewer and say, "I work 50 hours a week, and my family, girlfriend/boyfriend, and health are important to me. I have lots of ideas for side projects, but they haven't taken priority over my loved ones and health."

If that interviewer rejects you, their values aren't well-aligned with yours. They might have wanted you to work 100 hours a week, even if it meant low productivity and burning out.

Just do something small. A tiny .js library for something. Whatever. Open source something tiny and useful, put it on Github, done. It probably won't take you more than 8 hours total.

"I have trouble committing to any one project and seeing to it's completion"

this is exactly why I, as an employer, would be curious to see if you had done any side projects. it shows you have a track record of going out on your own, building something, and getting stuff done. which is an amazing trait in any potential employee, especially at a startup.

so I don't see a way to "get around" it. How about some project from school?

Maybe you could describe something you actually built for... well, work, which is what they want you for anyway, right? You'd want to be kind of careful not to violate any confidentiality agreements, but in the end I think if you "have a life" you shouldn't be ashamed of it.

From the OP comments about work/value proposition of side projects, the current work you are doing at your job should be the focus as the above mentioned.

How I take it, side projects give a candidate an opportunity to present a passion project and discuss the why, how, what of it and they did so because they wanted to, rather than someone asking them to. Ultimately, I think the why is a very important piece.

I would get really frustrated at that question as well. Due to those same circumstances. Family, Work, etc. Especially, when I was trying to get into an entry level programming gig. I think what ultimately got me over this hurdle was getting on GitHub. GitHub allowed me to have this public place that I could point to. At first, it was very sparse. But as time moved forward and I forced myself to upload even the most trivial things, I began to collect a lot of my coding samples. Whenever I wanted to learn a new technology like RoR or whatever, I committed it to GitHub. It became my playground. Now, I actually have something I can point people to. Overtime, you can clean it up and point people to your better stuff.

I'm going to focus on your last line...

"out-sourcing the slow/painful bits"

Which is exactly why I don't get the obsession with side projects or work samples. There is no guarantee that the person showing the work actually did the work. At best, it means they have access to people that can do the work, which I suppose is something.

Not that I am accusing you of cheating or lying or anything, just pointing out that in a world where outsourcing is easy and common that you can't take these things at face value.

In my experience, it takes a while (more than 1.5 years) to start accumulating completed side projects. Some easy ways that helped me get the ball rolling: 1) doing a hackathon, 2) making an interesting personal website, 3) building CLIs/APIs to avoid the design/css part. But, it does get easier to complete side projects as you become more comfortable with your tools and your interests as a programmer.

But one could also argue that a good programmer shouldn't do a lot of side projects to be able to focus on the "real" work. The best code is often written away from the computer.

"My work product is proprietary"

I've had to do exactly one FizzBuzz, and some light SQL. Mostly social validation and sometimes reference checking seems to be the norm. I haven't gotten any pushback on lack of a public code repository.

I have the opposite problem. All my side projects have the appearance of money making businesses, and I can't show them either the site or the code (it's private in Github too)

Give them samples of code from the project.