Showing interest in tech or programming was always the number one hiring criteria for me.
IT is so a fast changing job that you want to keep up just with your job alone, so if your company wants innovation they need people that do stuff like this in their free time.
This doubly applies for people fresh out of school, cause honestly you don’t learn nearly enough to do the job there. So every little extra gives you a lead against your concurrence.
If you want to save on resources you should use containers instead of vm’s.