I strongly disagree with you and I'm guessing you don't have much experience hiring. You reference lawyers and doctors but they have already spent years in ded

I strongly disagree with you and I'm guessing you don't have much experience hiring. You reference lawyers and doctors but they have already spent years in dedication of knowledge and experience. That's simply a bad comparison. This is about a junior developer not mid-level or senior. At some point as another comment says you have enough experience to not focus on it outside of work. In the beginning if you don't have passion and a desire to learn which your time at work won't be sufficient for, it's probably a good indicator you won't be a good engineer. Further your eight hours a day 260 days a year number is hogwash in the real world. No one gets eight hours of coding a day done unless they're prototyping in a cave isolated from the world. Communicating through pull requests, ticket systems, emails, slack, etc drive real productivity to somewhere between 3-6 hours a day depending on the company. So what it really means is you're talking 1.5x-2.25x the amount of time. That's assuming all learning is equal and the you're given tasks which linearly increase your knowledge (which is just nonsense). I for one would not want to hire someone who needs three or four years of work experience to overcome their "junior" title. I'm also in no way advocating they work more than 40 hour weeks or donate their time to the company. They need to be passionate enough to push their knowledge over a series of plateaus. A lot of people go to "code schools" now but lack passion. They want the pay thinking it'll be easy because of shitty and evil marketing campaigns that make false promises. That passion will prevent them from excelling at the work.