It's fine to be a coding hobbyist, I don't think the author would ever knock someone who is (and admits to being one himself). Unfortunately many folks here don

It's fine to be a coding hobbyist, I don't think the author would ever knock someone who is (and admits to being one himself). Unfortunately many folks here don't want to admit that their github "passion projects" are mostly irrelevant to day-to-day job competence. I've worked with two different people who dedicated tons of time to their side projects on github. I was impressed with the time and effort they put in, and felt a bit like an imposter for not doing the same myself or being able to add much input when they debated framework X vs framework Y (nevermind that our mountains tech debt made it totally infeasible to switch to X or Y). But these same people were fired 6 months later because they really sucked at estimating things, working with others, and would make extra work for themselves by building tools from scratch instead of using existing open-source ones. Amusingly, that last one probably could have been predicted when you consider that many of their github projects were just somewhat different re-implementations of existing tools, usually in a different language. I still respect these people and in the right environment, could see myself working with them again. But their passion did not align with the companies needs, and it created more conflict than code. Anyhow, I agree with the author completely. You can be great at your job, while preferring other hobbies (or just preferring to prioritize self-care or family care). Choice of hobbies does not make a candidate necessarily more or less capable at a particular role. Also, In case you haven't heard about it, I found "spoon theory" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory) to be a great analogy to explain how people with chronic illness or disabilities can often be able to fulfill the core things they need to do in the day (job, self-care) but not have enough energy left to devote to things like hobbies. It's another potential cause to mind when you wonder why a person is great in many aspects of a job, but doesn't work on side projects after work.