A friend of mine used to work as a lawyer, and many of them used to get involved in mock trials, where they could test themselves on a complicated case and see

A friend of mine used to work as a lawyer, and many of them used to get involved in mock trials, where they could test themselves on a complicated case and see how the other half does things. Although this isn't much different and an argument against this post I do agree with Ryan Carson in that a lot of developers are judged on things they do outside of work, as if not going to hackathons or working on open-source projects makes you a worse coder than someone who does. I work on my own projects from time to time, but I know many developers who treat it as a 9-6 job and a good number of them are far better than me. Carson is right in that there are a LOT of opportunists out there who are more than happy to take advantage of developers. I know people in my own area that use hackathons as a way to promote their own company, and while they're not "selling" this code they're definitely using it as a way to promote their business. Should developers care? Probably not, but given the attitude towards developers in general more of them would do good to be more cynical.