I've seen really good programmers(at ThoughtWorks for example) who didn't code at home at all. If you have an interesting job that leads you to code eight hours

I've seen really good programmers(at ThoughtWorks for example) who didn't code at home at all. If you have an interesting job that leads you to code eight hours a day (typically the case at TW, if you find enterprise sw, agile, XP etc interesting), I can understand why you wouldn't want to code at home. If you are coding a solid eight hours a day, you are probbaly exhausted when you get home and don't want to see more code on the weekends. Playing with your kids beats coding any day. That said, would I be inclined a bit more toward someone who had say Open Source contributions? Of course, it would be foolish not to. I guess most of the debate is centred around the binary nature of the decision - will hire/ won't hire. Move to a more flexible non-binary judgment and it looks more reasonable. Personally, I am open to hire both kinds of devs, but I'd prefer someone who had a side project / Open source cred etc.